“Today has been our most successful first day at Frieze LA since the first year of the fair,” Hauser & Wirth president Marc Payot said in a statement emailed to ARTnews.

David Zwirner’s first-day sales included works by Joe Bradley, John McCracken, Steven Shearer, Lisa Yuskavage, Huma Bhabha, Dana Schutz and Suzan Frecon for values between $250,000 and $650,000.

Along with the mega-dealers who sold works in the early hours of the celebrity-filled fair, Casey Kaplan, Vielmetter, Roberts Projects, and Tina Kim Gallery also reported sales of works priced at $250,000 or higher.

Dominique Gallery said it placed all works in its solo presentation by Mustafa Ali Clayton, including sculptures ranging from $12,000 to $100,000. New York’s Kasmin Gallery reported ten works by vanessa german sold on opening day, each priced between $25,000 and $65,000. The artist won the Heinz Award for the Arts in 2022. pt.2 gallery from Oakland, California, said it placed all of their works by Muzae Sesay, but did not disclose sales amounts.

Below, a look at seven works that were sold during Frieze’s first couple days, according to the galleries that brought them to the fair.

(All sales are in USD unless otherwise indicated. Sales information is provided voluntarily by galleries but does not include confirmation of transactions, discounts, or other fees.)

For the work, Farrag has affixed ceramic sculptures, via zipties, onto several R/C cars that resemble large rats. Each is adorned with several iron-on patches meant to match the personality of each ceramic sculpture, including car numbers, license plates, and other decal-like symbols.

“I made the ceramics first and when I was picking out patches for each one I was thinking, how do I create a personality for each head,” Farrag told ARTnews as a race was going on.

For the performance, Farrag and his team, dressed in custom-designed white jumpsuits, line up six ceramic rats at the starting line and count down for the race. After three laps, a winner is declared. Oftentimes, the cars crash into each other and, by Thursday afternoon, a few of the rat sculptures had lost their ears. The first-place winner receives a trophy, topped with an orange ceramic cone made by Farrag, who presents it and takes a photo with the winner, just as if they had won a Formula One race.

“I wanted to build up energy by creating an incentive, so people actually wanted to win,” he said. “I’m learning that it actually makes a difference.”

I partook in one of the races-cum-performances, choosing the ceramic rat with a patch of Ghostface, called Ozone. Even with a practice run, I wasn’t very good, crashing into the cones that demarcated the track, hitting peoples’ feet, and even managing to run into the two-row bleacher that was not that close to the track.

Rat Race is Farrag’s first public project and builds on his ongoing body of work involving abstracted cars and motorcycles made in clay. “I wanted to try out making sculptures that could be interactive and activated by other people,” he said. “Then the rat race idea came up as a way to make fun of competition—winning, losing. … I think it’s also a way to address survival within competition.”

As with a number of LA artists, like Jason Rhoades (whose car-related works are currently the subject of an exhibition at Hauser & Wirth in downtown LA), Farrag, who grew up in the Valley neighborhood of Reseda, said his interest in cars stems from the necessity of having to drive everywhere as an Angeleno, as well as his experience of being a food delivery person several years ago.

“Cars and transportation are a big part of my life—it’s why I keep making them [car-related sculptures], not because I love a [certain] brand of car,” he said. “I’m always in a Prius, going into zones while I drive. I come up with a lot of my ideas in the car. This is just another aspect of driving, just the race-side of it.”

There’s also a sense of humor imbued in the performance, which isn’t necessarily intentional, according to the artist. “The funny part is that I’m not even trying to be humorous, but I’m open to people laughing,” he said, beginning to laugh. “It’s just who I am; it’s kind of been that way all my life: ‘Oh yeah, that way funny? I said something serious.’”

But Farrag drew a comparison between his project and the high stakes of what was happening just inside the tent, especially on the fair’s first day where collectors are rushing to buy works (likely ones they had put on hold based on PDF previews), galleries aiming for a prime spot in the fair’s layout, or even artists showing with the right gallery.

“Being at an art fair, competition is prevalent.vThere are all these competitive parts [to an art fair] that are often overlooked. I wanted to address that competition and make fun of it,’ he said. Then, he added, “Today, people have been having fun. It’s also, in a way, a way to let off some steam from the fair.”

Actor and comedian Will Ferrell was front and center at the fair with wife Viveca Paulin, who is a known collector and a trustee at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The couple attended a breakfast hosted by the fair before checking out the art.

Actors and brothers Owen and Luke Wilson were also spotted laughing as they strolled together through the fair. Actress Sara Gilbert, who currently stars in the TV series The Conners, was seen clutching a map as she roamed the aisles.

