While 1-54 New York will be held at the Harlem Parish from 19-22 May 2022, wander through the city and go visit wonderful contemporary art exhibitions!
Frieze | New York
Frieze New York will feature over 65 major galleries with a strong representation from New York, celebrating the creative spirit of the city.
In addition, opening five days ahead of the fair on Friday, May 13, 11am EST until May 22, 6pm EST, visitors to the Frieze Viewing Room will be able to preview all gallery presentations, search artworks by artist, price, date and more, chat with galleries, and explore new immersive 3D rooms.
From 18-22 May
The Shed, 545 W 30th St
New York, NY 10001
VOLTA ART FAIR | New York
This year we’re happy to collaborate with another art fair happening in New York! VOLTA will be returning to NY with a vibrant cohort of 49 national and international galleries, providing its roster of exhibitors with a platform to present cutting-edge presentations in art market capitals. The fair will take place from Wednesday, May 18 to Sunday, May 22 and it will be located at 548 West, the former Dia building and Hauser & Wirth gallery space in Chelsea.
Get a discounted ticket for VOLTA with our special promo code: 1-54@VOLTA
From 18 to 22 May 2022
528 West 22nd Street
New York, NY 10011
Jean-Michel Basquiat | King Pleasure
Organized and curated by the family of Jean-Michel Basquiat, this exhibition of over 200 never-before-seen and rarely shown paintings, drawings, multimedia presentations, ephemera, and artifacts tell the story of Jean-Michel from an intimate perspective, intertwining his artistic endeavors with his personal life, influences, and the times in which he lived.
Starrett Lehigh, 601 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001
Entrance on 27th Street
Ouattara Watts | Karma
Karma is pleased to present the gallery’s first solo exhibition by Ouattara Watts, Paintings. The show is on display at the gallery’s 188 E 2nd street and 172 E 2nd street locations from April 23rd to June 4th, 2022.
Ouattara Watts paints as if he is searching for a common root shared by all living things. The mathematics of a fractal are positioned next to abstract forms. Textile patterns, belonging to traditions from across the globe are studied and layered between paint. Strings of numbers are interspersed with symbols used in Vodou divination. Ancient knowledge collides with contemporary philosophy. Modigliani converses with Shango of the orisha pantheon.
Open until 4 June 2022
188 & 172 East 2nd Street
New York, NY 10009
Stan Squirewell | Claire Oliver Gallery
Claire Oliver Gallery announces the inaugural exhibition Who That Is? by artist Stan Squirewell, marking the artists’ debut at the gallery. Through a ritualized process, Squirewell’s work examines who curates and controls the narratives that become accepted as history; from what perspective is history written, whose stories are told, and whose are neglected? Featuring more than 15 new works by the Louisville based artist, Who That Is? showcases works from Squirewell’s series While Shepherds Kept Their Watching, the creation of which is a summation of the multimedia artists’ practices of painting, photography, sculpture, and performance.
Open until 11 June 2022
2288 Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard
New York, NY 10030
African/American: Making the Nation’s Table | Africa Center
Curated by Dr. Jessica B. Harris—Widely considered the world’s preeminent expert on the foods of the African diaspora—the exhibition reveals the stories of innovators, cooks, mixologists, and entrepreneurs as it emphasizes that African American food is American food.
Displayed within the newly-constructed home of partner The Africa Center at Aliko Dangote Hall (1280 5th Avenue, New York), the first-of-its-kind exhibition celebrates the countless contributions of Black chefs, farmers, and food and drink producers who have laid the foundation for American food culture — recognition that is long overdue. Understanding the rich and expansive stories underlying any good meal, African/American seeks, in its immersiveness and historic scope, to offer a portrait of the immense breadth of African American traditions and innovations in cooking.
Open until 19 June 2022
1280 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10029
Frédéric Bruly Bouabré | MoMA
The first survey of Bouabré’s work, and the first exhibition at MoMA devoted to an Ivorian artist, Frédéric Bruly Bouabré: World Unbound spans the artist’s immense production from the 1970s until his death in 2014. A highlight of the exhibition is the Alphabet Bété—Bouabré’s invention of the first writing system for the Bété people, an ethnic group in present-day Côte d’Ivoire to which the artist belonged. Also on view are hundreds of postcard-size illustrations that he drew on cardboard packages of hair products he salvaged from his neighborhood in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire’s economic capital. Tracing the arc of Bouabré’s inventiveness—from the creation of his first writings and drawings focused on the the culture of the Bété, to scenes from everyday life exploring broader themes of democracy, women’s rights, and current affairs—the exhibition celebrates his commitment to collecting, preserving, and sharing knowledge as a way of understanding the world around us.
