Having had just one day available in New York City over the big art fair weekend (Sept. 7-10, 2023), we opted to concentrate on just one fair, Art on Paper. This was partly because art on – and of – paper is of special interest to us and partly because this fair tends to be both more self-contained and less trendy than the others, especially the Armory Show. It was also because we knew that there would be a strong Philadelphia presence: Commonweal, Stanek, and Bertrand Productions had booths; Billy Dufala (represented by Fleisher/Ollman) had one of the special projects; and Nato Thompson, who continues to reside in Philadelphia, was the fair’s Creative Director.
Art on Paper’s venue – Pier 36 – isn’t very close to the Javits Center on the West Side (site of the Armory Show). It’s on the East River and not near any subways, so it took some effort to get there. Neither is it as large as some of the other fairs but it was large enough (see photo) to take up the better part of a day. This year was the 9th edition.
Within the overall fair, there were the Center for Book Arts-curated Booksmart Fair (including Dieu Donné and 10X10 Photo Books) and Flat Files, which brought in a set of small fine-art printmakers and publishers with a somewhat less commercial focus. The fair is run by Art Market Productions (AMP), which also runs Art Market San Francisco and Hamptons, and the Seattle Art Fair.
We should confess that art fairs are not our favorite form of art exhibition. By and large the exhibitors bring work that they believe will sell and have booths that resemble resale shops rather than coherent galleries. This was definitely the case for the majority of booths at Art on Paper. As well, many of the exhibitors weren’t particularly interested in “truth in advertising,” showing work that had nothing to do with paper (like paintings on canvas, or wall reliefs made of wood or plastic). Most of the work on display tended towards the bright, colorful, decorative and gimmicky – more home décor than serious art.
We can happily say that this was not the case with the Philadelphia exhibitors. Both Stanek and Bertrand Productions had displays of serious work, and Commonweal (at their very first fair) had an outstandingly coherent display of very serious work – a 50-year mini-retrospective of drawings by Anne Minich. In fact, reviews in both Hyperallergic and The Art Newspaper named Commonweal as an outstanding booth. (Commonweal is currently also featuring Anne in a very strong one-person show at their Philadelphia gallery.)
Two other booths that stood out for us were Accola Griefen, specializing in work by women artists, and Purgatory Pie Press, a book arts studio that is a perennial favorite among Philadelphia artists.
Unfortunately, ethnic diversity was almost nonexistent, and the exhibitors (and attendees) were overwhelmingly white. One exception was the black-owned Tanya Weddemire Gallery, which showed the work of Guy Stanley Philoche. Another was the delightfully unexpected Worthless Studios, founded by Neil Hamamoto. This arts nonprofit, based in Brooklyn, describes itself as an “artists’ community space” that works to assist a diverse group of artists in “realizing their creative visions.” They managed to bring an Airstream trailer inside the pier, parking it among the more standard booths. The trailer houses a “mobile darkroom” as part of an ongoing project titled “Free Film” in which they lend a loaded film camera to participants who then return the camera and exposed film to be developed and printed. The photos are subsequently exhibited in certain theme exhibitions. They were doing this at Art on Paper — using B&W film in particular — and exhibiting some of the prints in the non-darkroom portion of the Airstream.
Apart from the exhibitors, art fairs often feature large-scale works that have been curated into the fair by a Creative Director. In the case of this year’s Art on Paper, these pieces were chosen by Nato Thompson, who recently spent five years as artistic director for the Philadelphia Contemporary. Thompson has also served as Artistic Director for several other AMP fairs. These gigs have overlapped with his stint at the Philadelphia Contemporary and with his current position as founding director of the Alternative Art School. Thompson chose large-scale “art-of-paper” sculptural works by Striped Canary (Stephen B. Nguyen and Wade Kavanaugh), Fitzhugh Karol, and Billy Dufala, among others. To be precise, the Dufala piece (a chest-high bale of recycled white paper) was not really that large, but it used scale effectively. It was perhaps the single most beautiful object in the fair.
