NADA New York 2026 Best Booths

Hailing from Saint Croix, Forgotten Lands is making its NADA debut with a two-hander of artists that exemplify the gallery’s program, which often explores Caribbean identity and subjectivity, according to curator and sales manager Azi Jones. The paintings by Green, who was born in Jamaica and is now based in Massachusetts, blend Surrealism, Cubism, and figuration to depict people mid-transition, often leaping into the sea. Green’s figures resist easy categorization, often blurring beyond recognition or melting into the highly stylized backgrounds that recall a color negative.

These paintings are paired with architectural works that transform the breeze block, a typically concrete block used in Carribbean architecture, into sculptures made from “heirloom fabrics,” the artist’s description of materials that come from the personal collections of his mother and grandmother. Those blocks are core symbols of the visual vernacular across the Carribbean, used for their durability, resilience, and temperature regulating properties. Here, layered with paint, paper, netting, and other found materials, they become vessels of personal and collective history.

Appearing in the NADA Projects section is this striking presentation by New Orleans-based painter Ruth Owens. The installation centers on an incident from Owens’s childhood, when she was abducted by her German grandmother on the eve of her family’s emigration from Germany to America. The artist recounts the incident in delicate, dreamy watercolors that make apparent her racial difference (Owens was born to an African American father and a German mother). The watercolors, presented in shadow boxes and surrounded by layers of Nigerian batik and European floral fabrics that seem to mimic the batik, appear as intimate recollections of Owens’s unique upbringing. That sense is furthered by an audio installation in which a voice recounts the abduction, and two video works depicting Black families frolicking in the water and fishing, recalling the scratchy Super-8 home movies of the artist’s childhood. It’s rare to find a presentation as complete and engrossing as Owens’s at an art fair; it’s worth taking the time to let this one transport you.

Brooklyn’s Tappeto Volante Gallery is set to celebrate its fifth-year anniversary by inaugurating a new Tribeca space on Friday, but first, NADA New York. For the fair, the gallery has dedicated its entire booth to a site-specific installation of new work by Keiko Narahashi, whose clay sculptures and ceramic works traverse the line between whimsical, weird, and maybe even a little sinister. Gallery cofounder Jared Deery, a painter in his own right, told ARTnews that most of the works take their inspiration from Herman Melville’s 1852 novel Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, which many scholars have suggested was a “spritual autobiography” for the author. That finds its way into the sculptures through suggestions of psychological complexity and interiority, a reading furthered by the fact that the body of work was developed amid COVID isolation. That melancholy and ambivalence is apparent in the muted colors and shapes that seem to wilt or bend under their own weight.

Another inspired pairing comes via Miami’s Baker—Hall, where Jen Clay’s quilted “Wild Dogs” hang alongside Alissa Alfonso’s sculptures made from discarded basketballs. As Clay told ARTnews at the fair, she was raised by her grandmother in North Carolina—an unruly child always getting into mischief. To keep her in line, her grandmother would warn that feral dogs, common in the state, were coming to get her. That refrain became a running joke between them over the years, and when her grandmother died, Clay began conceptualizing the dogs as emblems of her grief. Working in fiber, she used her grandmother’s bedsheets to craft the animals, whose threatening poses are defanged by bright patterns and softened edges. Alfonso’s sculptures, meanwhile, derive from found basketballs, beach balls, and other debris collected on walks in Miami; she fashions flowers, mushrooms, and other botanicals from hand-dyed fabrics that burst up from the discarded objects. Both artists find new energy, beauty, and strangeness in what others have left behind.

At Gramercy’s Con Altura, founder Steve Rivera has brought together New Orleans-based self-taught painter Auudi Dorsey with Philadelphia-based sculptor George Rodriguez. Dorsey’s paintings are loose, lively, and dynamic: you can practically hear the music that the figures dance to, as seen above in Big Steppa and Big Steppa 2. On the opposite wall are several black-and-white watercolor works depicting various jazz figures, like Miles Davis, emerging from the horn of an old record player, their vibrant personas unable to be contained by the music. Alongside these works are Rodriguez’s highly ornamented guardian figures and tomb sculptures, which draw from his Mexican-American upbringing and his experience of global travel to form novel connections between seemingly disparate ceramic traditions. The artists’ works really sing in juxtaposition with each other, drawing out the joy evident in both practices.

At Los Angeles’s Central Server Works, also appearing at NADA New York for the first time, are a collection of works by LA-based Moldovan artist Elena Roznovan. The works tackle motherhood as an embodied experience with intimate watercolors made post-partum, surrounded by concrete that has been embedded with various personal totems of motherhood, like breast milk, a memory card of newborn photos, an umbilical corn stump, fingernail clippings, and post-natal medications. The paintings are subtle and seemingly serene, depicting Roznovan and her child reflected in a mirror, or Roznovan with a newborn resting on her chest, contrasted by the messy materials lurking around the painting. Roznovan reminds us that motherhood is a messy, physical form of labor that does not easily fit into society’s structures of belonging.