Sources tell us a number of actors were in attendance, including the Oscar-winning actor Leonardo DiCaprio, who was listed on ARTnews’s Top 200 Collectors list in 2016 and 2017. Additionally in attendance were Robert Downey Jr. (nominated for an Oscar for his performance in Oppenheimer), Rob Lowe (currently staring in 9-1-1: Lone Star), Tobey Maguire (known for portraying Spider-Man), and Jeremy Pope. We also hear that writer and director Ryan Murphy (American Horror Story, Glee) and tennis player Aryna Sabalenka made appearances at the fair.

Prominent art collectors in attendance at Frieze this time include ARTnews Top 200 Collectors Komal Shah, Pamela Joyner, Ric Whitney and Tina Perry-Whitney, and Steve and Jamie Tisch.

This post will be updated as more celebrity sightings are made.

The aisles were thrumming during the opening minutes, and the works on view were strong. Dealers reported numerous sales by day’s end. And, of course, because this is Los Angeles, there were celebrity sightings made throughout the day.

Below, a look at the best booths at the 2024 edition of Frieze Los Angeles, which runs through March 3.

Located in Melrose Hill (a real-estate term that refers to a neighborhood better known locally as East Hollywood), Southern Guild’s space is near Zwirner, Morán Morán, James Fuentes, and Rele, which was founded in Lagos in 2015. Other galleries are a short drive away.

Taking over a 5,000-square-foot former laundromat, Southern Guild is opening with two exhibitions, a solo show for Zizipho Powsa, whose recent residency in Long Beach was a catalyst of sorts for the gallery’s expansion to LA, and a group exhibition titled “Mother Tongues,” featuring 26 artists on the gallery’s roster, including Zanele Muholi, Andile Dyalvane, Manyaku Mashilo, Jody Paulsen, andJozua Gerrard.

To learn more about Southern Guild’s history and expansion to LA, ARTnews spoke with Trevyn McGowan, the gallery’s cofounder and CEO, during a walkthrough of the gallery’s new outpost in LA.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

ARTnews: How did your expansion to Los Angeles come about?

Trevyn McGowan: We arrived in January [2023], thinking: We’ll see what this feels like. I had this singular vision: we’re opening in America, we’re opening in LA, and we’re opening like soon as we possibly can. We were introduced to this space by very close friends, the Haas Brothers. The whole idea of what they are doing here, how community-focused this development is, how visionary Zach Lasry has been in trying to create something that breaks the difficult parts of LA while embracing the best parts of LA, I think that’s what he’s achieved in Melrose Hill. The people who have been attracted to the district are likeminded in their desire for community, collaboration, breaking that stereotype of hierarchical monolithic galleries.

Had you traveled to Los Angeles a lot previously to deciding to open here in late 2022?

I had not. I’d been to LA twice, once in 1986 and once in 2011. But we had been talking to [ceramicist] Tony Marsh about Zizipho Powsa doing a residency here [at the Center for Contemporary Ceramics at California State University, Long Beach]. She was invited to do the residency in 2018. It was going to be in 2019, then it was pushed to 2020, and we were going to do a three-month pop-up and just hang out in the city. I had a little fantasy in the back of my head [about opening here]. It’s a very romantic city for me, especially the hills and the art history of the ’60s.

We were also spending so much time in Miami, Chicago, and New York. We love all those cities, but none of them felt like it would make sense. We struggled to see how we would fit into New York, even though we did a fantastic show last April, with Galerie 56 and [founder] Lee Mindel for Zizipho Poswa, and we’ve got another one opening April 30, called “No Bats, No Chocolate” with Porky Hefer. Look, the client base in New York is extraordinary. Nobody is going to debate that. But we’re happy to have a longer, deeper, more engaged way of working with people. Those relationships feel like they could be quite authentically developed in this city, potentially more so than in New York. There’s so many people here that feel authentically aligned with what we’re doing.

What about LA felt right? Is it a similar vibe to Cape Town, where the gallery is based?

LA’s a bit of a mixture between Cape Town and Johannesburg, but it’s more like Johannesburg, which is where I’m from. The cities are very similar in age. They were built up for the same reasons—people heading west [in the US] and people heading north [in South Africa] who were literally pioneering. The architecture has a lot of similarities, with its hodgepodge nature. The plants are exactly the same; the weather is very similar. The only thing that we don’t have in Joburg are mountains and palm trees—that’s Cape Town. But LA has that kind of hustle and bustle, friendliness, and openness, and that wanting to make things happen, so that all felt very familiar.

But we also need a space that is as big as this. This is how big our gallery is in Cape Town. Whenever we do booths at fairs, we get very big booths because the work we show is big and the scale of our vision is large. People’s houses are bigger here, people are more experimental.

What made you want to start Southern Guild 16 years ago, and what was South Africa’s art scene like at the time?

