In New York, two art fairs go in different directions; one tightly focused on expanding the canon, the other unfortunately bloated. 

The new fair’s focus on under-recognised figures and bodies of work from last century occasions rich discoveries, including works by artists who were unafraid to challenge material orthodoxies

On September 9th, the Independent Art Fair opens its inaugural 20th-century edition at Casa Cipriani in Battery Park, highlighting artists and programs that span 100 years of creative production.

Just 32 booths this year, a show of artists both famous and unknown at the southern tip of Manhattan is high quality- and sometimes thrilling. 

Lepri left a career in diplomacy to pursue a life of art and love with Fini and a Polish writer.

The fair, now in its 12th year, is adding a second New York edition aimed at illuminating art historical blind spots

Independent will hold its first 20th century art fair this fall in a presentation that promises to give visitors a new perspective on art of the era. 

The programming will showcase under-known talents like Joe Ray, one of the few Black artists tied to Light and Space.

Not only will the entire fair be devoted to this period of art history, Independent 20th Century also has the stated aim of revising the canon to create a more diverse picture of art history.

A new fair is coming to New York with one objective: to spotlight artists from the 20th century who may not yet have gotten their due. The project is a new initiative from the founders of Independent art fair, Elizabeth Dee and Matthew Higgs. 

Returning to TriBeCa’s stylish Spring Studios, this year’s edition of the modestly scaled but elegantly curated art fair features 17 new exhibitors, out of 67 in total, spread over four floors.

The new week-long alignment starts the spring art season with a bang, including the returns of the Independent, Nada New York, Tefaf New York and the Future Art Fair.

Back up to full scale, the May fair will include 67 galleries and five nonprofits that will be exhibiting artists representing a range of compelling themes—from Indigenous art, to art of the African diaspora, to historical genres

Thursday, he’ll present a solo booth at the Independent Art Fair in New York with the Greek gallery Allouche Benias. 

“The connections of her paintings to a Surrealist diaspora spun in Mexico and the United States by women was undeniable"

The Los Angeles–based artist Devin Troy Strother is showing a suite of new paintings and sculpture that respond to the 2020 controversy surrounding the postponement of a Philip Guston retrospective.

While it’s expected of galleries to put their best foot forward at an art fair, Independent felt innovative and diverse—a snapshot of some of the most exciting talents in contemporary art.

The artist Yu-Wen Wu turned an absurdist set of Google Maps walking directions into a 20-foot artwork in the tradition of Chinese landscape scrolls.

Independent has long been a darling of adventurous fairgoers. Returning for its 13th edition, the fair remains as strong as ever and is more than worth the trip downtown.

The fair, always a destination for discovering artists—be they young and emerging or older and overlooked—features several presentations foregrounding underappreciated photographers

At this year’s Independent Fair in New York, there are the requisite “rediscoveries.” New York gallery Lomex brought the [H.R. Giger] sculpture to the fair, along with some others by the artist, who is known, among other things, for designing the Xenomorph of the 1979 horror movie Alien.

The aluminum sculpture [by Giger] is the centerpiece of a presentation curated by the gallery’s founder Alexander Shulan, with artists Oto Gillen and Valerie Keane. 

Still keeping an eye out for overlooked and underrepresented galleries and artists, the Independent is featuring 43 galleries and approximately 100 artists, with lots of women, nonwhite and a few self-taught artists. 

The most pleasurable event of so-called Armory Week is bound to be the eleven-year-old Independent.

Deputy editor Andy Battaglia shares his higlights from both national and international galleries. 

In its new home at Cipriani South Street at the Battery Maritime Building, Independent New York promises to excite, confront, protest and tantalise.

Independent—which co-founder and director Elizabeth Dee says is known as the “thinking person’s art fair”—will offer a “compact, curatorially focused presentation.” 

The turn-of-the-century building has been closed to the public for over 50 years.

From a network of over 250 galleries assembled since its inception, 40 galleries and institutions have been nominated for the 2021 edition, with
11 galleries making their Independent debut.

