Independent 20th Century Doubles in Size at New Breuer Home

Independent 20th Century opens to the public today in Marcel Breuer's 1960s brutalist building on Madison Avenue and East 75th Street — the former home of the Whitney Museum and now the headquarters of Sotheby's. The fair has relocated from its Lower Manhattan location, following the move of its sister fair, the Independent, from Spring Studios in Tribeca to the larger Pier 36 on the Lower East Side earlier this year.

The new venue has allowed the fair to grow from 31 participating exhibitors in 2025 to 57 this year. The layout now more closely approximates a museum experience, with discrete "galleries" replacing the usual corridors lined with booths. Despite nearly doubling in size, the fair remains viewer friendly — a contrast, the report notes, with the concurrently running Armory Show and its exhausting 230-plus exhibitors.

Independent 20th Century differs from other New York fairs dealing in historical work, such as TEFAF and ADAA, in one specific respect: it focuses exclusively on art made in the 100 years between 1900 and 2000, with particular attention paid to expanding the canon. That focus reflects a broader art-world impulse toward inclusivity, visible in the increased presence of female artists, outsider artists, queer artists, and artists of the global South at auctions, biennials, and museum exhibitions.

The fair also troubles the boundary between historical and contemporary. Booths devoted to Jenny Holzer at Sprüth Magers and to relational aesthetics at Esther Schipper sit alongside presentations of works by Picasso at John Szoke and Raphael Soyer at Forum Gallery.

Standout presentations this year include "Black Soho," curated by the galleries Ryan Lee and Salon 94. The presentation features works made in New York between 1961 and 1984 by African American artists including Emma Amos, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Camille Billops, Frederick J. Brown, Vivian Browne, Ed Clark, David Hammons, and Norman Lewis.

Berry Campbell is showing a selection of pieces by the women artists of the famed Stable Gallery, which operated from 1953 to 1970, among them Elaine de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, Charlotte Park, and Janice Biala. Additional works by Mitchell — including one of the most expensive works in the fair — are on view at Maria Bueno, where her paintings are paired with those of Kimber Smith.

The solo booths carry their own weight. Nahmad Contemporary is showing punctured, Murano glass-encrusted, and sand-sprinkled works by Lucio Fontana that predate his better-known slashed canvases. Alison Jacques presents surrealistic works by the self-taught artist Bona de Mandiargues (1926–2000). Mitchell-Innes & Nash has assembled a grouping of the darkly humorous, and always political, work of the conceptual collective General Idea.

The report also points to eight other not-to-be-missed presentations across the fair.

The Independent 20th Century art fair runs from September 24–27 at 945 Madison Avenue, New York. Its expansion inside one of the city's most storied museum buildings signals how the market for century-spanning, canon-revising work is claiming more space on the fall calendar.