This year’s edition of Independent (until 17 May) marks a significant moment of transition for the New York fair, which is a longtime curatorial favourite. Considered a launchpad for artists making their first appearances in the New York market, Independent has relocated from its previous home at Spring Studios in Tribeca to Pier 36 on the East River.
The move has doubled the fair’s footprint, even as the number of exhibitors has declined slightly year on year, from 87 to 76 galleries. The result is a significantly more spacious fair, with larger stands, broader sightlines and room for more ambitious installations. Unlike previous editions, which unfolded across several floors at Spring Studios, this year exhibitors occupy a single level, creating a more unified layout that dealers say has improved circulation and visibility.
“They did a beautiful job designing the space and making sure this flows nicely,” says Charles Moffett, whose gallery has participated in Independent for the past three years. “We’ve already seen a dozen collectors in the first hour that we never laid eyes on in last year’s iteration. That speaks to the way that this is laid out for people to flow through in a really easy way.”
Independent built its reputation in part on introducing emerging artists to New York’s communities of collectors and curators, but Moffett’s presentation instead revisits the work of the late Swiss-born textile artist Silvia Heyden. Heyden created tapestries for more than five decades before her death in 2015. Prior to Moffett’s exhibition of her work last year, she had not been shown in the US since 1972.
“For much of her life, tapestries and textiles were largely considered craft and design,” Moffett says. “We wanted to help bring her work more to the fore as a contemporary artist and somebody who was making tapestries in a really incredible and unique way.”
More than a third of exhibitors are presenting solo stands by artists showing in New York for the first time. Among them is the Lebanese artist Omar Mismar, presented by the Milan gallery Secci. The stand includes paintings on salvaged advertising banners alongside intricate mosaics based on images sourced from gay dating apps. Another newcomer to New York is Julia Maiuri, whose atmospheric dreamscape paintings are presented by Gallery 12.26 from Dallas. One of the fair’s most colourful stands belongs to Miami’s Mindy Solomon, who has paired Terri Friedman’s eyecatching tapestries with Brittany Mojo’s patterned ceramics.
Among the galleries showing at Independent for the first time is the Tribeca-based dealer James Fuentes. He says the fair’s relocation to Pier 36 and its partnership with the Henry Street Settlement, where he serves on the board, made participation especially appealing. “For all those reasons, this is the most familial environment I’ve ever had at an art fair,” he says. “I root for Independent. I root for all the galleries participating here. So we’re happy to jump into the fair for the first time.”
Fuentes’s stand brings together works by Oscar yi Hou, Kikuo Saito and Al Held in a presentation examining downtown New York’s influence across generations. “It’s tough to compete with Tefaf and Frieze and auction houses, but this fair is really holding its own,” he says. “Anyone who comes here will find it to be very memorable and digestible.”
The fair’s expanded footprint has also allowed for more large-scale and site-specific installations. One of the most prominent is Gretchen Bender’s TV Text & Image, an installation of old-fashioned televisions tuned to programmes such as infomercials and Fox News broadcasts, overlaid with black vinyl text that warns viewers about passive media consumption. One of the fair’s most Instagrammed presentations is by the fashion house Comme des Garçons, which is staging a special installation of dresses designed by the brand’s founder, Rei Kawakubo.
Just outside the fair, the intrepid U-Haul Gallery set up shop to present work by the Texas-based artist Diego Miró-Rivera made from natural materials gathered in the Hill Country region. Among them is a burlap canvas embedded with 2,000 cicada exoskeletons and a moving sculpture made from local bunchgrass.