Artists Maria Gaspar, Mary Baxter and Gary Taylor present new works at Frieze New York 2024 as part of Frieze Reframe – an initiative spearheaded by Frieze and Endeavor Impact. All artists are previous winners of the Frieze Impact Prize, awarded to an artist from a non-traditional background, offering support at a critical juncture in their emerging career.
Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter
Consecration to Moses (dum diversas), 2024
Highlighting a long history of fugitivity, figuration and refusal within Black life and visual culture, Baxter reimagines a previously contested 19th-century self-portrait of Moses Williams.
In 1777, Williams was born to an enslaved couple who were traded to Charles Wilson Peale, founder of The Peale Museum in Philadelphia, as payment for a pair of portraits commissioned in Maryland. The Gradual Abolition Act of 1780 mandated that 11-year-old Williams remain in bondage until his 28th birthday. Unlike Peale’s biological children, Williams was not taught painting because it was considered a “high art” but was trained in taxidermy, animal husbandry, object display, and eventually the use of a silhouette-making machine, the physiognotrace. Williams quickly became a master cutter of profiles and was eventually granted his freedom a year early, aged 27, for his formidable talents as a silhouette artist.
In this work, Baxter complicates her multipart ongoing photo series, “Consecration to Mary” with an earlier instance of adultification bias and its impact on Black creativity, which would later become the reason for Williams's inability to sustain himself as an artist following the invention of the camera. Consecration to Moses (dum diversas) also reflects on how Black artists today continue to embrace the silhouette, despite the dominance of photography—often obscuring themselves or their subjects through visual opacity, as a means to thwart hypervisibility, objectification or the white gaze.
Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter is a Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist, pedagogue and cultural worker who creates socially conscious music, film, and visual art through an autobiographical lens. Although it has been 17 years since her release from a Pennsylvania prison, Baxter’s time on the inside continues to shape her creative practice. Baxter’s artistic interventions embody resilience and care, working at the intersection of transformative justice. Since receiving an inaugural Right of Return fellowship in 2017, Baxter has celebrated many successes, including a 2024 governor’s pardon, numerous fellowships, grants and public art commissions. Baxter’s work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally at venues including MoMA PS1, the African American Museum of Philadelphia, Frieze Los Angeles, Eastern State Penitentiary, and a 2023 solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. Baxter is also the recipient of a 2018 and 2019 Mural Arts Philadelphia Reimagining Reentry Fellow, 2019 Leeway Foundation Transformation awardee, 2021 Ed Trust Justice fellow, 2022 S.O.U.R.C.E Studio Corrina Mehiel Fellow, 2022 Art for Justice grantee partner, 2022 Pratt Forward fellow, 2022 Artist2Artist Art Matters foundation grantee and grantor and a 2023 Soros Justice fellow.
Maria Gaspar
Unblinking Eyes, Awaiting, 2024
Unlinking Eyes, Awaiting (2024) is comprised of multiple panels of high-resolution photographs of the north-end wall of the Cook County Department of Corrections in Chicago, the largest single-site jail in the US and a dominating fixture of the artist’s childhood neighborhood. The photographs are printed at 1:1 scale, and are positioned relative to one another so as to accurately document the magnitude of the jail wall that they picture. An earlier version of this project, Unblinking Eyes, Watching (2018) presented the same jail wall as an unbroken, 26'-high by 40'-wide photo vinyl. The current version, which has appeared in different configurations at The Ford Foundation and the Institute of Arts and Sciences at UC Santa Cruz, envisions the fragmentation and gradual disappearance of this architecture of incarceration.
Maria Gaspar is a Chicago-born, first-generation, interdisciplinary artist negotiating the politics of location through installation, sculpture, sound, and performance. Gaspar’s body of work addresses issues of spatial justice in order to amplify, mobilize, or divert structures of power through individual and collective gestures. For the past decade, Gaspar has been recognized nationally for her multi-year projects that attempt to dismantle borders, transcend penal matter, and turn places of precarity into places of possibility. Formative works like “Radioactive: Stories from Beyond the Wall” and the “96 Acres Project” include site interventions at the largest single-site jail in the country, the Cook County Department of Corrections, in her childhood neighborhood.
Gaspar has received the Guggenheim Award for Creative Arts, the Latinx Artist Fellowship, the United States Artists Fellowship, the Frieze Impact Prize, the Sor Juana Women of Achievement Award in Art and Activism from the National Museum of Mexican Art, and the Chamberlain Award for Social Practice from the Headlands Center for the Arts. Gaspar’s projects have been supported by the Art for Justice Fund, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Robert Rauschenberg Artist as Activist Fellowship, the Creative Capital Award, the Joan Mitchell Emerging Artist Grant, and the Art Matters Foundation. Gaspar has lectured and exhibited extensively at venues including MoMA PS1 and El Museo Del Barrio in New York, NY; the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX; the Institute of the Arts and Sciences, Santa Cruz, CA; the African American Museum, Philadelphia, PA; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
Gary Tyler
A Moment of Reflection, 2023
A Moment of Reflection, 2023 is a self-portrait based off of a photograph taken of Gary Tyler in 1989 just after his father’s death. The image was shot by Tyler’s brother during a visit he paid Tyler in remembrance of their father. Accompanying Tyler’s brother on his visit was Tyler’s nephew and two nieces; he remembers this moment fondly, as a moment of happiness and light during dark days.
This quilt is one of the first in which Tyler has used burlap, a material he says pays homage to his Black American heritage, and the legacy of quilting in both his familial lineage and culture more broadly.
Gary Tyler is a fiber artist, currently living and working in Los Angeles, California. In 1974, at the age of 16, Gary Tyler was wrongly convicted of murder and placed on death row at Angola State Penitentiary in Louisiana. He endured nearly 42 years there, during which the US Supreme Court ruled his sentencing unconstitutional, and he was finally released in 2016. While incarcerated, Tyler participated in the prison hospice program, where he mastered the art of quilting, and chaired the prison drama club for almost three decades, using the transformative power of the arts to confront the challenges of incarceration. Now based in Los Angeles, Tyler dedicates his life to the visual and dramatic arts, using them as tools to foster community and heal the scars of mass incarceration. Tyler is the 2024 Frieze Impact Prize winner, a 2024 Center for Art & Advocacy Fellow, and a 2019 and 2020 Art Matters Awardee. His work is in the collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C and the City of Santa Monica Art Fund
About Frieze Reframe and The Frieze Impact Prize
Frieze Reframe, spearheaded by Frieze and Endeavor Impact, is a major initiative that demonstrates the commitment both organizations share to address gaps faced by historically marginalized individuals.
The Frieze Impact Prize, inaugurated in 2019, is a prize awarded to an artist from a non-traditional background, offering support at a critical juncture in their emerging career. Each winner is also given an opportunity to exhibit at Frieze Los Angeles. At Frieze Los Angeles 2024, Gary Tyler was selected as the recipient of the Impact Prize. Wrongfully imprisoned for forty-two years, Tyler’s work draws on both his personal narrative and those of individuals encountered during his incarceration.
The four previous winners, Maria Gaspar, Mary Baxter, Dread Scott, and Narsiso Martinez, have each gone on to influence the art world. Between them, they have been awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship, The Rome Prize, the Graham Foundation Grant, to be collected by prestigious museums like the Hammer in Los Angeles, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney, and held exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Cheech Marin Center of Chicano Art and Culture, and the Museo del Barrio in New York.
Frieze Reframe leverages support to influence and transform who has exhibitions, who is included in museum collections, and who has an international platform in the art world.