Organizers of the inaugural “Riverdale Art Fest” are asking residents to mark Sunday, Sept. 24, in their calendars as they prepare to launch their first art festival, which they describe as a thrilling component of the Riverdale Y Sunday Market, where delicious food offerings are already a weekly staple.

Designed to introduce talented Riverdale artists to their community and vice versa, organizers said the Riverdale Art Fest will fill the entire center aisle of the market, held in the Riverdale Temple parking lot at 4545 Independence Avenue (near 246th Street) in the Riverdale section of The Bronx, and will feature what the organizers describe as Riverdale artists’ extraordinary work in painting, photography, drawing, watercolor, spin art, acrylics, three-dimensional art, and more.

“Riverdale is a creative community, and we want to emphasize that creativity and give artists a chance to interact with their audience,” said Eric Kollin, co-director of the Riverdale Art Fest. “We see the Riverdale Art Fest as a way to call attention to the great creativity in Riverdale and The Bronx art scene as a whole. Also, obviously, it will promote incredibly talented local artists.”

According to the organizers, the Riverdale Art Fest will also present interactive demonstrations in creativity that will, in essence, bring the artists’ studios to the public, not only giving the Riverdale community a chance to enjoy what was described as the extraordinary creative talent that lies within its borders, but to watch the artistic process in real time. They said there will also be a children’s section to engage young people in creative activities.

“As a center of our community, the Riverdale Y Sunday Market is proud and excited to host the first annual Riverdale Art Fest,” said Shira Silverman, the market’s director and Art Fest co-director. “It’s a way to enrich our offerings for the entire community and, in plain language to ‘up the vibe’ by lending texture to our traditional weekly market.”

The Riverdale Art Fest will be held from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., on Sunday, Sept. 24, extending the Sunday Market’s regular hours. Organizers said there will also be live music to accompany the artwork. Artists should note that there are still spaces available. To participate in the Riverdale Art Festival, contact the organizers at riverdaleartfest@gmail.com.

Convincing dealers, collectors and other art professionals that the industry needs yet another art fair is no small feat in the 2020s. Nevertheless, that is exactly what the organisers of Photofairs New York have been striving to do during the nearly yearlong run-up to its first edition. Although the early returns leave room for refinement, the fair’s unifying concept and strong management give the new event an opportunity to build a valuable bridge to underserved market constituents at the start of the fall art season.

Managed by Creo, a subsidiary of the international expo organiser Angus Montgomery Arts, the Photofairs brand made its New York debut at the Javits Center on Thursday. The first edition brought together a compact 56 exhibitors whose artists can only do what they do because of the camera’s rise to prominence. Some participating dealers, such as New York’s Howard Greenberg Gallery and Los Angeles’s Fahey/Klein Gallery, specialise in high-end classical photography. Others, such as the nomadic Postmasters Gallery and Miami’s Transfer gallery, are best known for championing progressive works in digital media.

“Photography tends to be digested in an art-fair context as one note, and we want it to be a symphony,” says Helen Toomer, the director of Photofairs New York and the former head of the Pulse, Collective Design and IFPDA Fine Art Print fairs (among other credits).

Toomer, in her telling, approaches this venture from a grounding in contemporary art, whereas other constituents approach it from a specific background in photography. But for all sides to engage, they first needed a centrepoint. Nine years after the first Photofairs was held in Shanghai, Toomer and Scott Gray, the chief executive of Creo, believe that their new fair can become that centrepoint in New York.

“The idea for Photofairs is to create space for the medium,” Gray says. “When we launched Shanghai, collecting photos in the Asia Pacific [region] was embryonic. Here, it’s far from that.”

Still, serendipity was needed to bring the event to the US’s art-market capital. According to Gray, Photofairs New York came into being after Alan Steel, the chief executive of the Javits Center, offered the company space in the complex during Armory Week. The one caveat was that leadership at The Armory Show would first need to agree that Photofairs was an ally, not a competitor. Fortunately, Nicole Berry, The Armory Show’s director, immediately lent her support to Toomer and the fair.

The cooperation between the two events has extended beyond intangibles. Photofairs and The Armory Show offer dual-admission tickets granting entry to both fairs on the Friday of their joint run, at a price of $72. (Single-day tickets to Photofairs cost $35, and passes for the full run of the show cost $90.) Toomer also says that each fair’s VIPs and exhibitors are welcome at the other gratis.

Sales versus exposure

According to Lauren Holowesko Perez, one of the founding directors of Tern gallery in the Bahamian capital of Nassau, the decision to show at the inaugural Photofairs New York was multifaceted. One part owed to efficiency, since the gallery had already been accepted to exhibit at The Armory Show; another came out of appreciation for Toomer, whom Holowesko Perez describes as a “big supporter” of Tern; and a third was about continuing the gallery’s mission to counter what Holowesko Perez calls “the stigma of where we come from. We want to show that there is conceptual contemporary art even in the Caribbean.”

