NADA New York 2026 Best Booths

The 12th edition of NADA New York opened Wednesday in Chelsea with a fair that felt both crowded and carefully paced. Held at the Starrett-Lehigh building on West 26th Street and 11th Avenue, the event brought together 110 exhibitors, just one fewer than last year, including 51 first-time participants. The overlap with Frieze nearby and 1-54 on the building's first floor made the block feel unusually dense with art-world traffic, but NADA's third-floor layout, washed in daylight from windows at either end, gave the fair a more open register.

That openness extended to the work on view. This year's edition leaned noticeably toward ceramics and fiber, a shift away from the figurative painting that has dominated many recent fairs. The material turn gave several booths a tactile, intimate quality, and in more than one case, the strongest presentations came from galleries showing at NADA for the first time.

One of the most memorable debuts came from Forgotten Lands, the Saint Croix gallery presenting Andrae Green and Cyle Warner. Green, who was born in Jamaica and is now based in Massachusetts, showed paintings that braid Surrealism, Cubism, and figuration into scenes of bodies in transition, often dissolving into stylized backgrounds. Warner's architectural works transformed the breeze block, a familiar element of Caribbean building culture, into sculptures made from what he calls“heirloom fabrics,” drawn from the personal collections of his mother and grandmother. Layered with paint, paper, netting, and other materials, the works carried the weight of both design history and family inheritance.

At Voltz Clarke, New Orleans-based painter Ruth Owens offered one of the fair's most complete installations in the NADA Projects section. Her presentation centers on a childhood abduction by her German grandmother on the eve of her family's move from Germany to America. Watercolors, shadow boxes, audio, and video works build the story into something at once personal and formally controlled, with the artist's racial difference and mixed cultural inheritance threaded through the installation.

Elsewhere, Tappeto Volante Gallery showed Keiko Narahashi's clay sculptures and ceramic works, some inspired by Herman Melville's Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, while Baker-Hall presented Jen Clay's quilted“Wild Dogs,” shaped in part by stories from her grandmother in North Carolina. Taken together, the fair suggested that NADA's curatorial standards remain exacting, even as its exhibitors push toward quieter, more materially expressive forms of contemporary art.

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