Open until 13 August 2022
11 W 53rd St
New York, NY 10019
What Have We Stopped Hiding? | Studio Museum Harlem
What Have We Stopped Hiding? considers how our values shift when our relationships to time and space are reshaped. In the context of a global pandemic, the artists committed to discovering themselves through image-making. Intergenerational group portraits, intimate self-portraits, quiet street scenes, and action shots display photographic experimentations such as high-contrast colors and dramatic interplays of light and shadow. In these thirty-four images, the 2021 Expanding the Walls cohort presents narratives that defamiliarize the everyday and elevate the unseen, revealing alternative views of interior and exterior worlds.
Online show until 30 July 2022
Deana Lawson | MoMA
The first museum survey dedicated to the work of Deana Lawson (b. 1979, Rochester, NY), this exhibition presents the work of a singular voice in photography today. For more than 15 years, Lawson has been exploring and challenging conventional representations of Black life through photography, drawing on a wide spectrum of photographic languages, including the family album, studio portraiture, staged tableaux, documentary pictures, and appropriated images.
Open until 5 September 2022
22-25 Jackson Avenue
Long Island City Queens, NY 11101
Tavares Strachan | Marian Goodman Gallery
The Awakening marks part one of a trilogy of exhibitions, which will continue with In Total Darkness at Galerie Marian Goodman, Paris, and In Broad Daylight at Galerie Perrotin, Paris, which will be on view concurrently this Fall, in October 2022.
The Awakening’s point of departure is the life and work of the pioneering Jamaican-born activist Marcus Garvey (1887-1940). A charismatic leader, Garvey incorporated the Black-owned steamship company The Black Star Line (1919-1922), which aimed to unify and connect people of African descent worldwide, via both the transport of emigrants back to Africa and through the shipment of goods among people of the African Diaspora. The Black Star Line (a play on the luxury British steamship The White Star Line) was created with the support of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) which Garvey founded in 1914, and embodied tenets of black self-determination and autonomy heralded by the UNIA.
Open until 11 June 2022
24 W 57th St, New York
NY 10019, United States
Sylvia Snowden | Andrew Kreps Gallery
Andrew Kreps Gallery is pleased to announce Green Paintings, an exhibition of recent works by Sylvia Snowden (b. 1942 Raleigh, NC), organized in collaboration with Franklin Parrasch Gallery, New York. The exhibition coincides with the publication of Sylvia Snowden: M Street, a new monograph published by American Art Catalogues that includes essays by curator Gavin Delahunty and art historian Rebecca VanDiver, and a lively conversation between Sylvia Snowden and Nathaniel Mary Quinn.
Sylvia Snowden has developed a singular body of work spanning six decades, which is characterized by a visceral and sculptural application of paint in which color and texture emerge from densely-worked underlayers. Working in series, Snowden’s work aims to depict the struggles and triumphs of humanity and dispel the societal myths that are used to push us apart. Most notable is Snowden’s M Street Series started in the late 70s after Snowden moved to Washington’s Shaw Neighborhood, where she still resides, which was marked by impending dislocation due to gentrification.
Open until 18 June 2022
22 Cortlandt Alley, New York
NY 10013
Renee Cox | Hannah Traore Gallery
Hannah Traore Gallery presents the exhibition of Renee Cox’s Soul Culture,wedding analog and digital photographic technologies to facilitate a viewing experience centering joy and reflection. As a celebrated artist for the past thirty years, Renee Cox has used her background in fashion photography, graphic design (for Spike Lee, the Jungle Brothers, and Gang Starr) and modeling to forge an artistic path joining photography, conceptualism, and performance. While she focused mainly on gallery and museum exhibitions, Cox has maintained these practices, including photographing Nick Cave and Los Angeles-based Black creatives such as Lena Waithe and Melina Matsoukas, both for T Magazine. The large-scale, three-dimensional portraits emerge from Cox’s investment in fractals’ visual enchantment.
Open until May 28 2022
150 Orchard Street, New York
NY, 10002
Faith Ringgold | New Museum
Faith Ringgold: American People is the most comprehensive exhibition to date of this groundbreaking artist’s vision, highlighted by the first full presentation of her historic French Collection in over twenty years along with many other quintessential works that will be exhibited together for the first time in decades. Featuring Ringgold’s best-known series, this show examines the artist’s figurative style as it evolved to meet the urgency of political and social change. The exhibition also foregrounds her radical explorations of gender and racial identities, which the artist incorporates into the rich textures of her paintings, soft sculptures, and story quilts. Among the most important artworks of the past fifty years, Ringgold’s fabric works combine local traditions and global references to compose a polyphonic history of this country. Long overdue, this retrospective provides a timely opportunity to experience the art of an American icon.
235 Bowery, New York
NY 10002
Open until 5 June 2022