Julian [McGowan, the gallery’s other cofounder] and I tend to be quite impulsive. We bought a house in three days [in the early 2000s] when we moved back to South Africa in a place called Wilderness, six hours outside Cape Town, on the spur of the moment after living in London for 22 years. I got back to South Africa after being away for 22 years. Julian was an acclaimed theater designer in London, and I had had an architectural and interiors practice. When we got back to South Africa, on the holiday that we bought the house, I was aware of this incredible creative capacity of people making things there.

In London, I had been sourcing pieces from South Africa. I just realized that there were things going on that were very different there than they were anywhere else. It wasn’t a logical or commercial decision to start a business doing this. It was a passion—falling in love with the makers, the artists, the creatives, and wanting to articulate what they were doing, and be the conduit for them to a global audience.

It was true that that we learned a language that we wanted to help articulate. There wasn’t a collectible design industry on the African continent, really. And to be honest, I didn’t even know that there was such a thing [elsewhere]. We launched in 2008, and our first big exhibition featured 36 designers at the Joburg Art Fair. Then, nine months later, I went to Design Miami/ and realized, Oh, so this is actually a thing that works in this category. So, it started from an impulse and a passion and just being blown away, rather than sort of sort of calculated. We helped to articulate and propel that category absolutely.

We have continued to help facilitate people making and collaborating. We’ve got a residency program. We’ve got a big campus that measures around 32,000 square feet. Some of our artists have their studios there, with the ceramic kilns and painting studios. There are also two bronze foundries. We’re located in the ports in a dead end, so we’ve got this whole street with five different buildings, with all of this creative community going on. We help to produce for international artists. We’ve collaborated with Marc Quinn, the Haas Brothers, Misha Kahn, and other makers here. We really are a bonded pack and a family. A lot of our artists have been with us from the beginning. It has been a wonderful thing to be part of a guild that’s supportive and holding each other up.

We showed contemporary art right from the beginning in 2008. At that time, we made a rule that it was going to be three-dimensional, so it would be wall hangings or sculptural objects. We simply wouldn’t show painting. Then about six years ago, we were like, Why did we put this binary in place? As we progressed, the design has become less furniture—not that it was ever classic furniture. The works we show have become more sculptural, more abstracted, and more things that you interact with rather than just use.

How has the gallery grown since its founding?

About six years ago, we expanded quite dramatically. There are 36 people on our team in Cape Town, and there are four in LA already. That is because of the amount of projects we do. Opening in LA feels like the next decade of major development, ambition, and desire to further broaden the particular way that we do things. I don’t think we’re the same as other galleries. We have aspects of a lot of galleries have. But, this is Southern Guild, encapsulating people who we think are contributing to what it means to be human and to address the issues of the past, what’s currently happening, and how we navigate a better future and more equitable future.

We’ve got such a scarred past coming from South Africa. A lot of our practice has to do with healing and forgiving each other’s ancestors for the responsibility they had in the past. How do we authentically try to eradicate any sense of disparity within our group and within the people that we stand amongst and alongside? Hopefully, through that articulation and through those discussions, that helps to make a difference in the world.

Are all the artists represented by the gallery based in South Africa or on the African continent? With the move to LA, do you plan to start working with LA-based artists?

Our artists are predominantly from Africa, but we also represent African diasporic artists. We’re going to do a show with Marc Quinn and Zizipho Poswa. We’re going to do a show with the Haas Brothers. But these are all people who have strong links to the continent, who are authentically working and producing there. For us to suddenly represent a Danish artist, for example, has no authenticity to it for us. But we hope to work with LA artists either who are tied to Africa through diaspora or even just through an authentic collaboration. If people want to work in Africa and we feel they add to our voice, then yes, we will [show them].

You hinted at this before, but the gallery’s name comes from a desire to create a guild of artists, correct?

We wanted to come up with something that was about uniting a band of people who share common principles and goals. A guild, like the blacksmiths guild from 1422, is about those same principles. We think that united we’re stronger. We want to have a voice that speaks for us. With “Southern” at that point [of our founding], we wanted to articulate coming from the Global South. We wanted to get away from the idea of a hierarchical system. That goes for our team as well. We’ve got an incredibly democratic organization with people who work for us. They have a lot of autonomy, and we promote people quickly. We’re not the McGowan Gallery.

Can you talk about how South Africa’s art scene has grown over the past 16 years since Southern Guild’s founding?

One of the reasons why we didn’t open broadly across all categories when we started in 2008 was we’d been in the country for five years. We thought, We’re specialists in this arena. Let’s focus on that—nobody else is doing this. Then, the landscape rapidly grew, and fantastic younger galleries started cooperatives, curators banded together. It has become an incredibly vital and dynamic space, particularly in Cape Town, a wonderfully dynamic, creative environment. And in 2017, two contemporary art museums opened in the city, the Norval Foundation and Zeitz MOCAA, which Thomas Heatherwick designed. That’s when groups from the Tate and SFMOMA started visiting. Any creative landscape needs that kind of rigorous interaction.

