new pop-up fair ‘disrupts usual week of fairs’ in New York

That 70s show, a 20-dealer takeover of the Eric Firestone Gallery loft space at 40 Great Jones Street in New York City, highlights artists who were active during the titular decade, a period of growth and experimentation. enormous across genres and media. The themed fair (through May 21) was inspired by a talk given by critic Jerry Saltz on the importance of keeping the legacy of older artists at the forefront of cultural consciousness, after which dealer Eric Firestone decided to “disrupt the usual week of the fair”, bringing together a wide variety of works from a pivotal moment in the New York art scene. Galleries participating in the project include PPOW, Karma, Kasmin, Ortuzar Projects, Craig Starr Gallery and Gordon Robichaux, among others.

Many of the works on display are by chronically underrated artists like Robert Duran, an abstract painter of Shawnee and Filipino descent, or Jane Freilicher, a Long Island-based artist known for her awe-inspiring landscapes and thoughtful still lifes (her furiously compound painting of dead fish jumps off the wall with an unexpected punch). By pairing pieces from lesser-known artists with heavy hitters like Alex Katz, Agnes Martin and Fairfield Porter, That 70s show leads to a fair and global vision of a time of transition in post-war art.

Bortolami Gallery contributed a suite of soft minimalist paintings by Daniel Buren, who worked with John Webber Gallery in the 1970s. Anton Kern Gallery and kaufmann repetto have teamed up to present the artist’s graphic and dreamlike figurations Puerto Rican Frank Diaz Escalet, an accomplished leatherworker and painter whose elegant renditions of the immigrant experience have lost none of their immediacy. Soft Network, the New York-based film archive, presents two films by Susan Brockman, an experimental feminist author active in East Hampton and New York throughout the decade. Brockman’s restrained and poignant frames crackle on repeat through a series of wonderfully eerie works by Judith Linhares, courtesy of PPOW, including a wild-eyed mermaid gazing happily at a little sailor she dangles from her fingers.

The show features a strong psychosexual and feminist line: Mira Schor’s small-scale depictions of naked women kissing bears live near a grid of finely rendered drawings by AIR Gallery co-founder Dolly Attie, who juxtapose cropped images of film and 18th century stills. works of art with politically frightening effect. Perhaps the most exciting inclusion is a set of striking and surreal line drawings by Benny Andrews. Sexism (1973), which reflects his sense of solidarity with the feminists he encountered while leading the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition, an advocacy group he founded in 1969.