Touria El Glaoui is the founding director of the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, which is held every year in London, New York City and Marrakesh. The daughter of a Moroccan artist father and a French mother, El Glaoui was working in telecommunication sales when she founded the fair to give voice to art and artists from the continent and the diaspora, and it remains among the most important on the contemporary scene, introducing talents such as Amadou Sanogo, of Mali, and Johanna Mirabel, of Paris.
This year’s edition of the fair is mounted in Manhattanville, at 439 West 127th Street (1-54.com), with a pop-up exhibition of Caribbean artists called “Sparkling Islands, Another Postcard of the Caribbean,” also through May 20, at High Line Nine, 507 West 27th Street. I recently spoke with El Glaoui about her vision and how it has grown. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.
Why did you start with the focus on Africa?
When I started in 2013, it was about creating a platform that would represent and give visibility to artists from that particular geography — the African continent and its diaspora. We say “diaspora” because we realize that a lot of artists of African descent were based in Europe or the United States or the United Kingdom.
I’m the daughter of an artist from Africa, Morocco, surprised that this part of the world was not covered at all and not at all present or visible in the mainstream or the international market. It was not my industry, so I didn’t understand why this was happening.
Your father is Moroccan, you speak with a French accent, and you were based in London when you started the fair. So how did those three things come together?
I was raised by a Moroccan father and a French mother in Morocco until I was 17 and moved north to study. I came to New York for 10 years. And then I moved to London, to work for a telecom fund and traveled to the Middle East and Africa for sales. I made friends with a lot of artists and also realized how amazing the work was and started collecting myself. I didn’t understand why they were not part of the mainstream of the global stage. There was no question about them not being good enough.
In 2013, in London we were able to [mount] it strategically around Frieze to make sure we had this pool of collectors to come visit. Once we had the blueprint, it just made sense to go to New York, with institutions, curators and collectors that can make a real difference in the careers of those artists. In 2015 in Brooklyn, Pioneer Works, this incredible organization, hosted us for four years. [This year] we were able to negotiate and take over the space called Malt House, the old Gavin Brown space [in Manhattanville].
Is it curated solely by you, or is there a panel?
We have three selection committee meetings a year for the three art fairs, [each with] one art gallery director (a gallery that is not part of the fair), a curator and my team — me and my associate director. It is basically a decision on the quality of a [gallery’s] program, but also the role of the gallery in the country or the city they are working in.
And there’s an educational component to the fair? What’s that?
We created the 1-54 Forum in 2013 — a platform for intellectual debates, artistic panels. One year it was [focused on] the invisible border between North Africa and West Africa, because of the influences of the Arabic world in those regions.
We made these engaging, but also available for free. We published catalogs, really reference book with biographies of artists who had never been published before.
When I started the project there was something much more important that was happening — a first for a lot of those artists to be published, to be part of the mainstream, to be sold in international art fairs. It was an educational platform, not just a commercial platform.
Who are some artists you are excited to showcase this year?
I’m looking forward to encountering the compelling and often provocative creations of Ronald Hall, a Brooklyn-based painter represented by Duane Thomas Gallery. Deftly moving between fictitious compositions and scenes inspired by history, Hall’s narrative works explore the complexity and contemporary experiences of African Americans through the lens of social constructionism. I expect another fair highlight will be Mobolaji Ogunrosoye’s intricate collage works, which splice photographs together to investigate body image and the impact of societal influences on the lives of Nigerian women. Ogunrosoye’s works will be presented by Kó, an art space in Lagos, Nigeria.