Tern pursues this goal across two stands at Photofairs, each featuring works conceived to counter stereotypical ideas of tropicality. The first displays a not-for-sale installation by Tiffany Smith that offers visitors a moment of respite in what the gallery describes as a “wicker throne chair” surrounded by artificial foliage, soothing light and crystals. The main stand features still photos, digital assemblages and video pieces on Polaroid-size screens by Smith and fellow Caribbean artists Steven Schmid, Rodell Warner and Melissa Alcena. Prices for works in the latter stand range from $1,750 to $4,200.

Holowesko Perez says that the gallery had made “a couple” of sales by the end of preview day. Asked about the clientele at the fair to that point, she said: “I wouldn’t say we’re meeting new collectors in particular—more institutional people.”

Dealers elsewhere at Photofairs echoed Holowesko Perez’s experience regarding transactions on preview day. A director at one veteran gallery shrugged and described sales as “OK” by late Thursday afternoon. The top acquisitions confirmed by a fair spokesperson on Thursday evening were five pieces by Thandiwe Muriu, each priced between $14,000 and $19,000, at Paris’s 193 Gallery. Yet some exhibitors flagged that it is characteristic of photo-based fairs for relatively few deals to close prior to day two at the earliest.

“The medium is still hindered by the perception of editions, multiplicity and reproducibility,” says Douglas Marshall, the founder of Los Angeles-based Marshall Gallery. It can be difficult, he adds, for dealers in this niche to instil a sense of urgency in potential buyers, given that both sides know there are multiple editions of most works available. Contrast this with the automatic scarcity of paintings, drawings and sculptures at fairs, and dealers in lens-based images are largely fated to endure a more leisurely transactional timeline.

The irony in Marshall’s case is that several of his artists produce either unique works or unusually small edition runs. Of the three artists on his stand at the Javits Center, only the sepia-toned photos of Albarrán Cabrera are editioned. The others, by John Brinton Hogan and David Samuel Stern, are one-of-a-kind. Prices across the stand range from $1,500 to $8,000 for a backlit portrait of a Julius Caesar bust woven together from strips of translucent vellum.

“Even today, photography is still a bastard medium,” Marshall says. “My artists tend to be too artsy to appeal to the photographic world and too photographic to appeal to the contemporary-art world. Photofairs fit in that way.”

Marshall also cites the diligence of Photofairs’ leadership as a major incentive for him to take a chance on the brand’s first New York fair. He recounted his experience at an early edition of Photofairs Shanghai, where Gray seemingly never rested in trying to improve the conditions for exhibitors after the venue suffered the aftereffects of a typhoon.

Anton Svyatsky, founder of Management gallery on the Lower East Side, praises Toomer in similar terms. Although visitors to his stand were weighted more towards enthusiasts than collectors on preview day, he says Toomer had personally checked in on him three times by late Friday afternoon, a level of attention he has not received at any other fair.

Toomer’s actions stood out even more, since Management has only existed for two years and focuses on emerging artists who often defy easy classification. Among them is the subject of its Photofairs stand: Merik Goma, a recipient of Titus Kaphar’s NXTHVN studio fellowship whose images of grieving figures in constructed interiors walk the line between neo-noir and ambiguous fantasy. Available works are priced from $4,000 for a small photograph to $14,000 for a large lightbox diptych.

“We want to make sure people are cared for, meaning the A/C is working, there are places to sit as well as being stimulated by artwork—and acquiring it,” Toomer says.

Modesty and magnetism in new media

Despite Photofairs’ overtures towards bridging photography and new media, the actual results at the first edition are a work in progress. Of the 56 exhibitors and six partner projects at Photofairs New York, 11 stands (about 18% overall) showed moving-image or screen-based works on preview day.

Magda Sawon of Postmasters says of the ratio: “It’s less than I hoped, but it’s still way better than a typical fair with 99% paintings and one Julian Opie.”

For Photofairs, Postmasters curated an ambitious selection of works that charts the medium’s evolution from still photography and video to generative film and pure software. Prices peak at $150,000 for Horror Chase (2002), an infinitely looping, algorithmically edited video installation by Jennifer and Kevin McCoy. But the stand also hosted the most accessibly priced piece in the fair: mononym artist Damjanski’s Bye Bye Camera app, which removes the humans from anything it is used to photograph for just $2.99.

“The fair planned to be an extension of photography into the next stage of image-making. It’s the definition of what we do: present new forms of expression, often through new technology,” says Sawon.

New forms of expression seemed to be the main draw on preview day. The Postmasters stand was well attended throughout the afternoon, and Sawon reported “very serious enquiries” on multiple pieces. But the unquestioned phenomenon of the fair early on was the work of Huntrezz Janos, who playfully manifested her wishes for a path to a more compassionate and egalitarian understanding of identity.

Examples of Janos’s interactive Infilteriterations series are on view at Transfer’s stand at the venue’s rear. Visitors who face the digital cameras mounted atop a trio of human-size LED screens see their actual faces adorned by colourful, multilayered digital filters equally indebted to Saturday-morning cartoons and the masks of ancient warriors or sci-fi fighters. The experience was a hit, as delighted visitors continuously mobbed Transfer’s stand until the end of preview day.

