The little gem of an art fair that ushers in the holiday season on New York’s Upper East Side turns twelve this year. Held at the Bohemian National Hall, the fair is known for both its clubby scale and the surprising breadth of the art on offer. A relative handful of top-flight galleries exhibits—there are seventeen from New York and New England in this year’s show—but they present work from across the American art-historical spectrum. Hudson River school painters, tonalists, and American impressionists are on view alongside Ashcan school painters and modernists, early and late. Another annual feature of the American Art Fair is a superb line-up of lectures. This year’s program includes Barbara Haskell, a curator at the Whitney Museum, discussing the influence of the Mexican muralists on American art; a talk by Stephanie Herdrich, a curator in the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, on Winslow Homer; and independent scholar Avis Berman’s presentation entitled “Becoming William Glackens.”
The American Art Fair • Bohemian National Hall, New York • November 16–19 • theamericanartfair.com
