In the crowded May art market calendar, 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair (until May 21) feels like a breath of fresh air. During the VIP preview on Thursday, May 18, sunshine flooded the fair’s new venue, a warehouse in Harlem that housed the Gavin Brown gallery business before it closed in 2020.
With 26 booths, this is the largest iteration of 1-54 in New York since the fair, named after the 54 countries in Africa, first expanded to the United States in 2015. Since that director Touria El Glaoui launched the fair in 2013 in London, the market for contemporary art from Africa and its diaspora has exploded, she says.
“When I started, it was very difficult to find enough galleries to fill the fair, and African artists were much less appreciated, not only in auction houses, but even in large international art fairs. public,” says El Glaoui. . This has changed in the years since, she explains, with some of the world’s leading galleries now representing artists from across Africa, and their work gaining increased recognition in museums and attention. at auction.
People line up at the new entrance to 1-54 New York Photo: Eva Sakellarides
At 1-54 this year, there are four galleries from Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country. One of them is the Lagos-based Wunika Mukan Gallery, which features works by Edozie Anedu, a 26-year-old Nigerian artist. Anedu’s colorful canvases at the fair, which range in price from $5,000 to $7,000, show a blue figure that represents long-dead ancestors.
“Edozie is different from most artists coming from Nigeria,” says Mukan. “He thinks outside the box and goes beyond portraits and domestic scenes. He is tied to tradition and being a young black African artist and what that looks like.
Lagos is home to a thriving arts scene that is still largely artist-driven, says Mukan. Since 2019, the city’s arts community has grown thanks to what Mukan describes as a “perfect storm” of the Black Lives Matter movement in the West and the pandemic forcing people back to their homes, where they began to dialogue. with Nigerian artists on Instagram. Many galleries in the city are also run by women.
“It’s a good time to be a black woman in art,” Mukan says.
