Future Fair (7-10 May) has returned for its fifth anniversary to the Chelsea Industrial building on West 28th Street in Manhattan, sporting 67 local, national and international exhibitors with a flare for the bright and bold. Fairs of all sizes have been touched by President Donald Trump’s tariffs this year, and Future Fair is no exception—at the Bologna-based Magazzeno Art Gaze's stand, a small hand-written sign reads: “Our shipment (art) is stuck at JFK customs. All the works you see are the ones we had in our luggage. We are doing our best, support us.” (The sign is surrounded by acrylic paintings of women blooming into floral arrangements by the Italian artist Margherita Paoletti).
The Montreal-based Wishbone Gallery almost experienced a similar fate but narrowly avoided disaster through magical means. “Magdalena Rantica's works were held up in customs since April,” the gallery's co-director Michael Lewin tells The Art Newspaper. “We didn’t lose hope, since we saw that they kept getting scanned every once in a while, but we even got a form to fill out declaring that the work was lost. Then the artist went and saw a psychic, who told her to print out pictures of the three paintings and burn them to 'let go'—I guess it worked, or some sort of divine intervention happened, because they arrived just in time!” Now, three vertical canvases featuring gibbon- and bird-flecked junglescapes proudly don the stand’s walls.
Saki Sonoda, "Maybe you just want to fucking scream?" (Scream Night), 2025 Saki Sonoda
Trade war aside, Future Fair continues its tradition of elevating portraiture in all imaginable iterations. At the Gowanus-based newcomer The Ritual Division’s stand, the Japanese artist Saki Sonoda paints the backstage machinations of the legendary Bushwick club House of Yes in screaming peals of neon pink. “She was drawing from life in the green room of this venue, then scaling the drawings up to make paintings,” the gallery's co-founder Taylor C. Black explains.
Meanwhile, the Lower East Side’s Plato Gallery is featuring Dutch Golden Age-inspired portraits for a contemporary audience by the Québecois artist Émile Brunet. And the Rwandan painter Izere Antoine has contributed a variety of stately impastoed depictions of Black women that upend European portraiture traditions at Mitochondria Gallery, a Houston-based outlet highlighting emerging artists from the African diaspora.
Matthew Rosenquist, Brawny Man TV, 2023 Future Fair
Smoke the Moon, a Santa Fe gallery, is showing a wooden relief of a Brawny man TV advert by the Los Angeles-based artist Matthew Rosenquist, whose pieces riff on Americana through rough-hewn block carving. Criss Collaborations has presented two tapestries by the Baltimore artist Katie Commodore, whose racy photos of friends find their way through “some sort of digital wizardry” into textile, says Erica Criss, the owner and curator at the gallery.
Catie Cook, Being Good Girls, 2024 Harsh Collective
The Missouri-based artist Catie Cook's fabulously furry sitters operate as animal stand-ins for her lived experience of womanhood in the American South. Cook’s portraits of high-femme Dalmatians, on view at Harsh Collective's stand, explore the violent undercurrent of the elegant, aesthetic dog breed, a metaphor for Bible-belt feminine social rituals.