Transfer began the fair offering nine different Infilteriterations priced at $12,000 each, a price that includes the engineering costs of moving the works from Instagram (where they can be freely used by the public via QR codes on one of the stand’s outer walls) to an independent website outside of Meta’s software architecture (where they will remain just as accessible).

The gallery plans to swap out the three works on view at the fair every day, according to Transfer founder Kelani Nichole. Two of the works had already been acquired by the Thoma Foundation, a US-based nonprofit with a robust collection of digitally informed works.

“Opening day has been wonderful. It’s been so gratifying to see people interact and play with the art and one another,” Nichole says. “People’s faces light up when they see Huntrezz Janos’s work. Our booth is filled with laughter and connection. That’s why so many public collections have expressed interest in this work today.”

It will be worth watching which lessons the organisers of Photofairs New York learn from their first experience at the Javits Center. The changes between year one of a fair and year two can be sizable, and both this event and this medium-specific niche of the art trade feel even more open-ended than most.

“This is our inaugural edition,” says Toomer. “We’re excited to grow with the market. It feels like we’re establishing something that’s needed.”

• Photofairs New York runs through 10 September at the Javits Center, 429 11th Ave, New York

Ridgefield Farmers Market is BACK at Jesse Lee Commons this Saturday, September 9 from 10am to 2pm! The Market has been wildly successful with hundreds of locals enjoying farm-fresh goodies as well as a whole lot of camaraderie!

Only 4 markets remain, so get out there and enjoy the best of local farm fresh!

A big “thank you” to Farmers Market founder Corrin Arasa and founding sponsors Fairfield County Bank and Karla Murtaugh Homes.

Here, Corrin provides her Market pics and a sneak peek of this week’s happenings.

This week marks the beginning of fall sports for so many families here in Ridgefield, I think we’ll see lots of hungry families coming before and after practice.

Backyard Pizza,  Badass Bagels and Quartertone

I’d recommend grabbing a picnic blanket from the blanket basket (see image #2)  and a Breakfast Pizza from Backyard Pizza. They use local farm fresh eggs and it’s perfect for hungry kiddos.  Or if you want to go the bagel route instead, be sure to pre-order to make sure you get exactly what you want, cream cheese and all. Quartertone will be serving hot and iced coffee for your pre or post-game caffeine fix. 

Link to pre-order bagels: https://www.badassbagels.com/shopbagels

CT Grown Apples from Sunset Farms

It’s the beginning of Apple Season and Sunset Farms will be bringing CT Grown Apples this week.   

Wild Iris Flower Vintage Truck is Blooming

It’s also Dahlia season which means the blooms will be outrageous, to celebrate, Wild Iris Flower Truck will have her adorable vintage VW on site- it’s a great spot to snap a pic too.  

Bring Home the Bacon

Henny Penny Farm has fresh bacon this week which I’ll be hitting up right away before the run out.  

Cross Culture Kombucha – Final Market

Cross Culture Kombucha is back again for their second and final time so be sure to grab some right off the tap-  I have my fingers crossed that they will be bringing the Hopped Peach- the flavor that turned me onto Kombucha in the first place. 

Art

Ridgefield-born artist,  Eliza Kingsbury will be popping up this week back in her hometown with some really unique offerings,  and Sha Sha has a refill of her body butter. 

Yoga

This week marks the beginning of a Free Mindful Movement series led by Lauren Chiarello. It’s a 30-minute Pilates Fusion class appropriate for all levels and ages.  She’ll be on the lawn in front of Jesse Lee. Check in at the membership table to sign up. 

For the Kids

And lastly-  the kids will be planting Radish this week!  They can come decorate the container and plant radishes that will be ready to eat in just a few weeks. 

Remember, the market is Rain or Shine.  Come hang out with us, we’ll be here either way and thrilled to see you. 

See you at the Market!  

Corrin 

The Farmers Market takes place at Jesse Lee Commons, 207 Main Street, Ridgefield, CT

Every other Saturday 10:00-2:00

Aug 26, Sep 9, Sep 23, Oct 7, Oct 22

Learn more www.ridgefieldfarmersmarket.org and follow along on Instagram @ridgefieldfarmersmarket

Yen Jui-Lui instills a growing group of characters with playful wiles and whimsy in an ongoing series of wooden toys (previously). Just a few of the artist’s recent creations portray pudgy bears that double as receptacles for spare change or fruit, a downcast rabbit enduring an inner tube, and birds that sprout dried flowers from the tops of their heads. Using a variety of wood types local to his home in Taiwan, he repurposes segments of cypress, cinnamon, and beech, among others.

Yen is currently working on a series inspired by the zoo, which has been in progress for more than two years. “This series is not imitating real animals; it’s more reshaping the imagination of the animals in cute and interesting shapes,” he says. You can find more of the artist’s work on Instagram.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article It’s a Zoo in Here! A Diverse Cast of Whimsical Animals by Yen Jui-Lin Emerge From Wood appeared first on Colossal.