Finding Art Outside The Mainstream In New York

Blockbuster museum retrospectives for brand-name artists like Edward Hopper at the Whitney Museum of American Art (through March 5) or Meret Oppenheim at the Museum of Modern Art (through March 4) will always generate the most attention on New York’s packed artistic calendar. Equally thrilling delights, however, can be found around the margins if you know where to look.

Black Women Photographers

Founded by Polly Irungu and launched in July of 2020, Black Women Photographers is a global community, directory and hub of over 1,500 Black women and non-binary identifying photographers. Spanning over 60 countries and more than 30 U.S. states, Black Women Photographers is a home for Black women to receive proper recognition and, most importantly, get hired.

“As a student at the University of Oregon, I was quietly making a Twitter list called ‘Black Women Photographers’ because I was searching for representation, inspiration and community. I found a love for photography, but did not know where to turn for support,” Irungu told Forbes.com of Black Women Photographers’ origin. “Growing up in a traditional African household, the arts was not a path that was seen as a ‘real’ career so I made this Twitter list of Black women photographers as a source of inspiration to keep going.”

During the peak of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, heated conversations were taking place in the photography industry–like almost everywhere else in America–about its need to hire more Black photographers and its history of racial inequality from hiring practices to what was shot and how.

“I shared my Twitter list and it got a lot of traction,” Irungu said. “From that, I started having conversations with several Black women artists who shared my sentiments, and it was clear that something more was needed. I was tired of waiting and decided to launch BWP.”

In little over two years, BWP has provided hundreds of hours of free education, free portfolio reviews with top industry leaders from The New York Times, The Washington Post, Associated Press, Getty Images, Reuters, and more, and helped countless Black women photographers get seen and hired; it has also established a $50,000 grant and equipment fund with Nikon Inc. Beyond journalism, BWP supports members practicing fine art photography by organizing gallery exhibitions for them. The first such New York presentation occurs at Galerie Kitsuné (108 Bond Street, Brooklyn, NY 11217) through February 26.

“Our Black Experience: Stories from Black Women Photographers,” showcases four Black Femme-identifying photographers in the New York City area, all BWP members, each with a story representing their experience and how they view their femininity.

“(Visitors) will see how four artists with their own unique paths can come together to share something so vulnerable,” Irungu said of the exhibition. “Visitors will see the level of care that each photographer puts into their work. The work is stunning, making you stop to take a moment and appreciate it. The perspective, the nuance, the stories, the art–all very different coming from a Black woman’s gaze. We’ve been doing the work, and the world is finally catching up.”

Outsider Art Fair

The 31^st annual Outsider Art Fair–the only fair championing self-taught artists from around the world–takes place March 2 through 5, 2023, at the Metropolitan Pavilion in Manhattan. Outsider artists are united through their being uninfluenced by “the conventions of classical or fashionable art,” as stated by artist Jean Dubuffet who helped define the genre, then called Art Brut, in the late 1940s.

Featuring over 64 exhibitors from 28 cities in eight countries, the fair continues embracing the inclusive, nonconforming, and “renegade” spirit of its practitioners, also variously referred to as folk or visionary artists.

Highlights from this year’s edition include a presentation of The Life and Death of Elvis Presley: A Suite, a series of eight complex paintings by American artist and architect Paul Laffoley (1935-2015) representing the artist’s interpretation of the distinct phases in the life of Elvis Presley. Donald Ellis Gallery offers an early group of graphite and colored pencil drawings by Inuit artist Parr (1893-1969), celebrated today for his unadulterated depictions of the hunt, animals and the human figure. SHRINE gallery showcases the work of Mary T. Smith (1904-1995) and David Butler (1898-1997), two figures in the Southern tradition of “yard shows,” where Black artists decorated their properties to convey messages that could not be openly voiced. Kishka Gallery & Library has drawings by Denver Ferguson (b. 1985), a climate refugee who began creating artworks on scrap paper while working as a cashier at a gas station in Connecticut following his departure from the US Virgin Islands post Hurricane Irma.