This year’s edition, the 12th, will take place from September 9 to 12 at Cipriani South Street, which is opening in Lower Manhattan this year inside a recently renovated historic ferry terminal.

"A fast pace of sales was recorded at this year's Independent, the most curated and crisp of the New York fairs.” —Melanie Gerlis

A strong focus on overlooked and outsider art uncovers indigenous Canadian sculptures and 1980s pinhole photography. 

Sooner or later, everything old is new again, and the most striking presentations in this fair, founded in 2010 by Elizabeth Dee to provide a curated alternative to larger art fairs, are revivals of work from the 1980s, the 1960s, or even earlier.

The Independent Art Fair is taking its cue this year from "maverick" dealers who spotlight marginalized communities. Fazakas Gallery, Franklin Parrasch and Garth Greenan Gallery share the mission of educating their audience on overlooked artists. 

The artist combed through hundreds of hours of Jamaican dancehall footage to create the 10-minute film.

Now more than ever, the art world is wondering exactly what role fairs will play in the future. In this Q&A, Elizabeth Dee discusses how and why she created Independent Art Fair as an answer to the problems that challenged gallerists participating in the art fair shuffle. 

Independent showcases mid-career and emerging artists just beginning to puncture the cultural membrane, and who are rocketing through their processes with endless repositories of style.

As Armory Week gets underway, we zoom in on the art fair shaking up the scene with its intellectual vibe. 

The Independent art fair, a calming cup of fine herbal tea to the Armory Show’s mixologist-concocted Red Bull and vodka, opened its 11th edition in New York with a serene spirit suited to its downtown home.

Founder Abby Bangser and artistic director Rafael de Cárdenas curate another masterful show. 

The location of Independent was a factor that led Downs & Ross to stage a solo booth of Vikky Alexander at the fair along with vinyl signs that once hung in the windows of the original New Museum space on Mercer Street, just a few blocks away.

Elizabeth Dee, who founded Independent in New York in 2010, and its Brussels edition in 2016, partly as a reaction to what she describes as “football-pitch” events, says that the fairs themselves also have to be more focused, to help their exhibitors hit the right collectors.

The Independent art fair, which is held annually in New York and previously staged presentations in Brussels, has revealed the 63 galleries that will show work in its 2020 edition at Spring Studios in Tribeca.

It’s strange, and a little magical, to see it suddenly filling up with galleries — with three more opening in just the last two weeks and about a dozen participating in last week’s Tribeca Gallery Walk, a biannual tour experience and mini-festival founded by the art fair Independent New York.

(...) this Tribeca (ish) scene doesn’t feel too cool or closed. There’s an emotional–spiritual-metaphysical warmth to the spaces, the art, the people.

Their curatorial work, which is a year-round process, has lead to the emergence of Independent as a glorious glitch in the art world machine.

Representing Austria at the Venice Biennale later this year, she debuted her "phallic caricatures" at Independent New York, her first-ever solo exhibition stateside. 

In its opening hours on Thursday, Independent notched a sale that, even had it occurred at The Armory Show, would have been among the highest recorded.

Works by Franklin Williams, Curtis Talwst Santiago, and Marcus Amm caught my eye for their innovative use of color and diverse materials.

Action was brisk from the get-go, as patrons made their way across four floors to see booths presented by 64 galleries.

The fair, which runs through Sunday at Spring Studios in Tribeca, includes more than 60 galleries, among them Chicago’s Monique Meloche Gallery, Los Angeles’s David Kordansky Gallery, and Air de Paris.

The sort of art fair that critics happily attend even when not contractually obligated to do so.

Independent has earned a reputation for measured, thoughtful work curated into an environment designed to avoid the suffocating cubicles-and-aisles format we all love to hate.

Independent is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, and founder Elizabeth Dee is as passionate as ever about its nearly open-plan format.

