8 Lesser-Known Artists to Discover at Independent 20th Century
From a self-taught Chicago painter to the artist behind the Caps for Sale children’s book, these are the names worth seeking out at this year’s edition
There is a particular thrill in discovering an artist who seems to have been hiding in plain sight. At Independent 20th Century, that sensation is part of the premise. Now in its fifth edition, the New York fair has established itself as a destination for stellar examples of coveted blue-chip art, as well as remarkable finds by artists who have fallen outside conventional narratives—or whose reputations are only beginning to catch up with the quality of their work.
Taking place September 24–27, this year’s edition moves into Marcel Breuer’s former Whitney Museum building on Madison Avenue, now home to Sotheby’s headquarters. With a larger footprint than the fair’s previous location at Casa Cipriani, this year’s event brings together around 57 invited exhibitors and more than 130 artists, offering ample opportunity to add new names to your radar.
Here are eight lesser-known names to seek out at the fair.
1. Reginald Madison at Uffner & Liu and September Gallery
Reginald Madison emerged from Chicago’s Black Arts Movement in the 1960s and ’70s, developing an improvisational, self-taught practice that remained largely unknown in the broader art world.
Uffner & Liu and September Gallery will share a booth devoted to Madison, who died earlier this year, presenting paintings spanning four decades from 1980 onward, alongside a sculpture. Often using rags and makeshift brushes to apply his paint, Madison’s works are remarkable, with intuitive gestures and dense textures. “Reggie was working with an extraordinary amount of freedom and improvisation at a moment when the art world demanded that artists fit within clearly defined movements, narratives, or categories,” says Lucy Liu, partner at Uffner & Liu. “His work resisted that kind of easy classification.”
That resistance may help explain his late recognition. “We are ‘rediscovering’ Reggie’s practice in a sense,” Liu says, “but he was always active in his studio making, and the work was always strong. We’re just finally catching up to it!”
2. Esphyr Slobodkina at Rosenberg & Co.
There is a good chance you already know Esphyr Slobodkina, you just may not be aware of it. Slobodkina was the author and illustrator of Caps for Sale, the 1940 classic children’s book, but she was also a pioneering abstract artist at the center of New York’s modernist scene.
Born in Russia in 1908, Slobodkina fled with her family amid rising antisemitism, eventually settling in Harbin, China, before arriving in New York in 1928. In 1942, she had a solo exhibition at A.E. Gallatin’s Museum of Living Art; the following year, Alfred Barr brought Slobodkina’s work to the attention of Peggy Guggenheim, who included her in the landmark Exhibition by 31 Women at Art of this Century.
“Despite being championed by the likes of Alfred Barr and Peggy Guggenheim during her lifetime, Slobodkina’s artistic legacy is today largely overshadowed by her contributions to children’s literature,” says Marianne Rosenberg of Rosenberg & Co.
The gallery will bring her abstract paintings and collages to Independent at a moment of renewed interest. Slobodkina is currently the subject of a two-person exhibition with Louise Nevelson at the New Britain Museum of American Art, and Rosenberg & Co. will mount a significant presentation of her work from October 7—November 14.
3. Frank Diaz Escalet at Hollis Taggart
Self-taught artist Frank Diaz Escalet approached his practice from an unexpected direction: through leather. Born in Puerto Rico in 1930, Escalet was a successful leather craftsman who created custom clothing for clients like the Rolling Stones. During his years living on the Bowery, from 1958 to 1971, he absorbed the energy of New York’s jazz scene, nightlife, and multicultural neighborhoods.
Escalet transformed his leather expertise into something entirely new. He assembled pre-dyed pieces of leather into intricate compositions on Masonite. In these works, as well as in his paintings made with more traditional materials like acrylic, he depicted everything from city life and immigrant communities to cowboys in the American Southwest.
“Frank Diaz Escalet’s works are charming and humorous slices of everyday life,” says Hollis Taggart. “At a moment when the art world is embracing new and unconventional materials, Escalet’s leather ‘paintings’ offer a singular vision—uniting artistic ambition with exquisite craftsmanship.” His work feels especially timely today, as artists and institutions continue to reconsider the boundaries between painting, craft, and material experimentation. Escalet was blurring those distinctions decades ago.
4. Ubi Bava at Galatea
Ubi Bava had little interest in belonging to a movement. An artist, influential educator, and architect working in Brazil during the rise of Concrete and Neo-Concrete art, Bava shared many of the movements’ formal concerns while resisting their labels. “He wanted to create freely, without objective rules,” says his great-nephew, Teodoro Bava. “He pursued his artistic practice with a sense of autonomy.”
