“I was friends with a porn star when I went back to Los Angeles, and we spent a very depressing Christmas together,” told Massoud Hayoun, a research reporter who became a painter, stepping from the Halo entrance in the New York City financial district.
We stand in front of Hayoun’s painting “Christmas Under Capitalism” (2023), with a surly blue man who wears pink eyeliner and sit for three glowing stripping posts. It is one of the first works to see visitors to the 1-54 contemporary African art fair of this year whether they are coming in through the Pine Street doors of the location. Held annually in London, Marrakech and New York City, this year’s Manhattan edition is located in a circular 30,000 square base of ground level in the city center after previous Stints in Chelsea and Harlem.
Many of the VIPs who were invited to view the show prior to the run of 8-11 May were intimidatingly fashionable. I was under hats with a wide edge, pastel -colored blue suits, trousers with a pattern and lace skirts. These were by far the most artistic outfits I had seen in the past year while treating art fairs in New York City.
“Porn is one of those things that I find erratic, beautiful and fun, but would it exist if we didn’t live in an extremist capitalist society?” Hayoun asked me rhetorically while we are becoming his paintings, which are strongly influenced by his Tunisian and Egyptian heritage, for sale in the Larkin Durey position, heavier, heavier.
Hayoun described 1-54 as a place where the exhibiting of artists from the African continent could ‘collective conversations about solidarity and appreciate each other’s creativity’. The 30 galleries of the fair – including exhibitors based in Paris, Brazil, Japan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Bahamas – showed more than 70 artists from the African Diaspora. Every stand, a publicist for the stock exchange told Hyperallergic“ Costs everywhere from $ 10,000 to $ 25,000.
In addition to the cabins, the collective Atlantic Arthouse has compiled an exhibition of eight Caribbean Middle Atlantic Artists entitled Crossfigurations for the stock market. A large -scale green painting of green tiled attracted my attention. The artist, with goldom-edged glasses, was swarmed by VIP visitors who asked questions about his process. Gallerists typed frantically on their computers between a scarce but steady crowd of visitors.
Mark Delmont, who flew in from Miami in front of the fair, was for his “talking to myself again” (2024), for sale for $ 15,000. A visitor asked him, “Was your only child?” It was a suitable question for an artist who just explained how the three men in his painting were one. “No, but it felt that way,” he replied animated.
When I finally got a moment to talk to Delmont privately, he noticed his Jamaican and Haitian heritage.
“When I grew up, I was too black for Caribbeans or Too Caribbean for black people,” he said. That positionality, he added, limited with whom he felt that he could reliable. “I have consulted myself very often.”
Delmont used to work in construction, an experience that brought up his choice to enter part of his painting, something he used to hate at work. Like most people, he noticed, the tiles are ‘immigrants’ because they are imported.
“I like to talk about people who build things and maintain society: the construction worker who is always too late,” Delmont explained. “If we emphasize ordinary people, we give them the chance to feel good about life.”
Before it could be said much otherwise, Delmont was swept in another conversation with an enthusiastic fair gurer.
After a few attempts to detect Debra Cartwright, who left briefly to put her mother in a train to Maryland, I met the artist for her oil painting “Uncharted Waters” (2025), which is for sale for $ 19,000. In the work she evokes brown limbs that appears to have been immersed in a sea of black, gray and white. It is influenced by her mother, a gynecologist, said Cartwright, and the dark history of gynecological experiments with black women.
“The feeling never really dies to be part of the origin of America, the sacrificing original sin,” said Cartwright.
Working on the stand for Tern Gallery, the first exhibitor in Bahamas who attended the stock market, was Asi Jones, a student student in Princeton who comes from Jamaica. “Because it is located outside the States, it is not as if you are in Tribeca where you can just pop [in]. So this is an opportunity to get some eyes on these great artists who try to build their practices, “she told me.
The average artwork that I early at 1-54 was around $ 10,000 $ 20,000, and I was not going to buy anything. Nevertheless, both exhibitors and artists delve into topics of Diaspora and resistance, where they deal with both press and non-press visitors-a proof of the Ethos stock exchange of openness.