Ten years on, I think Independent has shown that the idea of a focused and independently-minded platform for art—of all kinds—still resonates.

In anticipation of the March 7 opening, the fair’s New York Director, Alix Dana, walks us through Independent’s evolution and trajectory.

Throughout our conversation, she emphasizes how gallerists can be financially successful while also being innovators and “activists for the future of culture.”

The fundraising initiative is part of the fair’s celebration of its tenth anniversary.

Under the curatorial leadership of Vincent Honoré, Independent Brussels 2018 will reframe the art fair model into a performative festival welcoming live art, installations, curated displays, music, and discussions, resulting in an arena for experimentation, unexpected interactions and collective thinking.

Elizabeth Dee and Vincent Honoré on Independent Brussels 2018 breaking the art fair mould with performance

Independent is een jaarlijkse beurs voor hedendaagse kunst die in 2009 in New York werd opgericht en sinds 2016 ook in Brussel plaatsvindt. 

Independent Brussels 2018 is the first in its new form as an art fair and performance festival, where experiences and experiments take precedence over existing, traditional formulas. 

In the space of two days last month, Art Basel and Frieze announced they would be introducing new sliding-scale price models for booths, starting at Art Basel’s original fair in Switzerland and at the new Frieze Los Angeles. 

La fiera, giunta alla sua terza edizione, quest’anno presenta un programma dedicato alla performance, con iniziative che rivisitano la rassegna dal punto di vista concettuale e anche logistico. Ecco tutte le novità

Brussel kent gigantisch veel interessante culturele aangelegenheden, zeker als het op kunst aankomt. Onze persoonlijke favoriet onder de expo’s is Independent Art Fair. 

Under the curatorial leadership of Vincent Honoré, Independent Brussels 2018 will reframe the art fair model into a performative festival.

If any artist calls out Trump media bias, it’s Brooklyn artist Cynthia Daignault, who shows a series of 15 portraits of the president from American newspaper front pages,... on view at Independent.

In a refreshing reprieve from the every-man-for-himself attitude found at other art fairs, Independent offers a collaborative environment “more akin to a massive gallery”.

From pie graphs to itty-bitty handball courts, here are our highlights from the Tribeca-based fair.

"Outsider" artists hold their own against more established contemporary names and inspire buyers in search of authenticity and quirk

At roughly one-third the size of its waterside counterpart, [Independent] is your best bet for keeping burnout at bay.

Today, we met with Leibowitz at Independent to hear more about the works on view. 

After a snowy start to Armory Week, Independent New York, a fair on the cusp of its first decade, felt like a breath of fresh air. 

The tightly curated affair offered much to see. A look around the fair, which runs until Sunday, March 11.

[Independent] feels more like a journey of discovery through a contemporary art gallery than a neon-lit, overhung, and über-merchandized buying bonanza.

The formally ambitious but modestly scaled Independent is a godsend. With just 54 exhibits, many of them solo presentations, ...  it’s like a leisurely all-star game.

Nearly a decade in, Independent’s mission has calcified: to allow blue-chip dealers to co-exist next to small, emerging galleries, and to allow established artists to have work a few steps over from the new vanguard.

It sometimes feels like it was only yesterday that the Independent art fair made its debut appearance at the old Dia building in West Chelsea in New York, as a more modestly scaled and tightly edited alternative to the city’s other fairs.

The innovative New York art fair's Founding Curatorial Advisor selects a half dozen favorites from this year's edition.

At the helm of spring's leading art fairs– Independent, The Armory Show, and NADA New York– are three formidable women. Antwaun Sargent checks in with the directors for a preview. 

The hosts are joined by Independent's founding curatorial advisor Matthew Higgs.

"Gallerists are in daily conversation with artists, and are the beating heart of the art-world ecosystem."

For its third edition, Independent Brussels is jumping ahead from its usual springtime slot alongside Art Brussels and setting out on its own.

Créant l’événement à l’automne 2018, la manifestation bruxelloise innove.

