George Morrison, the Ojibwe painter whose abstractions were long excluded from the canon despite running in the same downtown circles as the Abstract Expressionists, is having a record market moment. Bockley Gallery is bringing his work to Independent 20th Century this week. The timing is not accidental: it follows a record-setting auction year for Morrison and lands inside a fair cycle that, by multiple accounts, is currently more interested in looking than buying at the Armory but unusually transactional at the Independent.
The Price Discovery Problem at the Fall Fairs
Artnet's Katya Kazakina reports that both fairs are grappling with the same central anxiety: what is the right number? For Morrison, the question is especially pointed. His market is catching up to a reputation that was always there. The gap between critical standing and market price for artists who were excluded from institutional support for structural reasons (race, geography, Indigenous identity) is not a neutral pricing lag. It is a record of who the market was designed to serve. The fair's enthusiasm for Morrison now is genuine and also indexes exactly the thing the Independent 20th Century's concurrent Black Soho tribute is documenting: a long tradition of artists building real community and real work outside the institutions that then rediscover them on the market's schedule, not theirs.
Emma Kunz, Healing, and the Canonization Loop
The pattern sharpens when you put Morrison next to Emma Kunz at Independent 20th Century, a Swiss healer-artist who insisted she was not an artist at all. She made large geometric drawings as diagnostic tools. The art world decided later that she was an artist. Kunz did not. The fair is now presenting her solo. Both cases, Morrison and Kunz, reveal the same mechanism: the market is very good at pricing rediscoveries and very bad at acknowledging why the original oversight happened. The New York Art Book Fair's 20th anniversary at MoMA PS1, running concurrently, operates on a different logic entirely: zines, queer publishing, work that does not want to be priced at all. The fair ecosystem this week contains its own critique of itself, if you know where to look. For the longer argument about taste as an exclusionary act, Tom Sachs put it plainly: taste excludes, always.