Never one to do things by halves, New York this week is playing host to more than 350 art fair booths across various venues in Manhattan.
The six fairs listed below form the spine of New York Art Week, when the city’s art scene comes alive with gallery openings, events, auctions, and enough programming to keep art lovers’ step counts—and calendar events—high.
With a higher concentration of fairs, galleries, and auctions than any other city, the lineup affirms New York’s status as the de facto capital of the art world. Each fair offers something distinct, too: Frieze brings the top end of contemporary art (read our rundown of the best booths from the fair here); NADA spotlights galleries and artists at the cutting edge; 1-54 foregrounds artists from Africa and its diaspora; TEFAF brings blue-chip panache; Independent hosts focused single-artist presentations aplenty; and Future Fair platforms a broad swath of newer names and dealers from the tri-state area.
Artsy’s editorial team has scoured them all to pick out seven of our choice works priced under $10,000.
NADA New York
Through May 17th
The Starrett-Lehigh Building, 601 W. 26th Street, 3rd Floor, New York, NY 10001
Founded in 2002 to support young galleries, the nonprofit New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) brings that mission to its New York fair—the largest of New York Art Week, with 120 exhibitors. Here, visitors will discover works by younger and emerging artists.
Bu Shi
Oyster, 2026
Presented by SARAHCROWN New York
Price: $3,900
Oyster, 2026
Bu Shi
SARAHCROWN New York
The palm-sized paintings of Chinese artist Bu Shi hold an amulet-like power. The artist, who lives in Ravenna, Italy, employs an unnatural, jewel-tone palette to create landscapes and still lifes that engage with occult themes. Having practiced seal engraving and calligraphy, the artist brings his attention to detail to these intricate paintings.
Oyster (2026), on view with New York gallery SARAHCROWN, depicts two jagged oyster shells set in a darkened arched cove. Resting beside the shells is a cameo ring with a woman’s face, a white artichoke-shaped sculpture, and a burning red candle.
Painted in subtly variegated dark hues, the work encourages the eye to search to discover small details. It’s a delightful and intimate viewing experience. Shi’s first solo show, “The Lighthouse,” is currently on view downtown at the gallery, bringing together mysterious scenes of rocky coasts, isolated beaches, and solitary islands.
—Katie White
Margaret R. Thompson
For Ithell, The Cardinal Flame, 2026
Presented by Red Arrow Gallery
Price: $5,000
For Ithell, The Cardinal Flame, 2026
Margaret R Thompson
Red Arrow Gallery
This painting by Margaret R. Thompson is one in a booth of new works with Red Arrow Gallery at NADA New York. Thompson nods to the great Surrealist artist Ithell Colquhoun in her title, though I also sense influences from masters of mysticism and transcendentalism like Agnes Pelton and Hilma af Klint, who used painting to explore spirituality and unseen forces.
This particular painting, with imagery that recalls the sea, sun, sky, and fire, is made with volcanic rock, collected earth, temple oil, and natural pigments. I love how the material keeps the painting grounded, even as it opens up space for the mind to wander and offers a small escape from the pressures of the everyday.
—Casey Lesser
Emily Ponsonby
Embroidered Souls, 2026
Presented by Gillian Jason Gallery
Price: £6,500–£6,750 ($8,670–$9,000)
Embroidered Souls, 2026
Emily Ponsonby
Gillian Jason Gallery
One of my favorite discoveries at NADA was Emily Ponsonby, who has a lovely solo booth with Gillian Jason Gallery. Ponsonby works in encaustic—a historic technique using wax and pigment—which gives her paintings a hazy softness. The process feels especially personal: the Dorset, south England–based artist’s father was a beekeeper, and her surfaces hold traces of layering, scraping, and touch.
In Embroidered Souls (2025), Ponsonby captures that moment of ease when you can take off your socks and rest—it might be at the end of a day or after a run or during a picnic. The title is also telling, suggesting these soles have been through a lot, or are embroidered with stories. Like the rest of Ponsonby’s work on view, it feels pulled from a fond memory.
—C.L.
TEFAF New York
Through May 20th
Park Avenue Armory, 643 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10065
Founded in 1988, The European Fine Art Foundation (TEFAF) has built its flagship Maastricht fair into a byword for lavish historical presentations and old-money ambience. Its smaller New York edition, launched in 2016, skews more 20th-century than its continental counterpart, but remains the week’s most blue-chip fair, where works by the market’s loftiest names are commonplace.
Hilda Palafox
Paisaje II, 2025
Presented by Sean Kelly Gallery
Price: $5,000
Paisaje II, 2025
Hilda Palafox
Sean Kelly Gallery
Mexico City artist Hilda Palafox is known for her monumental depictions of women across painting, murals, ceramics, textiles, and drawing. Earlier this year, Sean Kelly Gallery presented recent works by the artist in the exhibition “De Tierra y Susurros.”