The Cape Town Art Fair has gotten better and better each year. We did three booths there this year. Just in general, there is so much more activity, and it’s very interesting to see the stretch from what we would consider our masters [in South African contemporary art] to the very experimental artists, who are breaking the mold and are coming up now. As we became more authentically involved in the landscape, we saw within this whole group artists who, we believe, form a part of what our mandate is.

Can you talk about the LA gallery’s two inaugural shows, a solo for Zizipho Poswa and the group show “Mother Tongues”?

Because Zizi had done this residency, it was always obvious that we would show these works here. The ceramic bases were produced at Cal State Long Beach under Tony Marsh. A lot of very famous artists, like Simone Leigh, have passed through that residency over the past 35 years. Zizi created the bronze pieces [that rest on top of the ceramic pieces] once she was back in South Africa. So they were united about a week ago. They’re inspired by her travels through Africa, through residencies she’s gone to Ethiopia and Tanzania. She has a very positive, uplifting, and visionary take on what she wants to say with the work she produces, which is about honoring greatness in the everyday—caring for objects, the hairstyles she’s worn. In a way, they represent the time that women spend in hairdressing studios and the community and bond that’s formed. It’s also about raising the objects of adornment—a simple bracelet, a comb, or an earring—that gives the wearer the ability to feel elevated, confident, regal about themselves, give them the stature. It’s this moment of pleasure, joy, and affirmation. They’re honoring these objects to this scale and this elevation. She’s saying we need to look to the everyday to realize how important we are.

Regarding “Mother Tongues,” there are 12 official languages in South Africa, but there are many more that are spoken there. It’s a country that is full of different languages and different kinds of people from different backgrounds. How do we come together as one? There are artists between the ages of 22 and 68 in the show, so it spans a lot of viewpoints and generational opinions.

One of our most exciting young artists is Jozua Gerrard, who is 22 and who we’ve worked with for four years already. We showed him at Untitled in Miami Beach this past December and sold several works. The work is hand-painted on the back of glass, so it’s quite labor intensive because the paint moves. They’re photographs of his friends that he then translates into paintings. It’s on glass because it refers to how we’re always looking at things through this glass filter, via Instagram and social media.

This sculpture is by Andile Dyalvane, and it’s a topographical map, flying over the Eastern Cape, where he was born. He achieves these recesses by putting little firecrackers into the clay, and then, when it heats up in the kiln, they explode. This piece is older, from 2016; it’s one that I think is one of his most important.

A lot of what you see around us [in this exhibition] is work in which the use of material is very labor intensive. Everything has a lot of hand in it, but also reuse and repetition, like pieces by Patrick Bongoy with the inner part of tires, Usha Seejarim with clothes pegs, or Ranti Bam with glazed terracotta that is fragmented yet fine like porcelain. Or even in works by Ayotunde Ojo, who is painting his own studio. Often in his paintings, his work is half in progress behind him, so there’s this intimacy and this tenderness. Compare that to an artist like Tony Gum, whose photographs are bold and confident and are talking about the rape of the African continent: the milk bags representing money bags that become cheese and then cash. The jewels represent how we objectify the beauty of Africa when we’re not robbing and pirating its wealth of the natural resources. All of these voices come together in something that is cohesively communicating our perspective.

What’s next for the gallery’s program?

Our second show in LA, opening on May 11, is for Zanele Muholi, who will have the whole space. Her solo show is currently on view at SFMOMA. She has her second career retrospective coming to the Tate next year. She’s very focused on education and public programming. We did a lot with 18 public walkabouts, interactions, and panel discussions for her show in Cape Town last summer last. It was a cross-section—kids, teens, people in their 20s, and established collectors— talking about sexual health, gender-based violence, empowerment as a woman, and the quality of life in where you were born in the country. People have said they leave feeling like they’ve been through some sort of therapeutic experience. We will do the same kind of programming here, which is to engage the immediate environment, the audience, the community that used to use this space as a laundromat. We invite them to come and share something that could contribute to their lives in a different kind of way.

We have found a very strong audience in South Africa, but South Africa is a very small art buying population. But we see that what we do there is very important for our community, both for our artists and for each other but also as a place of education—it’s important for us to have rigorous exhibition programming.

For young galleries, art fairs like Frieze Los Angeles are a boon, but also a gamble: there’s the chance for exposure to top-notch collectors and a large audience, but without sales, the high cost can be deadly. The fair needs young galleries as much as or more than the galleries need them. After all, the fair burnishes its credibility by showing the most exciting young talent and the hottest galleries, even if it’s the blue chips that sell the most work. Frieze ensures this through Focus, a special section providing dedicated space to emerging galleries and their artists. But, as the art market grows ever more lopsided, so grows the challenge of putting together such a section.

