SHEER CELEBRATES THE OPENING NIGHT OF THE SPRING 2025 AFFORDABLE ART FAIR FEATURING WORKS BY NIA WINSLOW, ALANIS FORDE, AND ASARI AIBANGBEE

SHEER celebrated the opening night of the Spring 2025 Affordable Art Fair NYC at the Metropolitan Pavilion with a vibrant booth featuring mixed media works by Nia Winslow, Alanis Forde, and Asari Aibangbee and curated by Bianca Jean-Pierre. Thank you to everyone who joined us for an unforgettable night and to support these emerging artists. We look forward to returning in the Fall!

Below are some special moments from the opening night captured by none other than Serge Fils-Aime.

Featured

ARTISTS TO KNOW: CHELSEA ODUFU

Photography by Avery Savage

To close out The Shed’s Open Call: Portals series, we’re spotlighting Chelsea Odufu, a multidisciplinary artist whose work spans film, photography, sculpture, performance, and design. Her installation Gold with a Mind of Its Own explores the lasting imprint of the gold trade in Côte d’Ivoire through movement and visual language, using the body as a tool for reflection and resistance.

Now living between Abidjan and New York, Chelsea brings a global perspective to everything she creates, shaped by movement across mediums, across continents, and across dimensions of Black identity.

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.