Dealers invited to exhibit at the Independent 20th Century fair also said the fair was lively throughout the day. Nahmad Contemporary in New York reported most of the works it offered by French modern artist Marie Laurencin, painted in the 1920s and 1930s, were sold. Prices for these figurative works were between US$70,000 and US$190,000. 

“It’s the perfect city to come and do an art fair,” says Francesco Dama of Galleria Lorcan O’Neill Roma in Rome, Italy, who appreciates the informed conversations about the art on display, such as drawings by British artist Tracey Emin or the precise oil landscapes and still lifes of Matvey Levenstein, a Russian-born artist who lives in New York. 

“We have to stay here for days—nine hours a day!—at least having some engaging conversations is a blast,” Dama says.

Other fairs opening up at the same time as the first back-to-school days for New York City students included Photofairs New York—also at the Javits Center—Art on Paper, at Pier 36 on the East River; and Spring Break, which opened Wednesday at 625 Madison Ave in Midtown.

The fall fairs will be a test of how much the primary art market is affected by higher interest rates and the prospect of an economic slowdown, as secondary sales at the auction houses have softened. A dominant conversation among some dealers at the Armory Show on Thursday, however, was the effect Frieze Seoul was having on attendance.

The South Korean fair, Frieze’s second in the city, began on Wednesday and runs through Saturday. Ironically, Frieze announced in July that it had bought the Armory Show, making for an awkward scheduling conflict between two of its major fairs.  

In response to a question about the overlapping events, Nicole Berry, the fair’s director, said the VIP preview of the fair’s third outing at the Javits Center “had both strong numbers and an impressive presence of American and international collectors.” Earlier the fair had provided several names of notable attendees, which included Venus Williams, Anderson Cooper and Zoe Kazan, and collectors Estrellita Brodsky, David Mugrabi, and Alain Servais, among many others.

“Beyond the numbers we are hearing incredible enthusiasm from our exhibitors about the quantity and quality of attendees,” Berry said, adding, “Busy foot traffic during the preview has resulted in major sales and placements in prominent institutions and collections.”

On Thursday, one gallery official who declined to be named said he was disappointed that several prominent collectors who they had hoped would be at the Armory Show to view new works by an artist they represented weren’t there, although he was happy to report several museum curators showed interest. 

Leigh Bassingthwaighte, associate director at SMAC Gallery from Cape Town, South Africa, made a similar observation, noting “some of the big names that would normally be here” were missing. 

However, Bennett Roberts, owner of Roberts Projects in Los Angeles, described the fair as having a good “energy” and said he didn’t get the sense that big collectors were missing. Instead, he was appreciating those who were stopping by and expressing genuine interest in the works on display. Some fairs are purely about “just trying to make a sale,” Roberts says. In this case, “people ask some great questions.” 

The gallery was showing several pieces by some of the well-known contemporary artists it works with, including Jeffrey Gibson, who is representing the U.S. at the 2024 Venice Biennale, in addition to Kehinde Wiley, Amoako Boafo, and Betye Saar. Roberts was finding collectors interested in a new artist he’s working with, Suchitra Mattai, born in Guyana and based in L.A., who creates mixed-media paintings, tapestries, and soft sculpture installations drawing on her Indo-Caribbean heritage. 

Bassingthwaighte, too, says collectors were drawn to the evocative bronzes created by Johannesburg-based artist Mary Sibande on view at SMAC Gallery, which was located in the fair’s Solo section. Sibande’s sculptures and wall hangings feature an avatar of herself called “Sophie” who evolves into different characters, rendered in a changing rainbow of colors, that show the avatar’s increasing strength. The series begins with Sophie as a Black domesticated worker in a saturated royal blue Victorian gown with a white apron and head scarf knitting an equally vivid blue sweater with a Superman logo. 

The work evokes domesticated workers in apartheid South Africa who often took care of everything in a household, and were often the “unseen heroes, keeping everything together,” Bassingthwaighte says.  

At Independent, which, in contrast to the spacious layout of the Javits Center, was tucked in the carpeted halls of the newly restored 1909 Battery Maritime Building on the southern tip of Manhattan, also saw a steady stream of collectors throughout its opening day, according to dealers. 

Luxembourg + Co., a gallery from both London and New York with a location in the fair’s center, saw a lot of interest in a solo exhibition of Baber’s ethereal abstract watercolors and oil paintings, according to the gallery’s Yuval Etgar. Baber was among several female artists of the 20th century whose works are being rediscovered and collected. 

Alexandre Gallery was showing works of two female artists, Loren MacIver, a mostly self-taught American painter whose life spanned the 20th century, and Edith Schloss, a German-born American artist who was part of the post-World War II Chelsea-New York art scene. Both artists spent time in Europe in the mid-20th century, the gallery said. 

MacIver was married to poet Lloyd Frankenberg and her art was influenced by their social circle of modernist poets, including Elizabeth Bishop, e.e. cummings, and Dylan Thomas, says Emma Crumbley, a researcher at the gallery.

“Her work is very focused on moments and objects of everyday life in a way that engages more so with the work of the poets she was surrounded by rather than the artists she was with,” Crumbley says. 

Prices for the paintings, oils on linen, range from US$18,000 to US$95,000, with at least one of them sold on Thursday.

“Part of the reception we’ve been getting is that people said it’s calming to see these paintings, they’re joyful,” she says.