Back at the Starrett-Lehigh Building for New York City Art Week, NADA New York 2026 returns with more than 110 galleries from 15 countries and 46 cities, including 51 first-time exhibitors. Across the fair floor, artists explore ancestry, labor, domesticity, and cultural identity through material-driven practices spanning textiles, sculpture, papermaking, and found objects. The return of the TD Bank Curated Spotlight further emphasizes process-driven practices and emerging voices, as booths move fluidly between the tactile and conceptual, the intimate and monumental. The atmosphere feels notably relaxed as collectors, families, children, and even dogs weave through the aisles. Whitewall rounds up eight standout presentations worth seeking out.
SoMad
Keith Lafuente, “Waiter (Kain Na!),” 2025. Photo by Max C Lee. Courtesy of the artist and SoMad.
Keith Lafuente, “Dreamer (Receiving Gifts),” 2025. Fabric, poly-fil, ribbon, vintage table, glass beads, plastic beads, motor, driver, copper, pewter, aluminum, electrical tape, enamel, J-B Weld, hardware, power supply. Courtesy of the artist and SoMad.
For its 12th edition at NADA New York 2026, SoMad brings a solo booth by 2025 Artist in Residence, Keith Lafuente. One of the standouts is Waiter (Kain Na!), an 8.5-foot kinetic sculpture positioned just outside the booth, gazing toward visitors heading to the café. During his residency, Lafuente used grant funding to consult with kinetic artists while developing the sculptures, which include several smaller works alongside Waiter (Kain Na!).
The sculptures are constructed from leftover materials sourced from past residency artists, reflected in the patchwork blue-and-green fabric body of the waiter. This ethos extends throughout the presentation, where smaller sculptures are assembled from found scraps and repurposed supplies. Even the electrical cables are wrapped in matching textiles, turning functional details into part of the visual language.
What we love: Through both static and kinetic sculptures, Lafuente examines Filipino caregiving culture and the ways care labor is consumed, romanticized, and often overlooked within popular culture and society.
JO-HS
Polina Osipova, “A device for flying to the ancestral stars II (Kolyma),” 2026.
Archival family photographs on textile, watercolour, metal studs, canvas, graphite pencil, oak wood. Courtesy of the artist and JO-HS.
Polina Osipova, “Time keepers and their strawberries table cloth,” 2026.
Archival family photographs on textile, hand embellished with quartz crystals, quartz clock mechanism, polymer clay, watercolour pencils. Courtesy of the artist and JO-HS.
Mexico City and New York-based gallery JO-HS is known for championing emerging and mid-career artists through curatorial experimentation, often hosting exhibitions inside its Soho gallery, a hybrid residential and exhibition space. For NADA New York 2026, London-based artist Polina Osipova presents an exhibition exploring Indigenous cosmology and family memory through the lens of her Chuvash origins. Titled “Wings for Flying to the Ancestor Stars,” the presentation blends craft and digital innovation through archival family photographs printed onto textiles and transformed into wearable sculptures and self-portraiture. The works trace how Chuvash beliefs adapted during the Cold War and Soviet space race, taking shape as arrows, winds, and anatomical hearts adorned with freshwater pearls and metal details. Alongside the installation, a painting by Mads Bryld explored nature outside of a strictly seasonal framework, approaching the landscape as something psychological and continuous rather than tied to cycles of bloom or decay.
What we love: Osipova confronts generational trauma through textiles that collapse the distance between past and present. Her wearable sculptures become performances of reclamation, allowing inherited histories to be carried, embodied, and rewritten.
Bonian Space
YIN Zi’ang, “The Drunken Boat,“ 2026. Oil and oil stick on linen, 115 × 155 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Bonian Space.
Coming from Beijing, China, Bonian Space brings together works by YIN Zi’ang, Eva Haupt, and Diego DAI. YIN Zi’ang’s large-scale paintings merge memory, history, and contemporary imagery to explore the subconscious and emotional complexity of the self. Shifting between abstraction and figuration, the works carry a quiet melancholy that feels more accepting than heavy, heightened by brushstrokes that alternate between roughness and softness. His restrained palette creates harmony rather than tension across the compositions.
Eva Haupt’s practice is rooted in materiality, focusing on pigment, viscosity, sheen, and surface across canvas, paper, and murals. Her works trace everyday encounters and human relationships through themes of care, desire, and support, becoming intimate forms of self-communication that feel universally familiar.
Meanwhile, Diego DAI builds atmospheric paintings from layered translucent white brushwork over black grounds. Rooted in memory and meditation, the works draw inspiration from fireworks, rainforests, rivers, and flames, balancing fear and light through a sense of fleeting temporality.
What we love: Seeing three artists approach painting through entirely different emotional and material languages while still remaining connected through a shared sensitivity to surface, process, and atmosphere.
THIRD BORN
Loucia Carlier, “Cheap dreams (Migros),” 2025. Image courtesy of the artist.
