The Art Dealers Association of America is the strongest solidarity group for sellers of art in this country. Some 200 galleries pay dues for gatherings and collegiality, lobbying power in Washington and, most visibly since 1989, a chance to exhibit in an annual art fair at the Park Avenue Armory.
In 2024 many exhibitors blamed timing (three days before the presidential election) for sluggish sales at the fair. Since then the ADAA has skipped a fair, changed directors, lost its charitable beneficiary (the Henry Street Settlement) to the Independent Fair, found a new one (the Whitney Museum), and rebranded The Art Show, whose name implied there was only one, to the more accurate ADAA Fair.
This new fair debuts Thursday with a preview gala, then opens to the public Friday through Monday. Sixty-three galleries have brought modern and contemporary artists of many nationalities, from a lithograph suite by Edward Munch at John Szoke (D16) to a terrific, freaky, horny salon wall of modern drawings (A16) shared by David Nolan and Marc Selwyn Fine Art. It is less exhausting than the big international fairs and the geographical spread offers 12 newcomers, including Goya Contemporary (A5) of Baltimore and David Lusk (D5) of Tennessee. The mood seems more upbeat than two years ago, and some interesting themes emerge.
Abstract Expressionism, Sumptuously
The painter Pat Passlof (1928-2011), has several works at Schoelkopf (B11) but is in finest form at Eric Firestone (A7) with a large and enveloping ode to the I Ching, “Keeping Still, Mountain” (1971-72), its gentle whoosh of greens interrupted at the very bottom with a sort of trunk or path.
In his 70-year career, Larry Poons, of the same New York School as Passlof, has passed from geometric patterned canvases to messy waterfalls of paint and now, as suggested by this good sampling of his last 20 years at Yares Art (A5), a middle ground of controlled chaos. “Barret Snook” (2005) is a proper jungle of squiggles, with a low horizon line and branches of color that politely squirm. In “Untitled (026D-3)” (2026), Poons, 89, has melted back into pure action, with great gobs of acrylic hassled to the brink with his brush, giving a terrific sense of a moving surface.
Loud Colors for the Inner Child
More decorative artists announce themselves with color alone. At Sikkema Malloy Jenkins (A3), Zipora Fried has brought dense flag-waves of hatch marks with colored pencil on large sheets of white museum board, in configurations that resemble embroidery up close and test-pattern color bars from afar. Alteronce Gumby (b. 1984) pours paper pulp in long diagonal stripes of Play-Doh colors, with topaz and quartz sprinkled in, then lets the wet mass dry into one wafer. Their inclusion in Pace Prints (B3) tests your definition of “print.”
Lita Albuquerque , the American land artist who contracted Yves Klein’s obsession with pigment powder, contributes single-color panels, each depressed in the middle by a crater gilt with metal leaf. Michael Kohn (A2) lights a gold crater on fuschia so it appears to glow. The silver crater on black at Gavlak (B13) reflects the colors of other works nearby, and you. They are lighthearted experiments with negative space and color complements.
People From Memory and From Life
Much of the figurative painting here concerns memory. At June Kelly (D3), the oversize illustrations of children by the painter Philemona Williamson (b. 1951), aloofly coming of age or having their fun with puppets, seem a storybook-style companion to the devotional efforts of TR Ericsson (b. 1972) at Totah (C4). Ericsson copies old photographs that include his mother, in a flat and earnest photo-realism upon which he intrudes with touchingly trivial moments, like the gasoline can in a silly holiday Polaroid. He uses less common means, too. One print, of a seahorse, is inked with the funerary ashes of this mother, whose death by suicide is the inspiration for Ericsson’s project.
American Soul Food
It is déjà vu for the American standbys here. You’ll find Andrew Wyeth, Milton Avery, John Marin, Philip Guston on repeat, but then a small, easily overlooked watercolor by Edward Hopper, of a historic Second Empire home known as Talbot’s House in Rockland, Maine, from 1926, at Hirschl & Adler (B2). Hopper angled and cropped abruptly to imply an approach to something that is physically larger than you but also minutely detailed. Hopper’s friend and best man, the American realist painter and art critic Guy Pène du Bois, is at Avery Galleries (C5), but wins at Debra Force Fine Art (D18) with a small interior I thought was a funeral parlor scene. It isn’t. It is called “End of the Party” (ca. 1936). Told through the light on a tablecloth and on a woman’s leg, vague faces and the placement of a dog, it is the saddest painting I have seen in some time.
The Art Dealers Association of America (ADAA) Fair
Friday through Monday, Park Avenue Armory, 643 Park Avenue, Manhattan; adaafair.org.