In Galatea’s booth, Bava’s work will be presented in a project organized with Teodoro, highlighting a practice that explores optical effects, abstraction, and the relationship between two- and three-dimensional space. Mirrors sometimes draw the viewer directly into the work.
Though he exhibited throughout his lifetime, Bava’s reputation never reached that of some of his Brazilian contemporaries. “However,” Teodoro explains, “discussions surrounding his trajectory and artistic production have recently been revived through group exhibitions and new publications, while his legacy has been preserved and organized by the Instituto Ubi Bava in Brazil.”
5. Winold Reiss at Hirschl & Adler
Before portraiture became one of contemporary art’s most fashionable genres, artist and graphic designer Winold Reiss was using it to document an America in transformation. Born in Germany in 1886, Reiss moved to the U.S. in 1913. He was deeply inspired by the world around him and developed an intensely expressive portrait practice encompassing a broad range of figures associated with the Harlem Renaissance, like Langston Hughes, Native American communities (spending an extended period of time on the Blackfeet Reservation), and Mexican revolutionaries. He also embraced popular culture, depicting icons of fashion and New York’s cultural life in the 1920s and ’30s.
Hirschl & Adler will devote its Independent presentation entirely to Reiss, offering a rare opportunity to see the breadth of his subjects together. His portraits are more than records of likeness. They capture a country being reshaped by migration, cultural exchange, and shifting identities, themes that resonate with contemporary artists today.
6. Marie Wilson at Gallery Wendi Norris
In vibrant, abstract paintings and works on paper, Marie Wilson developed a singular practice that eventually became defined by precision and symmetry. Wilson drew inspiration from the aesthetic and spiritual cultures of Northern California, where she grew up, and the intellectual currents of Europe, where she lived and traveled. While hints of Surrealism, occultism, and echoes of artists like Hilma af Klint appear in her practice, Wilson’s work is deeply personal.
At Independent, Gallery Wendi Norris is showing a stellar selection of Wilson’s work in a solo presentation that marks her New York and East Coast debut. “Marie Wilson was surrounded and influenced by some of the foremost artists of her generation, and yet, she did not make paintings or drawings with the intention of exhibiting or selling them,” says Wendi Norris. “Rather, hers was a deep, meditative practice honest to her own vision.”
7. José Gamarra at Mariane Ibrahim
Born in Uruguay in 1934, José Gamarra studied in Montevideo and Brazil before settling in Paris in 1963. Through his studies and travels, he developed a signature style with densely populated allegorical scenes in which Indigenous figures, conquistadors, animals, and fragments of popular culture come together. He often draws from the histories and mythologies of the Americas, resulting in a surreal vision in which the violence of conquest continues to reverberate. Social critique runs throughout Gamarra’s work, revealing the artist’s commitment to dissecting identity and politics and interrogating structures of power.
In Mariane Ibrahim’s booth, Gamarra will be presented alongside Lorraine O’Grady, whose work likewise questioned the construction of history, race, gender, and power. Together, the artists confront imperialism, ecological devastation, cultural erasure, and the question of who controls the stories societies tell about themselves.
8. Hilla Rebay at Weinstein Gallery
Hilla Rebay helped create one of the world’s most important art organizations: the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, the precursor to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Born in Strasbourg in 1890, she lived a remarkably international life, studying in Paris, Munich, and Cologne before moving to Berlin and eventually the United States. Rebay was also an artist, creating vibrant, abstract paintings, often with geometric shapes that seem to float in space and dart across the canvas. Yet Rebay’s name remains considerably less familiar than the institution she helped shape.
Seeking to redress this imbalance, Weinstein Gallery is showcasing Rebay alongside artists she championed, including Rudolf Bauer, László Moholy-Nagy, Irene Rice Pereira, and Alice Trumbull Mason. “Long before she came to America, Rebay was exhibiting with the Dada circle in Zurich, at Der Sturm in Berlin, and alongside some of the most progressive artists of her generation,” says Rowland Weinstein. “I hope our presentation at Independent helps people rediscover Hilla Rebay not simply as the curator, director, and advocate, but as an artist who deserves a far more significant place in the history of modern art.”
That impulse—to look again, and to look beyond the familiar—is ultimately what makes Independent 20th Century so compelling. Its discoveries are not necessarily artists who have been forgotten altogether, but artists whose stories have been overshadowed or undervalued. For visitors willing to look beyond the obvious, the fair offers something more valuable than recognition: the chance to see 20th century art history from a different angle.
Independent 20th Century is on view September 24-27, 2026, at Sotheby’s New York