Material Shifts at The Affordable Art Fair 2026
Kayla Dantz, Grandma’s Backyard, Summer. Courtesy of the artist.
The Affordable Art Fair (AAF) has never been about asserting a singular notion of taste; its logic is infrastructural rather than aesthetic. Leaning into access and visibility, the fair offers a broader and more inclusive range for the everyday art viewer. Returning to the Starrett-Lehigh building this spring, AAF introduces new materials and mediums into a painting-heavy environment, sparking a palpable interest in experimentation.
The work of Florencio Lennox Campello on view at the booth of Alida Anderson Art Projects. Photo by Anna Carlson.
Ceramics and ceramic-related work, in particular, claim a stronger presence in the fair’s March iteration, oftentimes honoring fracture and imperfection. At Alida Anderson Art Projects, Florencio Lennox Campello shares his ongoing body of charcoal drawings on broken clay bowls. Campello’s work combines portraits of notable figures with observational, personal sketches. At Fremin Gallery, Robert Strati attaches a fragment of a porcelain plate to a metamorphosis ink drawing. Meanwhile, at Kai Gallery, Jared Fitzgerald and Yuan Lin present new works that explore the painterly potential of ceramic processes, applying different underglazes on canvas and panels. Established in 2016 as a contemporary extension of FitzGerald Fine Arts, Kai Gallery continues to expand, platforming practices from China and the broader Asian diaspora.
The work of Yuan Lin on view at the booth of Kai Gallery. Photo by Anna Carlson.
Lin’s creations are inspired by the natural beauty surrounding her studio in Jingdezhen, yet her imagery resists direct representation. Forms that might appear to be raindrops upon first glance are, in fact, re-imagined pearls, their luminous forms drifting across her compositions recurrently. Through overglaze porcelain techniques and moody color stories, her ceramic panels and canvases take on a dreamlike, atmospheric quality. In collaboration with Fitzgerald, they engage in an interactive dialogue around glaze, surface, and texture. Fitzgerald’s work features bold pop-art shapes, a lively rhythm, and refined brush strokes influenced by Chinese calligraphy. In Meeting (2026), he portrays an all-too-familiar scene: two friends sitting side by side in desk chairs, watching something on a desktop monitor. For this work, he combines matte and semi-matte glazing techniques, layering texture into an ordinary moment.
Among the booths, sculptural works are few but fierce. At P Fine Art Gallery, Moonhee Kim’s vases from In Between stand out for their organic forms and delicate details, inviting viewers to reflect on the equilibrium between strength and fragility. At Themes and Projects, multimedia artist Sasi Kladpetch delivers the most design-forward, compelling material investigations. Her circular objects, composed of resin, concrete, and live moss, closely examine the intersections between natural systems and urban life.
The work of Sasi Kladpetch presented at Themes and Projects. Photo by Anna Carlson.
Booths presenting fiber arts are notably scarce. One exception came from Kayla Dantz, a Boston-based textile artist and designer, who showed a few self-produced photographic prints transferred onto handwoven textiles. Working with personal imagery, such as vintage family photos from the 1960s and the ’70s, Dantz investigates how these visual artifacts carry meaning across generations. By weaving these images into fabric, she collapses the distinction between digital and handmade, distorting memory into something tactile and newly intimate. Her work is part of Harsh Collective’s presentation, Idiosyncrasy, alongside Olivia Overfield and Juliette Vaissière, whose practices similarly discuss the interplay between dimensionality and surface, challenging traditional perceptions of mediums through materiality and immersive form. Now in its third year at the fair, the artist-run collective embodies the very ethos that the Affordable Art Fair champions as a platform for emergence, for voices still forming and still waiting to be seen. In that sense, the fair remains a breath of fresh air for art enthusiasts eager to see art that resists settling into convention.
The Affordable Art Fair NYC Spring 2026 was on view at the Starrett-Lehigh Building from March 18th to 22nd, 2026.
