“The title of ‘Independent’ is something of a manifesto,” said Matthew Higgs, who has been the curatorial adviser to the New York art fair Independent since its founding in 2010 by Elizabeth Dee.
Higgs and Dee, interviewed together at Spring Studios in TriBeCa, where this year’s fair will be staged, have steered Independent’s defining invitational process since the beginning. (Distinct from other fairs where galleries typically apply to participate, Independent is invite-only.) They aim to juxtapose new and established dealers within open, egalitarian floor plans at architecturally distinctive spaces — an alternative to the aisles and booths of convention centers and the piers that host fairs in many cities.
“We wanted it to feel like a biennial layout,” Dee explained, “with long sightlines to encounter different works and immersive, intimate spaces for people to be more in conversation across different presentations.”
Dee, who ran her own gallery for more than two decades, first held Independent at the former Dia Center for the Arts building on West 22nd Street. In 2016, she moved it to Spring Studios, a former telephone-switching station that nodded to the area’s industrial past.
“It’s about leveling the playing field so that younger galleries and artists can compete on a global level because of the context of who they’re sitting next to,” Dee said.
Giving a snapshot of some significant moments in the fair’s history, “15 x 15” brings back 18 artist-dealer pairings that Dee says exemplify Independent’s status as a platform for discovery and rediscovery. It includes artists who had their New York solo debuts at Independent, such as Joel Mesler at White Columns in 2019 and Kent O’Connor at Matthew Brown in 2022, or those who had a reintroduction there, like Elisabeth Kley at Canada in 2018 and Peter Nadin at Off Paradise in 2022.
This historical nucleus will reflect the trends in the broad fair that will be unfolding around it in which, according to Dee, more than half of the 76 exhibitors in the main show will be giving artists their New York debuts and 12 of the galleries featured were founded since the onset of the Covid pandemic.
That includes Harlesden High Street, a gallery in northwest London that was established in 2021 and focuses on experimental artists of color.
Jonny Tanna, the founder of Harlesden High Street, described his surprise when he first received an invitation to participate in Independent. “Doing it last year definitely changed the optics on our gallery because we didn’t have a lot of visibility in terms of the overall art world,” Tanna said.
This year, the gallery will show the Mexican American artist Arthur Peña.
Like Tanna, Nicola Vassell founded her self-named gallery — a space in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood aiming to “widen the lens of the history and future of art” — during Covid in 2021. She used her first showing at Independent in 2022 to announce her gallery’s representation of Uman, a self-taught painter whose first solo show in 2015 had been curated by Higgs in his day job as the director of the alternative space White Columns. Vassell and Uman will return to Independent as part of “15 x 15.”
“We love the boutique quality of the fair and that it’s an invitational — one had to be anointed, frankly,” Vassell said. “It was a kind of affirmation for us that, even early on, we were on the right track.”
Ricco/Maresca Gallery in Chelsea first brought the work of the self-taught artist Martín Ramírez to Independent in 2018, where it was shown prominently, unlike its showing at the Armory Show in 2009, where the gallery’s exhibition of Ramírez received an undesirable location right next to the exit door.
“Various factions may have felt that art brut material was a lesser being,” said Frank Maresca, the owner of Ricco/Maresca Gallery, of why, perhaps, Ramírez’s work did not get better placement at that fair.
In “15 x 15,” Ricco/Maresca will again show Ramírez. Fazakas Gallery, out of Vancouver, British Columbia, will also return in “15 x 15” with the work of the Kwakwaka’wakw artist Beau Dick, who died in 2017 and was first shown at Independent in 2020. Dick’s work is currently showing at Andrew Kreps Gallery in TriBeCa until May 11.
“Fazakas is the pre-eminent Indigenous contemporary art gallery in Canada,” Higgs said, noting the growing attention at American museums on Native artists in the last five years. “Trying to identify the Fazakases of the world — galleries that are doing really prescient, necessary work, and then helping them to amplify that work to new audiences — we feel is critical to our claiming to be ‘independent.’”
The Los Angeles artist Ruby Neri said that showing at Independent in 2018 “was a seminal moment for my work.” Neri, who exhibited ceramic vessels centered on the nude female body with David Kordansky Gallery, added,“I’d been on the West Coast working away without much wider exposure until that point.”
Neri believes Independent’s presentation helped clinch her co-representation with Salon 94 on the East Coast shortly thereafter. (Kordansky and Salon 94 will put on a two-venue exhibition of Neri’s work in New York in late 2025.) For “15 x 15,” Neri is making a large ceramic wall piece, puzzled together with different parts.
As an emerging artist in 2018, Tomashi Jackson remembered feeling a little intimidated when Connie Tilton told her she would be the Tilton Gallery’s solo presentation at Independent. Jackson ended up using the space not just for mixed-media wall pieces about color perception, but also for an endurance performance with her friend and fellow artist Alteronce Gumby in which they held hands with their heads wrapped and connected by a knitted color study Jackson made.
“Through one of the tiny holes of my knit work I could see Thelma Golden standing nearby,” Jackson said, referring to the director of the Studio Museum. The fair shortly preceded Jackson’s invitation to participate in the Whitney Biennial in 2019, which considerably raised her profile. Her first midcareer survey is currently on view at the ICA Philadelphia through June 2. Jackson plans to revisit some strategies from her early work for “15 x 15.”
In the ecosystem of art fairs, she said, “Independent feels small, it feels warm, it feels incredibly intentional.”
“15 x 15” will also feature Fernando Marques Penteado, a Brazil-born, Brussels-based artistwho had his New York solo debut at Independent in 2015 with the gallery Mendes Wood DM, as well as McArthur Binion, the internationally acclaimed artist who re-emerged later in his career with the Chicago gallery Kavi Gupta at the fair in 2014.
The anniversary show “was a nice opportunity for us to make an argument for Independent through some of the artists whose work received early exposure or significant exposure through the fair,” Higgs said.
“We’ve ended up with this group of extremely idiosyncratic artists represented by extremely idiosyncratic dealers. The mavericks are the ones that we gravitate to.”
