FUTURE ART FAIR, NYC 2026 - A Critical Review

Future feels human. If it has the energy of a pop-up bohemian neighborhood that appeared overnight, that’s because that’s what it is. It’s not pretending to be a luxury boat show or a polished high end corporate showcase, nor does it stink of the pretention of other larger fairs that will go unnamed. At FUTURE dealer’s assistants lean casually against unfinished walls or hunch over tiny portable card tables locked into laptops nervously managing occasional financial transactions from the few actual collectors in attendance. Everyone else there seems to be people watchers or fashionistas with the rare peppering of aspirational art school heroes or unrepresented career creatives who are knocking off this fair from the endless list of other fairs and art world events going on in NYC this week. Artists circle their own booths pretending not to eavesdrop while the gallerists proper are engaging and, perhaps because I chose to visit on the last day, surprisingly warm and conversational without that sense that at any minute the genuine  is going to turn into pitch and the hard press to whore the wares and make an extra buck at the last minute. So that was refreshing. FUTURE carries a looseness that larger events have almost completely engineered out of themselves over the last decade. Conversations overlap awkwardly, booths fluctuate wildly in quality, and moments of genuine discovery still manage to happen between all the posturing and commodification of dreams.

There is some pandering at FUTURE, certainly that is built into the skeletal structure of all fairs. It’s what happens when commerce and creativity run their fingers through each other’s hair. Although there was plenty of work calibrated for selfies, acquisition committees, or collectors who want politically flavored decoration for apartments with radiant floor heating, there were are also flashes of genuine artistic invention and some very good booth design. Some booths stood to me out more than others. All the booths from Mexico City who shone bright with happy staff and consistently flashy presentations that as a collective they really set an example for many of the more local artist representatives from New York. ArtBug in booth U12, ENCARTE in booth F8 and PALI Galeria in booth R2, all from Mexico City continued the high standards that the Mexico City art scene has dependably brought to all the fairs of New York for the last many seasons. Certain other highlights included painter Kirsten Sims at Alison Milne gallery from Toronto who popped into the booth at the last minute to eagerly admit that she was completely unaware of what was where in her peopled cityscapes and parkscapes of Brooklyn and Manhattan. The slick, quick and colorful strokes featuring such popular destinations as Coney Island and Central Park were lovingly rendered with the shameless voyeuristic observations of a Native New Yorker which made her Australian naivete about the city all the sweeter.

By far and away my favorite work at Future this year was one of the smaller booths in the otherwise spacious and abundant event venue on 28th Street. In Specters, Booth E11, Diane Briones Williams presents us with manipulated Victorian-style needlepoint where colonial fantasy is interrupted by cleverly and poigninently rendered indigenous Philippine people, plants, and animals. The works are elegant at first glance, almost decorative, but their beauty is unsettled by deeper questions of memory, class, inheritance, and power. By completing and altering found European postwar tapestry kits, Briones Williams turns inherited taste into historical friction, revealing how Philippine, Indigenous, colonial, and diasporic identities continue to haunt one another. As a lover of fabric arts and embroidery in general, these works hit the mark for me in a timelessly marriage of concept to transcend craft and create powerful indictments of colonialism often forgotten and rarely taught about honestly in these United States of ours. Owner and Director Ariel Pittman of Official Welcome Gallery in LA, was a great champion of Briones Williams work and kept me drooling for the playful politics of it all for quite some time on my busy day out.

There is ambition everywhere at FUTURE, but there is also vulnerability, improvisation, and enough weirdness to keep the whole enterprise alive. All this begs the question as to how long this Fair can manage its delightful equilibrium in the coming years without falling apart at the seams or evolving into the same formulaic schlock that most of the old cool fairs have now succumbed to. I have my fingers crossed.