Within Outsider art, it is quickly realized that the remarkable and unusual creations result from remarkable and unusual lives. Take Harold Granucci, a recently discovered, self-taught artist who was believed to have had savant syndrome and viewed the world in grids and sequences. Born in Connecticut in 1916, at age 65, he began drawing in solitude eight hours a day creating geometrically based artworks that gave visible form to calculations found in nature, ranging from the storms to the solar system and sunflower crowns. He passed away at 90 leaving behind a prolific and relatively unseen body of work, a selection of which is on display at the fair thanks to Art Sales & Research gallery.

For this year’s OAF Curated Space, the fair has joined forces with Grammy Award-winning music producer, Randall Poster, co-founder of the Birdsong Project, a collaboration with some of the world’s most respected musicians, artists, poets, and actors, supporting bird conservation. Poster and fair owner Andrew Edlin, who have been friends since childhood, will co-curate an exhibition, “We Are Birds,” featuring dozens of works inspired by birdlife made by self-taught and contemporary artists.

Appropriate considering how a Eurasian owl escaped from the Central Park Zoo has become a prominent figure in the city this winter.

New-York Historical Society

Speaking of birds, the most famous art-related bird project is John James Audubon’s Birds of America (1827–38) comprising 435 lifelike and life-sized images of North American birds in the wild. The finest rendering of Audubon’s series came via the Havell Edition set of engravings commonly known as the “Double Elephant,” so titled for being printed on the largest paper then available for commercial printing: a full 39.5″ x 26.5.″ Fewer than 200 were created, many have been broken apart, the New-York Historical Society has a magnificent, complete, fully bound copy.

For a non-art museum, the NYHS has a staggering collection New York-related art, with significant pieces from the likes of Picasso (a massive curtain for the 1919 ballet “Le Tricorne), Mark Rothko and Keith Haring–the most exciting found over the admission desk.

Art lovers will also surely enjoy the Historical Society’s fascinating special exhibition program which currently features “Crafting Freedom: The Life and Legacy of Free Black Potter Thomas W. Commeraw” and debuts “Kara Walker: Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated)” on February 24.

“Crafting Freedom” is the first exhibition bringing overdue attention to Thomas W. Commeraw (1772–1823), a successful Black craftsman who was long assumed to be white. Formerly enslaved, Commeraw rose to prominence as a free Black entrepreneur, owning and operating a successful pottery in the city.

Kara Walker (b. 1969) has established herself as a global contemporary art superstar in part by creating works weaving together imagery from the antebellum South, the brutality of slavery, and racist stereotypes. Her silhouettes provoke controversy through their use of exaggerated caricatures reflecting long-standing racialized and gendered stereotypes and their lurid depictions of history. In the series of 15 prints coming to the NYHS, she responds to the two-volume anthology “Harper’s Pictorial History of the Great Rebellion” first published in 1866, exposing the omission of African Americans from the narrative and urging viewers to consider the continuing legacy of racial stereotyping and violence.

Rose B. Simpson

New York often paces the art world, but finally catches up with where much of it has been for years in recognizing Rose B. Simpson (b. 1983, Santa Clara Pueblo). Jack Shainman Gallery (513 West 20^th Street) presents “Road Less Traveled,” February 23 through April 8, the NYC debut for Simpson’s ceramic and mixed-media sculptures.

Simpson has previously been profiled by Forbes.com.

Julie Mehretu

Admirers of high-powered female contemporary artists like Walker and Simpson have the opportunity to hobnob with one during Amref Health Africa’s annual ArtBall event February 25, 2023, at 26 Bridge in Brooklyn where Julie Mehretu (b. 1970) will be honored with the organization’s Rees Visionary Award.

“The award is named after (Amref’s) late founder, Dr. Thomas Rees, who was a pioneering reconstructive surgeon, pilot, musician and artist,” Emily Correale, Director, Development and Communications, Amref Health Africa in the USA, explains. “The Rees Visionary Award is given to artists we feel are creating exceptional work that educates, inspires and emboldens the viewer through these challenging times.”

Amref Health Africa, the largest African-based NGO in the world reaching over 20 million people per year across 35 countries in Africa with healthcare programs and the Ethiopian-born Mehretu make a perfect pairing, one the public is welcomed to take part in.