For its fifth edition, which opens to VIPs tomorrow, Frieze LA has tapped Essence Harden to curate Focus. When Frieze director Christine Messineo hired them, Harden was one year into a new role as a curator at the California African American Museum in LA. Since 2017, Harden has built a reputation for organizing thoughtful exhibitions that investigate notions of Blackness and queerness. Working with Harden is a major draw for galleries and artists alike. For Harden, curating Focus allowed them to spotlight West Coast galleries that they felt could benefit from the exposure and that rarely show at fairs. About 60 percent of the galleries in Focus and around 50 percent in Frieze overall are based in LA.

Harden was handed a tough task nevertheless. This year’s Focus features only 11 galleries, compared to 19 last year, as part of a larger reduction in the fair’s size. With some 100 galleries applying, a mere 10 percent make the cut. Those odds are even slimmer when you consider that Harden and their Frieze colleagues reached out to certain galleries to encourage them to apply. This is a common, though little discussed, practice that art fairs use to ensure they show what are, in their view, the best exhibitors.

The pitch to galleries and artists for Focus, Harden told ARTnews, is pragmatic. The section is a dynamic “rotating, shifting” space designed to “move people along.” Harden views the fair as a platform to elevate less-established galleries based in California that aren’t active at large-scale fairs. “For those who really need it, it can serve as this guiding thing,” they said.

That pitch is important. Not only do young galleries have a hard time covering the cost of fairs, they also don’t necessarily favor participating in such overtly commercial events. Some dealers taking part in Focus told ARTnews that they hadn’t considered the commercial space to be right for them in the first place. Here, the words of a curator like Harden, whose reputation is built on elevating less salable but conceptually rigorous art, can make all the difference. Participating gallerists described Harden as a rare candidate in their field, a writer who knows the West Coast scene well and goes slowly when observing an artist’s development.

For Seth Curcio, a director at Los Angeles–based gallery Nazarian / Curcio, the hope is that Focus will increase exposure for photographer and UCLA professor Widline Cadet, who has greater recognition in New York after a residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem. In the Focus section, Cadet is exhibiting high-contrast images of Black models meandering outdoors, their faces often turned away from the camera. Cadet took all the photographs in LA, mostly at night, employing local models to stage scenes that reflect on her familial relationships.

“There’s a video embedded in the central photograph, which is primarily documentation from her family,” Curcio said. “We wanted to build on an institutional project that wasn’t presented here, to help bridge that gap a little.”

Still, participation can be a burden. Two galleries involved in the section told ARTnews that they were invited to Frieze at the last minute, which meant upending plans and budgets.

Brock Brake, who runs Oakland-based gallery pt.2, said he had stopped applying to fairs after rejections from the New Art Dealers Alliance and others, and had no plans to show in one this year. But a day before the application deadline, a Frieze LA official reached out asking the gallery to apply. They gave him and his artist, Muzae Sesay, one day to confirm their participation. Brake said he hadn’t planned for an outlay of $20,000 to $30,000, but the pressure of producing shows while under-resourced is something he and his artists are used to.

“There was never really an impetus to go even outside of Oakland,” Brake said, explaining that in the Bay Area, artists tend to follow a grassroots approach, involving small-scale collectives that aren’t sales-driven.

Having previously written press releases for pt.2, Harden knew the program well and felt that Sesay’s paintings—large-scale dusk-toned depictions of “the energy of blackness,” in the artist’s words—deserved a wider audience outside of Oakland.

Quinn Harrelson, a gallerist still in his early 20s who graduated from UCLA last year, also hadn’t planned to participate in a fair this year. The fair circuit hasn’t been a high priority because of the cost, he said, and his primary focus was on facilitating museum acquisitions.

“So much of what I do is determined by financial possibility. There are no collectors here [in Los Angeles],” Harrelson, the son of Cultured magazine founder Sarah Harrelson, said.

Frieze LA is Harrelson’s first fair. Though still in the early stages of building his program, it leans conceptual. He’ll be bringing work by Ser Serpas, a sculptor whose work is included in the 2024 Whitney Biennial. Harrelson became friends with Serpas as a teenager in Miami.

Serpas serves as a guide as Harrelson finds his footing on the West Coast. “She deals with the legacies of the artists that made Los Angeles relevant,” he said, seeing references to Paul McCarthy, Mike Kelley, and Kaari Upson in her work. They combine texture with what Harrelson describes as a “cold blooded conceptual rigor,” saying the era of artistic production feels like it’s no longer active. “I think that not a lot of art like that gets made anymore.”

