To wrap up from last time on the May New York art fairs, The Future is hardly the future. For all its ambitious title, this alternative fair looks like nothing so much as a quiet corner of art’s recent past.
A reasonable assortment of dealers from America, Canada, and occasionally Europe, it could almost be checking off the boxes. How about geometric abstraction, but with soft edges to entice and not to offend, or portraits that do not shy away from including a charming home and a dog? How about images of strong women, including racers and, with an artist collective called Black Women in Visual Art, just that? Still, these things are in vogue these days for a reason, and booths get clearly demarcated space to show them off in an event space on the northern edge of Chelsea galleries.
Those black woman command one of three “special projects” out front, although these, too, are for galleries—the collective in conjunction with Atlanta’s Partnership with Dashboard. Right on the way in, Anna Zorina presents Melanie Delach and Mark Fleuridor, artists with their own space between symbolism and surrealism. Delach frames her compositions with rougher fields of color, to place them further between painting and the decorative arts. For more women, Laura Berger (with Mama Projects) picks up the trend for flat, full, ghostly nudes. New Yorkers will recognize some decent galleries as well. They may not announce a real alternative, present or future, but they avoid the temptations of tacky newcomers and overblown gallery empires, and that will have to do.
Will I ever give up on the art fairs once and for all? I sure hope so, but even then I may attend just one for pleasure and a bit of self-education. (What else makes art worth your while?) The Independent continues to highlight galleries that gained prominence with an alternative to Chelsea’s wealth but have not sold out quite yet. Now twice yearly, with both spring and fall fairs, it returns for spring to its Tribeca space, and the downtown scene will recognize many a name as its own. It is a high-windowed, high-storied space at that.
These are not the monster booths that turn the most prominent fairs into near shopping malls, and many a contributor sticks to one or two artists. One can see its polls almost from the start, with black scrawls by Judith Bernstein (with Paul Kasmin) that challenge abstraction and hypercharged interiors by Elizabeth Schwaiger (with Nicola Vassell) that challenge realism. Fairs all but shun new media in favor of art objects that sell, but crazed photos by Stan VanDerBeek (with Magenta Plains) that nicely complement his early films at the gallery itself (and share the booth with scarier realism, by Chason Matthams, of bodies and the machinery to record their every move). Still, you have to ask, how much can a fair add? As long as you are in Tribeca, could you not just walk right over to Tara Downs for its gallery artists, 
or Broadway gallery for Edie Fake on a more impressive scale?
A fair can still add something. Charcoal by Emily Nelligan (with Alexandre) may seem a let-down after her solo show last fall, with its landscapes that bring out observation as a process takes time, but it does let in the light. Photos by D’Angelo Lovell Williams (with Higher Pictures) show African Americans in spaces that they can call their own, but the men on pedestals or threesome on a bed are anything but unposed—because a black man is always under heightened scrutiny, especially one with AIDS. Photos by Eleanor Antin (with Richard Saltoun) have not appeared in New York for fifty years. The city then looks ever so spontaneous, ever so populated, and yet ever at risk of dangerously emptying out. Not even this neighborhood will look that way again.
It all comes down to that central question: what are you doing here, at a fair, in the first place? Last year, their return felt like a return to normal after the pandemic, and who could refuse its comfort? One year later, business as usual is no longer as comforting. Maybe next year I can finally call it quits, or maybe this fall. You never know, but maybe you can, too.
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