The Art Dealers Association of America’s (ADAA) annual fair, The Art Show, is heavily associated with New York. Held every year in the Upper East Side’s Park Avenue Armory, the event has raised more than $37m for the nonprofit Henry Street Settlement, which offers social, arts and health services to tens of thousands of New Yorkers each year.
But a new programme by the ADAA will shed light on the group’s member galleries that hail from outside New York. Spotlight On… will focus on a new US city each year, and first up is Houston. Former ADAA executive director Maureen Bray says the idea for Spotlight On… came about after a trip to her hometown of Houston, where her sister, Bridget Bray, works as a curator. The art scene in Houston and local patrons’ support for galleries and institutions is “unmatched”, Bray says.
“We spent three days going to gallery openings, going to see shows and museums,” Bray adds. “Growing up, I knew very well how rich and deep the cultural scene is there, but seeing it through my sister's eyes in recent times, it occurred to me there was an opportunity to showcase the cultural scenes in cities outside of New York or Los Angeles, and that the ADAA and The Art Show were well positioned to do it.”
Bray stepped down from ADAA leadership about a month ago, but she has stayed on in a consulting capacity to help support the transition of the new executive director, Kinsey Robb, who spent the formative years of her childhood in Dallas (“You can't get too far without meeting another person from Texas,” Bray muses after learning that this reporter was born and raised in the Austin area).
“Coming in and seeing the seed that Maureen planted with Spotlight On… Houston, the response to it has been really exciting,” Robb says. “It’s brought together a sense of community across our ADAA members, and I think everybody's cheering for each other.”
Spotlight On… has helped guide The Art Show’s programming, and the ADAA has organised panel talks featuring some of the city’s curators and collectors. It has also commissioned Walley Films, the San Antonio-based filmmakers, to create a short documentary featuring the ADAA’s five Houston member galleries: Inman Gallery, McClain Gallery, Josh Pazda Hiram Butler, Sicardi Ayers Bacino (all participating in The Art Show) and Texas Gallery.
This work by the Houston-based artist Reynier Leyva Novo shows a sculpture of the Confederate general Stonewall Jackson being loaded onto a moving truck after it was removed from Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, in 2020 Courtesy Sicardi Ayers Bacino
The four Houston galleries with stands at The Art Show have a special blue stripe with a star on their stand signs, designating them as part of the Spotlight On… platform. Sicardi Ayers Bacino, which specialises in representing Latin American artists, has staged a solo stand of works by the Cuban artist Reynier Leyva Novo, who is now based in Houston. Priced between $10,000 and $22,000 each, these feature images of Confederate and other monuments being torn down across the US in the wake of anti-racism protests in 2020. To create the dual-canvas works, Novo covered his paintings with layers of blue paint and worked with specialists from the conservation department of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, to use infrared photography to create a print of the painting that lies underneath the blue pigment.
“I'm using this to talk about the layers in history and the access that we have to these different layers,” Novo says. “Because if I don't show this infrared image, you will see a monochrome painting and cannot access the content of the true story, how history is built. The process is about this cycle of removing, recreating and remaking history.”
Allison Ayers, a director and partner at Sicardi Ayers Bacino, says the gallery chose to showcase Novo’s work because many of the themes were “timely, given the elections and all of the issues we’re facing today”. (The Art Show preview on Tuesday (29 October) took place just one week before the US presidential election.)
“Novo also is an immigrant," Ayers adds. “He moved here three years ago—he's living in exile, and so it's important to know what's happening with our history. This whole series is about not hiding in history.”
This year's Art Show marks Josh Pazda Hiram Butler’s first taking part in the fair. Josh Pazda says the gallery decided to apply before they knew Houston would be highlighted, adding that it was “a really happy bit of news”. Its stand is a solo one dedicated to Ana Villagomez, a painter born and raised in Houston and now based in Brooklyn, whose large canvases are priced at $18,000 each.
“Houston's a really great city with a thriving arts community, and people from outside of Houston are not always aware of that,” Pazda says. “When people visit, I think they come away understanding that something really wonderful is happening in the museums and galleries and artists’ studios.”
Pazda points to Houston’s lack of traditional zoning laws for land use and how it lends itself to a robust DIY art scene in the city. “The city has no zoning, and so there are pockets of activity that pop up all over the place,” he says. “People are working in less traditional ways, not always in artist-studio complexes. They’ll find other interesting properties and make them their own.”
The ADAA plans to continue the Spotlight On… series at The Art Show in future years. “We talk about a global art world all the time, but this is the devil's-advocate version of that, which is the celebration of unique, specific, local geographic areas and its art,” Bray says. “When we have an opportunity to celebrate individual communities, we should take it.”