Living up to the fair’s name, Dee has decided to move its third edition away from being a satellite of the Art Brussels contemporary art fair in April and instead let it stand on its own two feet in November.

Independent has announced that Vincent Honoré, the recently appointed senior curator at the Hayward Gallery in London, will serve as guest curator of a special edition of Independent Brussels.

“Vincent brings a strong vision and track record of exhibitions that go beyond the traditional brick-and-mortar format. We’re looking forward to delivering a truly unique context for future art experiences.”

Contemporary curator Vincent Honoré has taken on the role of guest curator at the Independent Brussels art fair (April 19-22, 2018). A focus on performance art, which is one of Honoré’s specialities, can be expected.

Half of the dealers are planning to show all-women booths.

If you’re expecting Frieze or Art Basel, Independent Brussels will surprise you. The European edition of the New York fair co-founded by gallerist Elizabeth Dee is in its second year, and touts a different philosophy: quality over quantity. 

Dealers chatted amicably with buyers, curators, collectors and reporters yesterday, in sharp contrast to the speed-dating feel of Art Basel Miami or the Armory. This is the way to do an art fair in New York City, if one must.

Founded by gallerist Elizabeth Dee and curator Darren Flook, and developed in conjunction with creative advisor Matthew Higgs and director Laura Mitterrand, the Independent feels more like a large group exhibition or a biennial than it does an art fair.

With a strong curatorial emphasis, and a policy of continuous rotation among galleries, Independent battles the fatigue of the fair experience by striving for “museum-quality” shows from all of its fifty-one participants.

Whether Brussels is the "New Berlin", your “B-sides” (à la artist Megan Marrin), or a “hellhole” (à la Trump), it’s certainly a destination, especially in the spring, when the de facto capital of Europe draws thousands to its annual Brussels Art Week. 

The new offshoot of New York's Independent fair openend in Brussels this week, to considerable applause from exhibitors. "I can't think of a better place to hold a fair,"said the London dealer Maureen Paley.

Timed to coincide with the established Art Brussels fair, Independent Brussels represents an intriguing new addition to a city known for its strong collector base and influential gallery scene. 

“It’s like the Guggenheim or Ikea—you are led around and forced to discover things,” says Louis-Philippe Van Eeckhoutte, the director of Brussels-based Office Baroque, one of 72 galleries invited to take part.

Brussels’ community of contemporary art collectors will face a double dose of temptation in the coming week. Wednesday sees the launch of Independent Brussels, a European offshoot of the New York fair that is cited as an alternative to its more traditional corporate counterparts on the circuit. 

The New York City art fair grows up and branches out, launching its first European edition.

Laura Mitterrand on the chic "curated" fair's latest moves. 

“If we accept that fairs are a necessary evil, then we should at least try to make them more interesting,” says Independent creative advisor Matthew Higgs. “Instead of a trade fair, we’re trying to approximate what artists can do in galleries.”

Whoever the anonymous makers were, regardless of their motivations and compulsions, I saw art driven by inner necessity, elaborate imagination filled with pathos, intensity, something pitiable but incredibly celebratory. 

Artist Matthew Higgs has had the privilege of organizing 56 exhibitors for Independent 2014. artnet wanted to know a little about what makes Mr. Higgs tick, and via email in mid-February, he respond- ed to our questions like so:

The art world has different tribes. The crowds at the Armory, ADAA Art Show and Pulse are different because the varying aesthetics and brands on display draw different audiences.

“I’ve signed up,” said London dealer Maureen Paley, who took part in the fair’s debut. “It was a breath of fresh air and brought some real energy to New York.”

Independent is an art fair with none of the administrative-feeling visual barriers of your typical art fair, and a whole lot more enthusiastic energy.

You might have thought that New York had reached the saturation point in contemporary-art fairs, but no. A new one has just arrived. It’s called Independent. And it is housed, quite attractively, in the old Dia Center for the Arts space in Chelsea, lately home to the utopian X Initiative.