The Salon by NADA x The Community
Installation aerial view of The Salon by NADA and The Community on opening day. Courtesy of Mischa Schlegel.
Paris’s autumnal Art Week has always had a major fair as its beating heart (once FIAC and now Art Basel Paris), while other art events pump through the city’s capillaries: OFFSCREEN, AsiaNow, Paris Internationale, and the latest—and edgiest—The Salon by NADA & The Community.
Since 2002, NADA (New Art Dealers Alliance) has supported contemporary art and emerging artists. Best known for their art fairs in Miami and New York, “challenging” and “reimagining” are often used to describe their community-based nonprofit programming—vague terms which actually imply that they platform a network of unrepresented or early-career galleries, curators, and artists who produce alternative multidisciplinary work.
Reflective of their official event title, “The Salon by NADA & The Community,” the two organizations paired up, the latter being a new-generation art institution and curatorial unit founded in Paris in 2016 to localize their dialogue with the city’s rich history of art-making and industry. Like NADA, The Community focuses on facilitating dialogue between nonconforming artists, both established and emerging.
Those who received an invite from either party slotted themselves into booths at 30 bis Rue de Paradis, a former training center for the French national railway company SNCF. The 10th arrondissement venue provided an obscure, fun layout, though the grey patchwork office carpet didn’t do the offbeat artworks any favors.
Carpet aside, The Salon by NADA & The Community played a key part in the hype of Paris Art Week. With NADA’s reputation preceding them, five thousand plus people came through on the opening day, followed by a sweaty afterparty that spilled onto the open-air stairwell spiraling six floors above a tiny courtyard.
Installation aerial view of The Salon by NADA and The Community on opening day. Courtesy of Mischa Schlegel.
This energy was owed, of course, to the quality of its hand-selected mix of commercial and nonprofit spaces. The Fall River Museum of Contemporary Art, a Massachusetts-based experimental and collaborative space headed by artists Harry Gould Harvey IV and Brittni Ann Harvey, was stationed in the venue’s stainless steel kitchen with a selection of multi-media works, including materials like wood, paper bags, denim jeans, combs, and pegs.
“The Community reached out to us to be a part of it,” Harvey shared, saying it was their first fair, in Paris or elsewhere. “We connected over mutual intentions, ethics, and hopes in our nonprofit projects. It felt like a really good fit.” For The Salon, they decided to highlight their educational program while also featuring artworks from past shows.
“We came with low expectations because we've never done it before, but we've had a really positive response,” Harvey added, emphasizing the accessibility of the model’s low prices for nonprofit spaces. “It's been great to be in front of so many people. For a city like Fall River, we're not getting that type of attendance for our shows. Here, we're seeing ten to twenty times the foot traffic. We've had great conversations and connections and found potential opportunities for our artists.”
Wig by Tomihiro Kon in Current Plans’s booth at The Salon by Nada and The Community. Courtesy of Tahney Fosdike.
One booth over from FR MoCA, another nonprofit, Current Plans, presented works speaking to the diverse and experimental practices in East Asia and East Asian diaspora with a focus on intimacy and interaction. Angel Leung, a Hong Kong Paris-based curator overseeing the booth that day, pointed to the many colorful, delicate wigs assembled on wire nets hanging from the ceiling.
“These are made by Tomihiro Kon, a hairstylist who works with fashion brands and celebrity artists like Lady Gaga. He also makes these art-piece wigs on the side. You can try them on; they fit perfectly comfortably on your head.”
“It’s Current Plans’s first NADA fair,” Leung added. “They wanted to do something more interactive so people would stay in the booth a bit longer and have some fun.” If they wanted to stay even longer, they could opt for a tattoo by Kwok Keung. His durational tattoo booth offered ethereal small scenes—a bird over a horizon, for instance—in iterations of four. With slight differences between them, the completion of the set, whether on one or multiple people, would form a stop-motion. “If you feel adventurous enough,” Leung told me, “he can do the tattoo for you, right now.”
Across the fair, there was a trend of small but dense paintings. At Mrs. Gallery, a contemporary art gallery located in Queens, this motif was cultivated in the serene still-life studies of Alexandra Barth. There’s something feminine and mathematical, minimal but detailed in her crisp, calm angles and curves of interiors and objects: a piano, a page, a plan, a curtain.
“They're all airbrushed on canvas, which is always surprising for people to see,” gallery manager Lily Frances Pendery said, adding that the Italian-based Slovakian artist is the only European artist in their program. “We're excited to bring her here after a stellar presentation at the Armory Show last month in New York. We won a prize and wanted to continue the momentum.”
The gallery has been a member of NADA since opening in 2016, with Pendery saying, “We're thrilled there's this iteration of the fair in Paris; it feels very international. Not even just European clients, it feels like everyone is here. It's great to introduce the NADA network and share that with a totally different audience.”
Elena Rivera-Montanes, Daydreaming, oil on panel, 15 x 10 cm. Courtesy of Night Café and the artist.
Elsewhere in The Salon, Brigitte Mulholland presented narrative-led works with a nostalgic appeal, seen in BA Thomas’s geometric painting of an intimate bookshelf under a skylight. A similar domestic mood also popped up in Elena Rivera-Montanes’s Daydreaming and intimate scenes by Marco Bizzarri at London-based Night Café. Material reimaginings also had a presence, in works like Alessandro Teoldi’s facedown pigeon created with oil, charcoal, and ink on fabric and linen at Marinaro and Grace Kalyta’s painted works of fabric that emanated desire at Pangée.
Grace Kalyta, Rustic Opulence, Sultry Encounters, 2024, oil on canvas, belt, rivets, 72 x 58 cm. Photo by William Sabourin, courtesy of Gallery Pangée and the artist.
The Salon delivered on showing new and emerging talent that could not be found elsewhere, simultaneously exposing these lesser-known but should-be-known artists to the European scene. NADA and The Community securely introduced their progressive model into the Paris Art Week ecosystem as a humble and exploratory moment with community at its heart—I’m sure everyone hopes they’ll be back next year.