At TEFAF, the gallery is showcasing a handful of small-scale works in acrylic and charcoal on paper. These black-and-white works are almost photographic in appearance, linking themes of the female body to ecology. In Paisaje II 2025, the white silhouette of a blossom hovers over an open mouth in an image both sensual and striking.
—K.W.
1-54 New York
Through May 17th
The Starrett-Lehigh Building, 600 W. 27th Street, New York, NY 10001
The only fair focused entirely on contemporary art from Africa and its diaspora, 1-54 launched in London during Frieze Week in October and has run a New York edition since 2015. This year, the fair returns to the Starrett-Lehigh Building (the same venue as NADA) and will feature 26 exhibitors, including a curated section focused on Brazil.
Shourouk Rhaiem
Lessive Cléopâtre, 2025
Presented by 193 Gallery
Price: €8,500 ($9,955)
Lessive Cleopatre, 2025
Shourouk Rhaiem
193 Gallery
At the booth of Paris’s 193 Gallery, Shourouk Rhaiem’s Lessive Cléopâtre (2025)—a faithful, crystal-encrusted replica of the vintage French laundry-detergent box of the same name—sparkles with clever humor. The original packaging, with its kohl-eyed Cleopatra and a tagline promising “Blancheur Divine” (Divine Whiteness), carries the casual orientalism of its era. French artist Rhaiem, who is of Tunisian descent, covers the packaging with tiny rhinestones, elevating this laundry-room banality into something closer to a Fabergé egg.
Rhaiem spent the 2000s as a fine jeweler at her Shourouk Paris label before extending her embroidery and crystalwork into sculpture. The bedazzled replica has become her signature: staples of French consumer culture, such as cigarette packs and household products, are recast in gemwork, elevating their associations with domestic labor and advertising. The Cléopâtre on view was included in “Le mystère Cléopâtre” at Paris’s Institut du Monde Arabe last year.
—Arun Kakar
Independent
Through May 17th
Pier 36, 299 South Street, New York, NY 10002
Founded in 2010 with a strong emphasis on curation, Independent is known for its open-booth-style format and in-depth artist focus. More than 70% of the 76 galleries taking part this year are mounting solo artist presentations, so expect to add a few new names to your artist wishlist.
Brittany Mojo
The Sprawl, 2026
Presented by Mindy Solomon Gallery
Price: $8,000
The Sprawl, 2026
Brittany Mojo
Mindy Solomon Gallery
Brittany Mojo’s coil-constructed ceramic vessels display both keen technical ability and a defiance of formal tradition. Her matte, underglaze finishes unite colors that don’t typically go together. Her surfaces feature geometric patterns defined with wavering black outlines, which she then loosely adheres to.
In The Sprawl (2026), triangles of bright and muted hues ripple across a textured surface, a little purple spilling into the vivid orange section next to it, some blue infiltrating a mauve field. Though the work sold, other pots by the artist, adorned with ebullient floral forms, are still on offer at the gallery’s booth.
Mojo lives and works in Southern California, and the region’s fluidity and freedom infiltrate her work. “She’s not going for symmetry or perfection. She’s going for childlike wonder,” gallery assistant Mariana Mikaela said.
—Alina Cohen
Anton Stankowski
Ohne Titel (Spiegelung im Motorrad) (Untitled (Reflection in a motorcycle)), 1938
Presented by OSMOS
Price: $3,500
Ohne Titel (Spiegelung im Motorrad) (Untitled (Reflection in a motorcycle)), 1938
Anton Stankowski
OSMOS
A 1938 black-and-white photograph by Anton Stankowski at OSMOS’s booth caught me off guard before I realized what I was looking at. Ohne Titel (Spiegelung im Motorrad) (Untitled (Reflection in a Motorcycle)) frames a tight close-up of a motorcycle’s underside: dark coiled hoses, hex nuts, and oversized bolts curving across the picture, and at the center of it all a polished chrome disc, its convex surface acting like a fish-eye mirror.
Inside that mirror sits the small, slightly distorted figure of Stankowski himself with one hand raised toward us, his body wrapping around the curve of the chrome like it’s being poured into the metal.
Stankowski, who passed away in 1998, is better known as the graphic designer behind the Deutsche Bank logo. He came up through the Bauhaus-adjacent Neues Sehen (New Vision) movement, in which his peers like László Moholy-Nagy treated industrial machinery as raw material. This image sits squarely in that tradition. It’s half-mechanical study, half-hidden self-portrait, and entirely a useful reminder, too, of why Independent is a fair ripe for discovery.
—A.K.
