The premise of New York’s Independent 20th Century is that the last century remains full of untapped potential. Founder Elizabeth Dee seeks out dealers who want to share obscure artists who deserve recognition for their place in the art-historical canon, as well as important bodies of work by otherwise well-known artists that have remained largely unseen.
The fair’s fourth edition, located on the water’s edge in lower Manhattan at Casa Cipriani, delivers on that promise, offering its 31 exhibitors the perfect opportunity to take a chance on untested material that might be too risky at a larger event. [...]
New York’s Cristin Tierney Gallery, meanwhile, is revisiting works from 1985 to 1990 from the sculptor Judy Pfaff (b. 1946), including a monumental wall-mounted work ingeniously crafted from recycled materials. You’ll spot a watering can, a metal olive oil jug, and even a propeller incorporated into the mixed media sculpture, priced at $375,000.
“Judy is a master scavenger,” Cristin Tierney told me, explaining that many of these materials were gathered from around Pfaff’s home in an informal artists’ colony in Williamsburg, then still an industrial neighborhood. Other collage works feature shiny, neon contact paper purchased during a residency at the American Academy in Rome, and decommissioned city parking signs. “I don’t think people have really looked at these works in quite a long time. They’re just so incredibly fresh.”
Pfaff, who will be creating a site-specific installation for a solo show at the gallery’s new Tribeca home next month, has had numerous prestigious exhibitions over the years, including multiple appearances at both the Venice Biennale and the Whitney Biennial in New York. And as a longtime art professor, she is widely admired among her peers. But Tierney, who started representing Pfaff earlier this year, believes that the market’s focus on painting has kept her from really breaking through—something she hopes will soon change.
“The art world has continued to really rethink and re-value artists of a certain era, and especially female artists and artists of color who fell outside the mainstream art dialogue of the ’70s and ’80s,” Tierney said.
