1-54 - New York.

1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair was founded in 2013 by Touria El Glaoui, its name a direct reference to the 54 countries of the African continent, and its New York edition has spent eleven years making a quietly irrefutable case for itself as the most intellectually alive fair on the spring calendar. Now in its eleventh New York iteration, the 2025 edition arrives at a new home: the Starrett-Lehigh Building at 600 West 27th Street in Chelsea, running 13 to 17 May and landing, as always, during Frieze New York week. The address is not incidental: Chelsea did not become the center of the contemporary art world by accident, and 1-54 arriving here feels less like a relocation and more like a correction.

The fair brings together galleries from across Africa, Europe, and the United States, presenting works spanning painting, sculpture, photography, performance, and installation, with a breadth of geographic representation that consistently outpaces its modest footprint. The Special Projects program provides a platform for site-responsive commissions that expand the conversation beyond the booth, while the Forum, the fair's acclaimed program of talks, performances, and screenings, gathers artists, curators, and thinkers around the evolving discourse of African and diasporic art practice. It is the rare fair where the intellectual programming does not feel like an afterthought to the commercial floor.

For ArtAtlas travelers, the two-day VIP Preview on 13 and 14 May is the correct entry point, and the fair's scale rewards focused attention rather than a sweeping lap of the hall. The Starrett-Lehigh's proximity to the High Line makes the itinerary write itself: walk it properly, treat the public art as seriously as anything inside a booth, and use the afternoon to gallery hop Chelsea in the way the neighborhood was always intended to be experienced, on foot and without a rigid agenda. The conversation that leads to the best acquisition of the week begins at a private dinner the night before, and the people who know which dinner to attend are the ones who did their homework in advance.