With more than a dozen fairs occurring simultaneously this week and next, New York’s spring art season can be dizzying. But across the Brooklyn Bridge, away from the perhaps buzzier Manhattan shows, a more intimate opportunity to engage with artists awaits.
Independent artists run the show at The Other Art Fair held at ZeroSpace in Boerum Hill, which is returning for its 15th year and features 127 artists from 14 different countries and a heavy Brooklyn contingent. The fair is presented in partnership with Saatchi Art, the London-based online gallery, but it’s much less stuffy than their chichi counterparts across the river.
“It’s meant to encourage people who may be intimidated by the art world, give them an opportunity to learn about an artist’s process and potentially walk out with a piece that’s very affordable,” The Other Art Fair spokesperson Kate Greenberg told Hyperallergic.
At the opening last night, May 8, pop music blared through speakers as a crowd clustered outside an antique subway car currently occupied by the fair’s co-sponsor, the Texas-based distillery Balcones, which gave samples of its whiskey. Nearby, multimedia artist and writer Ann Marie Tendler adjusted her Leica M10 as she prepared to take styled portraits of art fair guests in a photo booth outfitted with an ornate Victorian couch, bouquets of flowers, and a leopard skin draped on its side. The space was inspired by her photography series Rooms in the First House (2022) and her memoir “Men Have Called Her Crazy” (2024).
“I wanted something dark and moody, lush and feminine as well. Something otherworldly so you can’t tell what year it is,” Tendler explained.
Fabric and ceramics works were among the strongest at the show. Illustrator and ceramicist Maureen McAfee drew a large crowd to her booth with her whimsical ceramic newspaper vases and magnets imitating newspaper pages. British artist Sophie Reid’s mathematical hand-stitched fiber pieces were also striking in their simplicity.
Textile artist William Storms examined his hanging weavings while greeting two of his friends who came out to support him. Storms typically works as an interior designer for tech firms like Google and Amazon, where he has created giant fabric pieces that stretch across multiple floors of an office building, but his works at the fair are much smaller, some incorporating e-waste like corded headphones and charging wires.
“Textiles are usually soft and flat, but that’s boring,” Storms said. “When you look closely you say, ‘Wow, look at that texture — and are those my headphones?’”
For a campier nod to the art world, Los Angeles-based artist Annie Rob drew cheeky slogans such as “Make America Gay Again” over vintage portraits she thrifted at flea markets. “It’s about giving these pieces a new voice,” she said. “This fellow is a rather handsome brute,” she said, pointing to a 1962 portrait of a man who bore a slight resemblance to actor Matt Damon, “and I thought he should say, ‘You Seem Poor’ based on his expression.”
Seven blocks away, Gowanus’s preeminent arts institution, Powerhouse Arts, held a “soft launch” for Conductor, a new fair promoting artists from the Global South. Tucked behind a self-storage facility off Third Avenue, the 170,000-square-foot former factory frequently hosts open houses and art fairs for the public to poke around its wood, metal, and ceramics workshops.
This year, a handful of galleries and artists from Mexico, Puerto Rico, Nigeria, Palestine, and Brazil have set up in a corner of the art factory’s third floor. A much larger fair is expected to return next year, but it’s still worth checking out the mix of eccentric ceramics from Mexico City’s Ago Projects and artist Gabriella Torres-Ferrer’s eerie mixed-media sculptures that incorporate used soda and energy drinks and digital screens with cryptic messages of financial transactions.
“It’s a critique on the commodification of data,” said Manuela Paz, co-founder of the San Juan-based gallery Embajada. “In the same way you accept cookies from a website you give up your privacy and allow your personal data to be shared, these scenes are spitting out aggregated data.”
Palestinian artist and filmmaker Khaled Jarrar was also on hand to show off his installation of handmade clay vessels of olive oil produced from olive trees on land he purchased in the Occupied West Bank in 2016. He titled the work “UNKNOWN – Olive Oil,” a sarcastic take on being assigned “Unknown” for the country of origin on his Green Card.
“It’s a study of resilience and beauty as a Palestinian,” he said. “They didn’t acknowledge that I was born in Jenin.”
You can sample Jarrar’s olive oil, too. It’s much smoother than the Texas whiskey. Both fairs run through Sunday, May 11.