Returning for a second year in the Project Section, THIRD BORN brings a solo presentation by Loucia Carlier that is an extension of her past series “Cheap Dreams.” Inspired by imagination and the conditioning embedded within domestic life, Carlier constructs sculptural boxes wrapped in vivid leather tones, each containing dollhouse-like interior worlds. The monumental shifts into the miniature as the artist merges carpentry, upholstery, and metalwork into a single practice.
One standout work features a canvas screen-printed with scenes of objects discarded across New York streets, punctuated with dots echoing dominoes, a familiar pastime in both France and Mexico. Another striking leather box, rendered in muted grey and mint green, layers domino-like dots beneath surfaces that Carlier repeatedly wipes away, creating uncertainty around which color lies underneath. The contrast between matte suede sides and glossy leather finishes heightens the tactile quality of the work.
What we love: Carlier builds miniature worlds that quietly critique domestic conditioning while encouraging slowness, reflection, and a more grounded relationship to everyday life.
SITUATIONS
Installation Shot of Renelle White Buffalo and Jerry the Marble Faun at NADA NY 2026. Photo by Adam Reich. Courtesy of SITUATIONS.
One of the first booths visitors encounter at NADA New York 2026 is SITUATIONS, positioned directly at the center of the fair. The presentation brings together three artists: Corinne Jones with her wave-shaped paintings of undulating forms, Jerry the Marble Faun with hand-carved limestone sculptures populated by playful figures, and Renelle White Buffalo, whose abstract paintings draw from environmental observation, Lakota cultural traditions, and South Dakota landscapes.
In White Buffalo’s Flowering, the speckled raw material of the canvas remains visible beneath a layer of clear gesso, allowing the surface itself to become part of the composition. Areas of unprimed canvas subtly shift between matte and reflective finishes depending on the light, while embroidery thread and ribbon emerge from other works filled with dissolving, pooled color.
What we love: The tension between the raw, exposed canvas and the tactile embroidery gives the work a deeply physical presence, grounding abstraction in materiality and gesture.
5U Space
Mika Obayashi, “Celestial Mechanics no. 3,” 2026. Handmade paper (linen pulp paint on abaca). 22 x 30 inches. Courtesy of Dieu Donné.
One of the TD Bank Curated Spotlights at NADA New York 2026 is a solo presentation by Mika Obayashi with 5U Space. Created during her fellowship at Dieu Donné, the works expand Obayashi’s papermaking practice beyond the sculptural installations she is typically known for. Here, the artist turns toward flat compositions, using white and black linen pulp painted directly into wet sheets during the papermaking process. At times, stencils are used to introduce subtle rectangular forms that seem to bend under the weight of gravity, while delicate black specks are applied by hand using string throughout the labor-intensive process.
The resulting works feel spiritual and almost cosmic, balancing softness with precision. A recurring fan-like motif flashes across the surfaces like lightning, heightening the celestial atmosphere.
What we love: The intimacy of Obayashi’s process revives traditional papermaking techniques. Many of the details only emerge up close, encouraging viewers to slow down and engage with the work on a deeply tactile level.
Constitución
Martín Farnholc Halley, “Closet Cristal,” 2022. Mixed technique- 78.74 in x 55.11 in. Courtesy of the artist and Constitución.
Flying in from Buenos Aires, Argentina, Constitución brings a presentation of colorful sculptures by Martín Farnholc Halley. Constructed from old rulers, pencils, wood, oil paint, and found materials like feathers, pipe cleaners, and cubic zirconia, the works blur the line between sculpture and painting. Halley deftly composes the objects so they initially appear two-dimensional, only revealing their layered construction and shifting spatial relationships as viewers move around them.
His geometric, non-figurative practice draws from modernist manifestos while questioning colonial systems of subjectivity in the Global South. At the same time, the artist embraces “poor” materials and imperfection as a way to explore discomfort, fragility, and transformation.
What we love: The ruler details feel especially striking. Often overlooked as functional objects, they become integral compositional elements here, turning the border and frame into part of the artwork itself.
Tappeto Volante Projects
Installation Shot of Keiko Narahashi at NADA New York 2026. Courtesy of the artist and Tappeto Volante Projects.
A gorgeous site-specific installation by Keiko Narahashi transforms the booth of Tappeto Volante Projects. Mounted on wooden wall platforms, Narahashi’s ceramic figures range from purely glazed ceramic forms—with an enviable control of surface and texture—to hybrid works attached to metal structures first visualized through ink drawings and later translated into sculptural form. Magnetic ceramic additions act as interchangeable eyes, ears, hair accessories, and facial details, allowing the works to shift instantly between two-dimensional and three-dimensional compositions.
The pieces feel both calming and minimal, despite their complexity. At first glance, the metal structures barely register, softened by curved contours and painterly surfaces that obscure their industrial hardness. Rooted in spontaneity and tactile immediacy, the works use material not only as medium, but as structure itself. The ability to continually alter the faces becomes a reflection on expression as something fluid, evolving over time rather than fixed.
What we love: The installation carries a lighthearted, almost playful quality while quietly exploring deeper ideas surrounding evolution, transformation, and emotional fluidity.
