I gasped when I saw them: a pair of hermit crabs, poking out of resin-printed sculptures resembling a daisy and a gaping toad. I had been walking around the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) fair for over an hour after giving up on its no-frills map and resigning myself to plunging into the sea of gallerists, collectors, artists, and fair staff pushing snack carts.
This year’s edition, which runs through Sunday, May 11, features 120 galleries splayed across the third floor of the Starrett-Lehigh building, a loft-style edifice perched on West 26th Street in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. It’s a new venue for NADA, which has more exhibitors than last year, and organizers told me that the location is linked to this expansion. Extra space aside, it’s a welcome change from the 2024 edition’s exhausting four-floor layout.
After stumbling across the arthropods, I found that Tatjana Pieters gallery’s booth had an entire flock of taxidermied crustaceans emerging from assorted objects including a snake coil, a severed dog head, and a spiked sunburst staged around a folklorish house display. They were created by Belgian artist Charles Degeyter, who told me that the series draws from his childhood in Southern France. NADA has a reputation for showcasing rising artists and up-and-coming trends, but it still surprised me to find another whimsical animal sculpture display at Massey Klein Gallery’s booth, where tiers of upright fish, a supersized worm, a lobster, and birds created by Canadian visual artist Jude Griebel warned passersby of impending doom due to human activity.
There were other running threads throughout the fair. Two San Juan-based galleries, Embajada and Hidrante, offered homages to Puerto Rican life and culture: the former spotlighted self-taught artist Joshua Nazario in a slew of blocky sculptures and paintings depicting athletes, sports cars, and dominoes; the latter consisted of a group exhibition addressing island sovereignty, ancestral heritage, and ecotourism.
Many booths were teeming with textured sculptures, such as Ernesto Solana’s aluminum and bronze depictions of birds and flowers at Guadalajara90210, SarahNoa Mark’s intricately carved clay works at Goldfinch, and Anna Yamanishi’s fabric-like wood carvings at Cohju gallery. At the booth of Pasto gallery in Buenos Aires, faces carved onto concrete pigeons teetering on coin stilts caught the attention of a couple, who told me that they were a bit “bored” by all the painting at the fair. The sculptures by Argentinian artist Santiago Licata were listed for $6,000, the gallerist told me — a recurring price point across NADA this year. The works had not yet sold, but another work by Licata had been snatched up for $3,000.
There were also plenty of people who were drawn to paintings, such as Cob gallery’s presentation of YaYa Yajie Liang’s fluid oil canvases and Salomón Huerta’s depiction of the Los Angeles fires, both of which attracted admiring visitors. Liliana Zavaleta, an artist and returning collector to NADA, showed me a work that she had put on hold: a blue and gray abstract oil painting by Jean-François Lauda at the booth of the Montreal gallery Eli Kerr. I asked her what drew her to it, and she told me it was just a “feeling.”
“ I don’t think that you analyze it, like, ‘Oh, can I sell it in 10 years?’” Zavaleta continued. “No, no, no. It’s not like that. I want to keep it forever.”
