Seven Artists with Unconventional Art Journeys at Frieze New York

The 2024 edition of Frieze New York spotlights alternative journeys into art, as championed by galleries such as Ortuzar Projects, Andrew Edlin Gallery and Gordon Robichaux. This focus is echoed in Venice at the Biennale's Central Pavilion Exhibition, “Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere”, where artists from non-traditional art backgrounds and training take center stage. 

Feliciano Centurión turned to the craft of his childhood while in exile; Reverend Joyce McDonald discovered clay in detox; and Thornton Dial rescued scrap materials from his workplace. While the circumstances that sparked these seven practitioners' entry into artmaking are wildly different—as are the techniques and themes they pursue—they share a boundless desire and freedom to experiment, and a clear sense of how their practice informs and is informed by wider sociopolitical concerns. 

Pacita Abad | Tina Kim Gallery, stand A9

Pacita Abad set out her belief that “an artist has a special obligation to remind society of its social responsibility,” and she fulfilled it. Fleeing political persecution by the Marcos regime in the Philippines, Abad moved to the US in 1970. Largely self-taught, she pioneered a new approach to canvas, quilting it rather than stretching it over a wooden frame to create her trapuntos. Vibrant color became Abad’s language to give voice to marginalized individuals and communities, including Haitian refugees and detained Mexican migrant workers. At Frieze New York, Tina Kim Gallery presents The Far Side of Apo Island (1989) from Abad’s “Underwater Wilderness” series, inspired by the fantastical submarine landscape she discovered on her scuba diving excursions in the Philippines. 

The retrospective “Pacita Abad” is on view at MoMA PS1 until September 3.

Feliciano Centurión | Ortuzar Projects, stand B17

Paraguay-born Feliciano Centurión was raised by his grandmother and mother, who taught knitting, crochet and embroidery at a local school. In 1980 in Buenos Aires, following years of military dictatorship, Centurión found social and sexual liberation, becoming a key member of the radical Centro Cultural Ricardo Rojas. As he developed his artistic practice, he returned to the handicrafts of his childhood, integrating painting and kitsch aesthetics. Ortuzar Projects presents a selection of Centurión’s frazadas: packing blankets that the artist repurposed and inscribed with text, flowers and animals, diverting culturally masculine symbols (such as the tiger) and feminine techniques (including ñandutí, an indigenous spider-web lace-making method traditionally passed from mother to daughter) towards his own self-expression. This exhibition concentrates on works made between Centurión’s HIV/AIDS diagnosis in 1992, and his death from complications in 1996 at just 34. You can feel the defiance in his green stitched statement “Soy el flujo del tiempo que no se detiene” (“I am the flow of time that does not stop”).

Chris Martin | David Kordansky, stand B1

A visit to Al Held’s retrospective at the Whitney in 1975 gave Chris Martin the push he needed to abandon his undergraduate art degree at Yale and move to New York. There, he discovered the vibrant countercultural community of Brooklyn, and shifted his painting away from emulation towards experimentation. He turned to the materials he had to hand in his studio—glitter, newspaper cuttings, bread, cement—to make mural-scaled paintings. Martin’s 15-year career as an art therapist, working with HIV/AIDS patients, reinforced his emphasis on process, and his rigorous studio practice continues to this day. The same playful, alchemic energy of his early works characterizes his latest paintings, in which he inserts photographs and slides in warping fields of color and glitter, shown with David Kordansky at Frieze New York.

Mame-Diarra Niang | Stevenson, stand D3

Mame-Diarra Niang is a self-taught photographer whose practice grew from her desire to chart the “plasticity of territory,” both geographic—exploring her upbringing across Senegal, the Ivory Coast and France—and bodily. Niang reflects that her photographic series “Sama Guent Guii” (“This Dream That I Had”, 2021–22), presented by Stevenson, “feels like the abstract idea that I have of myself, the acceptance that forgetting is also a starting point and a fleeting, necessary memory.” The photographs emerged from a period of introspection in which Niang addressed her ancestry, recollections and the portrayal of Black bodies. Printed on metallic paper, Niang’s portraiture refracts and obfuscates its subject, using ethereality and abstraction as means to affirm, not negate, her identity: “I am made of memory and oblivion,” she writes.

Reverend Joyce McDonald | Gordon Robichaux, stand F7

“The first time I put my hands [in] clay, I felt overpowered,” says Reverend Joyce McDonald. “Every horrific thing that’s happened to me, everything that I have experienced, it’s come out of me, into the clay.” After her HIV diagnosis in 1985 and a long battle with addiction, McDonald discovered sculpture in detox. Her clay figures and heads are “testimonial,” enshrining her life stories along with shared experiences of loss and love. For her latest works, such as Beauty in the Midst (2024), McDonald embellishes her figures with objects of significance, such as jewelry belonging to her late mother. Art, for McDonald, is part of a wider vision of healing and transcendence: she uses sculpture, painting, poetry and song in her role as activist and advocate, working with HIV creative groups for young girls, women’s shelters and hospitals, and her church’s AIDS ministry. 

“Beauty in the Midst” is on view at Gordon Robichaux’s Union Square space until June 16. 

Read more: New York According to Jacob Robichaux

Thornton Dial and Beverly Buchanan | Andrew Edlin Gallery, stand D2

Andrew Edlin Gallery presents a dual exhibition of Beverly Buchanan and Thornton Dial: both artists of the American South, both making work in connection to the places and materials they knew best. Dial spent 30 years as a metalworker at the Pullman Standard plant in Alabama fabricating railroad cars. When the factory closed in 1981, Dial devoted himself to the assemblages he had been making on the side. He transformed discarded materials such as steel, copper, wire, wood, carpet, rope and rock into structures that spoke of the suffering and survival of workers in the Deep South.

Buchanan, unlike Dial, did receive formal training in the arts, but only once she had gained two graduate degrees in public health. Following a period of pursuing abstract expressionism in New York, she returned to the South in 1977, this time to Georgia, and began to make work rooted in the local landscape. Like Dial, Buchanan used unlikely vernacular materials to address notions of memory and decay. On display at Frieze New York are Buchanan's distinctive “shack” sculptures, oil pastels and photographs, to which she ascribed "legends," telling of their inhabitants, real and imagined, alongside her minimalist sculptures, for which she made her own “tabby” concrete of crushed oyster shells, a technique used by enslaved workers in the 18th century. 

Further Information

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Frieze New York is supported by global lead partner Deutsche Bank, continuing over two decades of a shared commitment to artistic excellence.

^{Main image: Feliciano Centurión, Untitled, 1994. Acrylic and embroidery on textile, 2.3 × 2 m. Courtesy of the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) and Ortuzar Projects © Feliciano Centurión. Photo by Arturo Sánchez}