Harrelson may be reaching toward LA’s art history, but Frieze’s Focus section is also oriented toward the art world’s future, where fashion and lifestyle brands are increasingly a factor. Emily Glazebrook, commercial director at Frieze, told ARTnews, “Focus isn’t oriented solely to facilitate sales, but rather as a space to blend art, content, and commerce.” Frieze is facilitating introductions between the section’s sponsor, the Italian streetwear brand Stone Island, and galleries in the section, in exchange for subsidies on their exhibitor fees. Meghan Gordon, the director of participating gallery OCHI, told ARTnews that Stone Island’s representatives recently visited their Washington Boulevard location to view Lilian Martinez’s work, which the gallery is bringing to Focus. Martinez runs her own brand, BFGF, producing art multiples.

“This is us introducing [Stone Island] to the contemporary art world,” Glazebrook said.

Such an introduction can be just the beginning of a larger process. Gordon said Martinez’s inclusion sparked interest in other gallery artists, leading to discussions about potential collaborations with the brand. Gordon said that Martinez’s portrayal of spaces, particularly those referencing the Yucca Valley, embody a Los Angeles lifestyle, where “leisure, pleasure, comfort, and luxury” are all touchpoints. She described Martinez’s brand as a “symbol of the attainable art object.”

Like that between galleries and fairs, the relationship between art and brands is yet another symbiotic one.

“Certain art fairs provide more visibility than New York Fashion Week,” Robert Liptak, the former creative director at RTA, a Los Angeles streetwear brand that has partnered with Frieze New York, told Vogue in May. He said that the fair franchise brought opportunities to be seen in proximity to other creatives.

This year’s LA fair is the first since media conglomerate Endeavor completed its buyout of the remaining 30 percent of Frieze this past May for $16.5 million, putting its total valuation at $55 million. The gambit for Endeavor is most clear in Los Angeles, where the company is well equipped, as Glazebrook put it, to heighten the fair’s blend of “art and entertainment.”

“No matter where you’re at, that talent has a way of flourishing,” he told ARTnews in a phone interview. “There’s something good that could come out of prison, despite what an individual went to prison for, whether they’re innocent or guilty.”

Being an artist was never something he imagined as a career. He started quilting in Angola State Penitentiary in Louisiana as a hospice care volunteer in 2010. To raise money for the program that supports terminally ill men in the prison’s hospice care, the volunteers started making quilts out of old fabric, jeans, and shirts. At a certain point, the founding members need additional help and tapped Tyler to be a sewer. He was initially hesitant because of his machismo, but soon he was sitting in front of the sewing machine and learning new techniques.

His love for quilting bloomed. He found quilting to be a “manifestation” of life and connection to society. When Tyler learned the appliqué technique, in which swaths of fabric are overlaid onto a larger quilt, he explored deeper imagery in his work. He felt like he could show people who he was—his thoughts, feelings, and the injustice he faced throughout his life.

“People saw those quilts and felt that I had a talent, something that I shouldn’t just push to the side since I’m now free,” he said. “It’s something that I should be able to show people and continue to do and show them what I am worthy of.”

After his release from prison in 2016, he spent seven years adjusting to his new life before returning to quilting. Last year, he had his first solo exhibition at the Library Street Collective in Detroit, showcasing a series of self-portraits that depict his time in Angola, press imagery from his legal case, and the protests for his release. His works on display at Frieze share stories from his time being incarcerated and his transition to life after prison, often including motifs like butterflies and flowers that represent the ways life continues to bloom under times of struggle and duress.

“He’s expressing his world through art, and being able to have him show that to other people, I can only hope that is just a small step toward creating a more empathetic world,” said Romola Ratnam, a senior vice president and head of impact, inclusion and advocacy at the talent agency Endeavor, which owns Frieze.

Launched in 2020, shortly after Endeavor took ownership of the fair, the Impact Prize partners with organizations to honor artists who made a significant impact on society through art. Artist Jesse Krimes, co-founder and executive director of this year’s partnering organization, the Center for Art and Advocacy, came across Tyler’s work through his organization’s Right of Return Fellowship which supports formerly incarcerated artists like Tyler.

“These are artists who have lost decades and decades of their life but are in the best position to be able to talk about that experience, but to do so through a very elevated art form,” Krimes told ARTnews.

Krimes, who is himself also a formerly incarcerated artist, said he is fascinated by the creations people make in prison where there are limited materials and support. Art is a way to “hold onto the dignity and humanity within our identity in an environment that is literally designed to strip that from you,” he said.

He hopes that the quilts not only enlighten Frieze patrons of Tyler’s story but also his talent and artistry.

