SHEER EXHIBITS ALL WOMEN OF COLOR ARTISTS AT THE SPRING 2024 AFFORDABLE ART FAIR IN NYC

SHEER exhibited all women of color artists at the Spring 2024 Affordable Art Fair in NYC from March 20-24 at the Metropolitan Pavilion in Chelsea!

For decades, the Affordable Art Fair has been dedicated to its mission of democratizing the art world and making art buying feel more accessible. SHEER was honored to join the fair this Spring as a black woman-owned media platform that has connected and championed the work and stories of multicultural women and non-binary creatives from all over the world for the past five years.

SHEER’s booth featured works by artists Audrey Lyall, Nada Esmaeel, and Kaarina Chu Mackenzie. Check out photos from the opening night below and we’ll see you at the next Affordable Art Fair in the Fall!

Photography by Niaja Smith

FEATURED ARTISTS

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FEATURED ARTISTS |

FEATURES

ARTISTS TO KNOW: PATRICIA ENCARNACIÓN

Photography by Avery Savage

There are certain projects that don’t just speak to identity but ask us to feel through its politics. Patricia Encarnación’s Tropical Limerence, part of The Shed’s Open Call: Portals exhibition (on view through August 24), is one of them. Across ceramic forms, layered video essays, and filmed testimonies, the installation asks us to confront how colonial desire continues to shape how Global Majority communities are seen, consumed, and misinterpreted. Through conversations held in the Dominican Republic, Martinique, Puerto Rico, Barcelona, and New York City, Encarnación creates an embodied archive that blurs the lines between artwork and altar, vulnerability and theory, fracture and sovereignty.

ARTISTS TO KNOW: LAURENA FINÉUS

Photography by Avery Savage

For our third feature in The Shed’s Open Call: Portals series, we step inside the world of Haitian-Canadian artist Laurena Finéus. As she prepared for the opening preview, we caught rare behind the scenes moments while she put the finishing touches on Together, We Could Have Made Mountains, her first textile installation that weaves Haitian migrant stories into a landscape of dreams, sacrifices, and shared histories. Alongside the installation, her paintings incorporate soil, mica, and natural pigments, transforming each piece into both a vessel for memory and a living archive of migration.\

In our conversation, Laurena reflects on migration as resistance in the face of racial violence, the coumbite tradition of coming together in mutual support, and how working with textile and ceramic beads became a ritual of care, preservation, and possibility. She speaks to the balance between rupture and refuge, grief and futurity, and the grounding practices that keep her rooted while navigating institutional spaces.

ARTISTS TO KNOW: MARWA ELTAHIR

Photography by Avery Savage

As part of our ongoing collaboration with The Shed to spotlight artists from the Open Call: Portals exhibition (June 27–August 24), SHEER spent time inside the immersive installation of visual artist, writer, and producer Marwa Eltahir: 99 Names: My Liberation Is Tied To Yours.

Her installation creates a sacred, sensory space for reflection. Modeled after majlis-style communal seating found along sub-Saharan caravan routes, the work invites audiences to rest on woven rugs beneath sheer white curtains, surrounded by sound, stillness, and prayer. A projected film plays in a loop, opening with the Azan and unfolding into spoken word narration and original composition.

gallery opening, events, artBianca Jean-PierreApril 22, 2024affordable art fair, nycComment