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Sad Rap and Emojis Collide at NYC Anti-Art Fair, Black Market

We talked to the artists and curators behind Black Market, the one-night-only hybrid art fair and concert experience.
Emoji art by Yung Jake

Crowds of tourists, $4 water bottles, blaring fluorescent lights, a location nearly inaccessible by public transportation—these are the things we come to expect when attending art fairs in NYC. Walking the rows of sardine can-packed gallery booths, the works blend together, in part due to the numbingly repetitive atmosphere, in part to the lack of diversity (of medium, as well as race and gender) apparent in the blue chip art market. During the week of Frieze Art Fair New York, however, a new kind of fair is coming to town. Black Market, a one night pop-up art event held at the Bitcoin Center on May 15th, is bringing performers, musicians and artists from around the country together to redefine the art fair model through a medium rarely seen under the florescent lights: hip-hop.

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Bitcoin Center NYC

Bitcoin Center NYC, Home of Black Market on May 15th

"It's an expression of young artists navigating an overwhelmingly ceremonious art industry where white wine and whitewashing are the order of the day," Marvin Jordan, who organized the fair with rapper and performance artist James Allister Sprang (who performs under the name GAZR), tells The Creators Project. The two have collaborated on projects that merge hip-hop with art before, but Black Market is more than just a show, it’s a gathering of many different mediums and styles. From LA-based Net artist Yung Jake, who makes emoji portraits of celebrities and raps about the art world on YouTube, to Prada Mane, a video artist and producer helming the “sad rap” movement, the artists involved in Black Market come from a variety of backgrounds, but all converge on their hip-hop influences. It’s a new crossover between trends that you won’t see at a fair like Frieze, but the movement is gaining traction. “Jay-Z performing with Marina Abramović at PACE Gallery, Kanye West collaborating with Vanessa Beecroft at Fashion Week—” references Jordan, “We believe the time to awaken the dormant links between hip-hop and the art market is now.”

Throughout the night, each artist will both be performing an act and showing off their art, whether that be merchandise, sound, or installation, or at a booth, in true art fair style. Nandi Loaf, an artist whose persona has taken shape in her own online store, will be using her booth as a retail center. Using the internet to sell herself as an artist and a brand, Nandi makes t-shirts donning selfies her Instagram, or hyperbolic slogans like, "Nandi Loaf is Fashion." “The internet is gross,” she tells The Creators Project. “It’s overwhelming, but it’s huge and the internet makes it a lot easier to create a following, interact with an audience, and be seen.” Her work is an art world rendition of the hip-hop celebrity culture constantly on display online and at contemporary art events, and it's in perfect character that she'll strut the fair and show up IRL. “I can’t exist without an audience,” she says, despite her apparent skepticism of the form. “Shout out to my audience.”

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Original tee shirts by Nandi Loaf

It's true: Black Market is all about the audience, about including viewers in the art fair experience as not only consumers, but necessary participants. Devin KKenny, an artist who describes his lyrical practice as “utilizing interdisciplinary and trans-disciplinary approaches to gnosticism and popular culture,” will be hosting a mini-seminar of performative heights. “I haven't really had a good time at any art fair I've attended,” he tells me, “but I'm not much into carpeted floors either. I think Black Market is an interesting amalgam of a concert experience and art fair model, so I think some of the experiential shortcomings will be addressed in a fittingly trill manner.”

Marvin Jordan (left) and James Allister Sprang (R), creators of Black Market

GAZR, Meme

“The lifeblood of our programming consists of deconstructions and reinventions of value in the context of contemporary art,” says Sprang, who will be releasing his new Life Does Not Live mixtape at the event. Sprang's rap persona, GAZR, takes inspirations from internet memes, questions art world heavyweights, and quotes rappers like philosophers—an intriguing representation of the intersection between internet and performance; high-brow and low-brow; art and hip-hop. Though the corporate art fair model may be acting on a larger scale (and budget), Black Market is showing a type of art gathering that is beyond the bounds of a single medium, providing a night of art and performance unheard of in a sterile art fair booth. “If art teaches us how to sharpen our tools,” Sprang concludes, “then hip-hop is the point of our spear.”

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Black Market will be open one night only, May 15th, beginning at 10:30 PM at Bitcoin Center NYC. Buy tickets and donate to Black Market on their Kickstarter, and make sure you come by their fundraising party at Bitcoin Center NYC on April 25th, 6pm-2am.

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