1-54 New York opens with Afro-Brazilian art for the first time

May 13. The 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair opens Thursday at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, and for the first time in its ten-year run, Afro-Brazilian work gets a dedicated pavilion.

The fair, which launched in London in 2013 and added a New York edition in 2015, has historically leaned toward galleries out of Lagos, Accra, Johannesburg, and Dakar. This year: fourteen Brazilian galleries are on the floor, three of them first-time exhibitors. The pavilion is called Axé, and it runs through Sunday.

The geographic shift

Brazil has the largest Afro-descendant population outside the African continent, but the country's contemporary art infrastructure tends to route through Europe or New York first. The 1-54 pavilion is an attempt to short-circuit that. São Paulo's Mendes Wood DM is showing paintings by Ayrson Heráclito, who works with dendê oil and fabric dyes. Rio's Simões de Assis is bringing sculpture by Eustáquio Neves, whose material base is reclaimed colonial-era wood.

The positioning is intentional. Touria El Glaoui, founding director of 1-54, told Wallpaper that the fair's remit has always been "spotlighting the African diaspora," but until now the Brazilian thread was incidental, not central. This year it's the structure.

What else is on the floor

Forty-three galleries total, including returnees like Addis Fine Art (Addis Ababa / London), Gallery 1957 (Accra / London), and Stevenson (Cape Town / Amsterdam). The Brussels-based Harlan Levey Projects is showing Congolese painter Vitshois Mwilambwe Bondo, who's been having a quiet moment in European auctions since a Sotheby's sale last November.

Tickets are $30. The fair runs through May 18.