The Best Booths at Independent 20th Century, From Elegant Modernism to Native American Punk

September 6, 2024

Independent’s 20th Century fair, devoted specifically to art from its titular period, stands apart as a singular species in New York. Housed in the Battery Maritime Building at the southernmost tip of Manhattan, the fair is aesthetically transportive, like walking onto the Queen Elizabeth II or attending a party at Gatsby’s estate out on West Egg before people started drowning themselves in alcohol.

The understated elegance of the affair is part and parcel with the thoughtful approach that Elizabeth Dee, the fair’s founder, has brought to the event. The Independent (both this fair and its counterpart staged in May) is invite-only. Galleries are nominated by Independent founding curatorial adviser Matthew Higgs with input from participating galleries and the fair’s leadership team. The result is precisely measured, very international, and somewhat studious, but not without vitality or glamour. That’s no small feat for an event that has only 28 galleries and exclusively shows work made between 1900 and 2000.

Among the perks of holding the event in such an historic Beaux-Arts building is the striking facade and balcony area. But it’s the work inside, hung from white walls that sit on gold and blue carpeting, that keeps your attention. Here are some of the best booths on view at Independent 20th Century’s third edition.

Stuart Davis at Alexandre Gallery

Image Credit: Courtesy Alexandre Gallery

While known for his jazzy abstractions, Stuart Davis began his career at 17 as a student of the Ashcan School’s headmaster, Robert Henri. The works on view here show Davis, a young sponge who’d only just dropped out of school to study painting, absorbing rough-and-tumble Manhattan, where he experienced ragtime music alongside suffragettes, socialists, and burlesque dancers. All the vitality and music of Davis’s later work is there, but here, it exists in a figurative form that bears the hallmark of the Ashcan School’s quick, improvisational brushwork.
Squeak Carnwath at Jane Lombard Gallery

Image Credit: Courtesy Jane Lombard Gallery

For the works shown here, all dating to the ’90s, Squeak Carnwath looks inward, using shapes, symbols, and words that are scratched or smeared onto a canvas. The goal of these works is to create a visual diary of her thoughts. Carnwath’s work is jazzy, much like Davis’s, but hers is freer—less Charlie Parker and more Roland Kirk or Charles Mingus. Mingus, actually, is a handy comparison. His tunes often spiraled nearly out of control before being reined in, organized, and made digestible. Carnwath’s work is similar. You can get lost in the business of the details, but by stepping back for a moment, the whole song comes into focus.
Raoul Dufy at Nahmad Contemporary

Image Credit: Alexa Hoyer, Courtesy of Nahmad Contemporary

In his day, French painter Raoul Dufy was a heavyweight—he was represented by Louis Carré, the same dealer who also repped Matisse and Picasso, and was in 1952 awarded the grand prize for painting in the 26th Venice Biennale. Perhaps he lacks of the same name recognition as Matisse and Picasso today, but the works on display at Nahmad’s show why he was so acclaimed during the 20th century. Whether in oil, gouache, or watercolor, Dufy painted figures that are so animated, they almost appear to move. That’s because Dufy deliberately painted light with a flagrant disregard for tradition. Peter Schjeldahl once wrote that “Raoul Dufy was perfect in ways for which generations of serious art people had no use.” Hopefully, that will soon no longer be the case.
John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres at Salon 94

Image Credit: Photo by Elisabeth Bernstein

For nearly 40 years, John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres have been collaborating on plaster casts of their neighbors in the South Bronx and others. The casts have often been produced on the street, and the act of making them has become like a block party, with people of all ages participating. The busts, which hang on the wall at Salon 94 booth show the range of human emotion, but above all, they exude the dignity of their subjects and evince the empathy of these artists. Titi in the Window (1985/2024) is the highlight of this booth. Titi was a fixture of the South Bronx, a watchdog, a mother hen, and a patron saint. She knew the names of all the children, and if you had political ambitions, you’d have been a fool to not go and seek her blessing before launching a campaign. Here, she is properly memorialized alongside others from the Bronx, in a testament to the deep connections between Ahearn and Torres and the people who lived in this neighborhood.
Brad Kahlhamer at Venus Over Manhattan

Image Credit: Courtesy Venus Over Manhattan

The paintings, sculptures, and works on paper by Brad Kahlhamer explore the gritty New York of the 1980s and ’90s through a Native American lens. Born in Tuscon, Arizona, in 1956 to Native parents, he was adopted at a young age by white German American family. (As a result, he has no tribal affiliations because he cannot trace his ancestry, a requirement for official enrollment.) As a young man, Kahlhamer on the periphery, slightly excluded from everywhere he went. It wasn’t until he moved to New York in the ’80s, when he fell in with the city’s vibrant underground art scene and its alternative spaces, that he began to fully realize his practice, a combination of Indigenous ledger drawings in an animated, somewhat frantic style that owes something to Art Spiegelman and Peter Saul. It’s all more than a bit punk.