“Gary is not a uniform—he is special and exceptional in a very unique way that makes him who he is,” Krimes said. “At the same time, there are thousands and thousands of other people just like Gary who are currently behind bars, who if given the opportunity and support would make very unique things and contributions to society.”

Felix L.A. is unusual for a fair because it doesn’t take place at a convention center: much of the art can be seen on floors of this hotel, with rooms converted into makeshift gallery spaces. The experience harkens back to art fairs of the ’90s and earlier, but its format is the most exciting thing about the fair.

Much of the work was mediocre, and many dealers opted for group shows of artists on their roster rather than solo presentations. Perhaps these gallerists were trying to clear inventory in a shaky market. But amid the hodgepodge, there was some compelling art. Below is a selection of highlights from the fair.

While many works explored a variety of interesting concepts, many booths fell flat and seemed relatively unimpressive; there were, however, a few standouts.

During the 1960s, a group of young artists working in South Korea emerged from a dark time. The Korean War had taken place less than a decade earlier, and the resulting unrest paved the way for a military coup in 1961 that brought dictator Park Chung Hee to power. Two years later, Park became president. By 1972, the state was monitoring speech and the media with a sweeping policy aimed at keeping the dictatorship intact.

These artists were making a living in a young republic fraught with tension between North Korea and Japan, the country’s former colonizer.

Reckoning with widespread upheaval, the artists set out to challenge the conservative status quo. They gravitated to video, performance, and installation. Some of these works have gone long unseen because they have been lost, despite efforts to conserve them; others have only recently gained an audience in the West amid a new interest in Korean art and its edgier periods.

A new exhibition devoted to these avant-garde South Koreans, “Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s-1970s,” just opened at the Hammer Museu in Los Angeles, after previous runs at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul. Its 80 works attest to the tumult the artists faced and the ways their practices mirrored it.

“Their lives were responding to this period of exceptional change,” said Kyung An, an associate curator at the Guggenheim who organized the show’s iteration in New York. “They were their art.”

ARTnews spoke to Kyung to learn more about the show.

ARTnews: What was the historical context for these works?

Kyung An: It’s a very recent history of trauma, and there’s also an engagement with a very unpopular military involvement in Vietnam. At the same time, it’s a period of rapid urbanization and modernization. You have beginnings of what you call a rise of a middle class. That all collided with a nationalist ideology and increasingly repressive censorship propagated by the state. Park Chung Hee tightened his grip on power. It’s a dark period—I think a lot of people would agree [that it lasted] until his assassination in 1979.

What was going on in the art world in South Korea at the time?

Gestural abstraction had really swept across the Korean art scene in the 1950s, and they were rebelling against that. They saw it as this conservative kind of art-making. They were searching for a new beginning that could reflect the sense of radicality that they had been sensing around themselves.

So, they were breaking away from the art infrastructure already established there, reacting to the abstract painting movement that was baked into their formal education.

If you look at experimental artists, they create their own platforms for exhibitions and create their own circulation of printed materials and journals. They organized their own seminars to discuss the findings of what they were reading about: what was happening contemporaneously outside in Europe, Japan, and America.

This was not organized in conjunction with, but away from, the centralizing force of the academies. The biggest centralizing force, I would say, was the Kukchön,anational annual juried exhibition. If you look at their published conversations, the artists’ writing, and even that of critics and historians at the time, was very critical of the kind of art that’s embraced by the national art exhibition. They were kind of moving away from it.

Why did you focus on young artists?

The radical thing was, when abstraction entered the academic discourse in the 1960s, it was the mainstream. But abstraction was no longer reflective of both the novelty and the newness that these artists were craving. So, this next generation of experimental artists and authors was fighting against that. For me, it took a long time to settle on an exhibition title. A lot of exhibitions in Korea that dealt with experimental art, really, and focused on the quality of rebellion. I kind of wanted to move away from that. A lot of artists and different art movements reflect that. I wanted to really set them apart.

You also wanted to show how the artists were coming of age.

They were in their 20s, and some were in their early 30s. Just to have that courage and acumen and belief in oneself to create something new, to desire something so strongly—I really admired that.

All the documentation of the performances from the 1960s and ’70s is in black-and-white, and a lot of the works are lost. There is a kind of nostalgia that comes, but I wanted these artworks to feel as contemporary as if they were made today, which is how they feel.

There were threats and other material restrictions to them even producing work and finding space to convene. Some artists were the target of censorship.

I think the material restrictions and challenges were real. Remember, it’s a country that’s coming out of war. A lot of the artists had their own businesses. The later generation tried to see them as this kind of elitist, bourgeois conceptual artists. But they were very connected with what was going on because they were working in the field.

The lack of infrastructure becomes part of the practice. Kim Kulim made important works in the face of these structural challenges.

