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Artists to Watch: Future Fair and 1-54’s Best Discoveries

Who to follow, from Colette LaVette and exonemo to Candice Tavares, Aaron Kudi, Dana Robinson and more.

As usual, New York art week‘s satellite fairs—with their more contained, curated formats and sharper sense of focus—offered some of the best opportunities for discovery. Concurrent with Frieze and just a short walk away, both Future Fair and 1-54 confirmed their distinct roles again this year: the former as a launchpad for emerging talents and more experimental galleries and the latter as a tightly curated platform for contemporary art from Africa and its diaspora. If, in the rush of a week of art fairs, you missed some of the most promising names, here’s our list of the artists you should keep an eye on.

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Launched in 2020, Future Fair is a community-focused art fair championing curatorial vision, access and sustainable growth within the global art industry: a collaborative platform that grants young dealers meaningful visibility while courting a new wave of collectors seeking a more approachable entry point into an opaque market. “We wanted to create something highbrow enough and elevated enough to appeal to seasoned clients of the art world, but also be accessible, approachable and exciting for consumers of our generation,” co-founder Rebeca Laliberte told Observer in an interview last year. Exhibitors participate on an at-cost basis, with profits generated primarily through ticket sales and sponsorship revenue. Through an unprecedented mutual aid initiative, 15 percent of annual profits are reinvested as grants for select participants, expanding opportunities for new voices and ambitious projects emerging across the globe that might not yet have the resources to present in New York, one of the most expensive cities in which to show.

Colette Levette at Gillian Jason

A solo booth dedicated to Levette by London gallery Gillian Jason was extremely well received and sold out almost entirely by the weekend, with prices ranging from $2,000 to $7,000. Levette’s feathery brushstrokes immediately recall the Rococo, with its lightness, delicate chromatic palette and ornamental excess, but the sense of vertigo and the dynamic sinuosity of the swirling figures moving through the sky are also in dialogue with Art Nouveau. Both movements sought to reconnect art to nature, drawing from organic forms or projecting scenes of pleasure into idealized bucolic environments. In Levette’s scenes, however, a more mystical realm unfolds, where utopia and dystopia intertwine, and the human figure returns to a more primordial state, before social constraint fully separates body from instinct, nature and desire. Amid vortices of wind, fire, leaves, petals and fabric, figures dissolve between the earthly and the celestial, while drapery behaves like smoke, clouds or waves. Nature courses through the work, merging human and environmental forms in an eternal dance between the wild and the manufactured, staging a resonant desire for reconnection as a visceral, harmonious, energetic symbiosis.

Diane Briones Williams at Official Welcome 

There are multiple sides to history, and perspectives are always erased, manipulated or suppressed from the official narrative. In her delicate, Victorian-looking embroideries, Briones Williams traces the hauntings of post-colonial and diasporic Philippine life. The base works are beautiful tapestries, once made from imported European needlepoint kits, popular in the postwar era and meant to emulate the tapestries found in the estates of European nobility. In “Specters,” Briones Williams completes this detailed wool work, weaving in her counter-narrative by including images of Indigenous people, animals and plants that had been excluded from those idealized representations. The layers of memory in the work are many: shifts in taste, class-based values, the complexity of influence across borders and cultures and the impact of the Indigenous on the colonizer and vice versa all echo through works........

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