“I was friends with a porn star when I moved back to Los Angeles, and we spent a very depressing Christmas together,” Massoud Hayoun, an investigative reporter turned painter, told me steps from the entrance of The Halo in New York City’s financial district.
We’re standing in front of Hayoun’s painting “Christmas Under Capitalism” (2023), featuring a sullen blue man wearing pink eyeliner and sitting in front of three glowing stripper poles. It’s one of the first works that visitors to this year’s 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair will see if they enter through the venue’s Pine Street doors. Held annually in London, Marrakech, and New York City, this year’s Manhattan edition is located in a circular 30,000-square-foot ground-level event space downtown after previous stints in Chelsea and Harlem.
Many of the VIPs who were invited to preview the show ahead of its May 8–11 run were intimidatingly fashionable. I found myself among wide-brimmed hats, pastel blue suits, patterned pants, and lace skirts. These were by far the most artful outfits I’ve seen while covering New York City art fairs over the past year.
“Porn is one of those things I find whimsical, lovely, and fun, but would it exist if we didn’t live in an extremist capitalist society?” Hayoun asked me rhetorically as we perused his paintings, which are heavily influenced by his Tunisian and Egyptian heritage, on sale at Larkin Durey’s booth for $5,000 to $6,000.
Hayoun described 1-54 as a place where exhibiting artists from the African continent could engage in “collective conversations about solidarity and appreciate each other’s creativity.” The fair’s 30 galleries — including exhibitors based in Paris, Brazil, Japan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the Bahamas — showcased more than 70 artists from across the African diaspora. Each booth, a publicist for the fair told Hyperallergic, cost anywhere from $10,000 to $25,000.
In addition to the booths, the collective Atlantic Arthouse curated an exhibition of eight Caribbean mid-Atlantic artists entitled Crossfigurations for the fair. One large-scale green-tiled painting caught my eye. The artist, wearing gold-rimmed glasses, was swarmed by VIP visitors asking questions about his process. Gallerists frantically typed on their computers in between a sparse but steady crowd of visitors.
Mark Delmont, who flew in from Miami for the fair, stood in front of his “Talking to Myself Again” (2024), on sale for $15,000. A visitor asked him: “Were you an only child?” It was a fitting question for an artist who just explained how the three men in his painting were one. “No, but it felt like it,” he replied animatedly.
When I finally got a moment to speak to Delmont privately, he noted his Jamaican and Haitian heritage.
“Growing up, I was either too Black for Caribbeans or too Caribbean for Black people,” he said. That positionality, he added, limited who he felt he could reliably relate to. “I ended up consulting myself very often.”
Delmont used to work in construction, an experience that informed his choice to tile part of his painting, something he used to hate doing on the job. Like most people, he noted, the tiles are “immigrants” because they are imported.
“I like talking about people who build things and maintain society: the construction worker who is always late,” Delmont explained. “When we highlight regular people, we give them a chance to feel good about life.”
Before much else could be said, Delmont was swept up into another conversation with an eager fairgoer.
After a few attempts to track down Debra Cartwright, who left briefly to put her mother on a train to Maryland, I met the artist in front of her oil painting “Uncharted Waters” (2025), which is on sale for $19,000. In the work, she conjures brown limbs that appear to be submerged in a sea of black, gray, and white. It’s influenced by her mother, a gynecologist, Cartwright said, and the dark history of gynecological experimentation on Black women.
“The feeling never really dies of being part of the lineage of America, the sacrificial original sin,” Cartwright stated.
Working at the booth for Tern Gallery, the first Bahamas-based exhibitor to attend the fair, was Azi Jones, an undergraduate student at Princeton who hails from Jamaica. “Being based outside of the States, it’s not like you’re in Tribeca where you can just pop [in]. So this is an opportunity to get some eyes on these amazing artists that are trying to build their practices,” she told me.
The average artwork I inquired about at 1-54 was around $10,000–$20,000, and I had no intention of purchasing anything. Still, exhibitors and artists alike delved candidly into topics of diaspora and resistance, engaging with press and non-press visitors alike — a testament to the fair’s ethos of openness.