He was very active as part of the Fourth Group. It was a very interdisciplinary group formed by not only artists, but also people in theater, fashion design, and film. They were only formally active for a very short time. They held a series of performances and public arenas that were often stopped by the police. Kim himself had professed to being interrogated with his family in Daegu, where he was harassed and trailed. These were real challenges that they faced, even within the art world. There’s a very famous performance that he did, Phenomenon to Traces (1970). He wanted to tie up the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea with fabric and bury the ends of it in the ground, almost like a tomb. After he did it, he was told to take it down after a day. It was not considered art. What he was saying was: this the death of the old museum. Museum authorities said to dismantle it.

He wasn’t the not the only one. Jung Kangja, another artist whose work is featured here, faced pushback from the press and state authorities.

She was one of the few women artists whose works have survived and are in the show. She had a solo exhibition in 1970 that was promptly shut down. Its venue, the national public information office, where a lot of artists held exhibitions, felt it had lent the space under the misassumption that it would host an exhibition of sculpture. She ended up doing a performance that it didn’t agree with.

She remains a very prominent and interesting figure. A lot of her work deals with this contradiction that I think women faced that at the time. We tend to focus more on her performances, but we should remember that she made a lot of installations and sculptures as well. It’s just that they didn’t survive.

In Kiss Me (1967), a gigantic brightly painted pair of lips, entrapped within these blocky rows of teeth is woman’s severed head and a rubber glove that you use for washing dishes. Women at the time were still forced to adhere to certain Confucian ideals of womanhood: be a good mother, a good wife, a good daughter, and be loyal to your family.

Kim Kulim’s 1969 experimental film The meaning of the 1/24 second figures prominently in the show. It features glimpses of Seoul, which was also a protagonist of sorts for these artists. What was it like to rewatch this film in preparation for this show?

He worked with a few other artists in the actual making of the of the film. For me, it’s like energy and life of Seoul at the time. It’s composed 224 frames individually spliced frames per second. It’s a real montage of the capital city in a state of flux. It juxtaposes images of progress—the newly built expressway, for example—with images of people living their daily lives. You see electrical towers; you see construction workers. What’s interesting about this film is that you can see that Seoul as a city caught between the past and the present. These shots are interspersed with displaced figures sleeping on the street, a very old gate fallen into ruin, an elderly woman selling flowers on the streets. The camera never stops, except for when you sometimes see some of the artists who helped make the work. A repeated figure that appears is a child, dressed in a suit. He interrupts the flow, staring straight into the camera. It’s almost like an interjection into the overstimulation of the city.

The film was supposed to premiere in July 1969. But due to technical difficulties, it was canceled. Kim ended up projected slides of images from it onto his own body.

What happened to the artworks that no longer exist?

A lot of the works don’t exist anymore because when artists moved, they tended to get rid of them. We found a lot of the work from the ’60s really difficult to locate. Thankfully, we had images of them archival materials that indicated what they look like. A general curatorial rule was that we would not fabricate a work for the exhibition.

Lee Kun-Yong, who is now in his early 80s, is another big figure in the show. Logic of Hands, from 1975, shows Lee in four separate black-and-white frames, posing with his hands in different gestures. What made him so critical?

His practice was very diverse. He developed performance-based works that use the body as a way to understand one’s relationship with the surrounding world. In the show, we wanted to really focus on what he called “events-logical.” This is kind of exemplary of his performance work, where the repetition of everyday gestures such mark-making, counting, walking, and standing are made within a particular logical parameter. He removes them from their social conventions.

I think what’s interesting is that this work was created at the height of an authoritarian regime where the state not only affected one’s ideological routes, but also the physical realm, too. Restrictions just became part of your daily life. Lee was never overtly political, but it’s interesting to see these works within that context.

You said that performance doesn’t enter the discourse until the late 1970s to the early 80s. It starts off with happenings. Disappearance, staged in 1973 by Lee Kang-So at Myeongdong Gallery in Seoul, was one of them.

Lee took tables from a local bar he frequented, with cigarette marks or rings left from drinking glasses. The furniture itself embodied all of what was left behind. He loved that the surfaces of the furniture seemed to emit the life of the other people who touched and interacted with those objects. But then they were subsequently lost. I would say he did not know what was happening internationally at the time, with other happenings in New York. If you look at photos, it’s all friends, some strangers, some family members. This is a real reflection on like the fleeting experience of everyday life.

You mean that it came out of his experience, that he wasn’t necessarily reacting to what was happening with art collectives abroad? It wasn’t until 1975 that it was shown publicly.

This was the time of a dictatorship. In 1972, the Yushin Constitution, which banned large gatherings, had just been announced. It closed universities and [introduced] a period of censorship. Disappearance was meant to create a space where artists and thinkers could come together and converse freely. I think that was a very radical move.