Ecologies of the Americas at Frieze New York 2025
Artists at the fair looking at land, rootedness and nature in South and Central America, including Claudia Alarcón, Beatriz Milhazes and Nohemí Pérez
Artists at the fair looking at land, rootedness and nature in South and Central America, including Claudia Alarcón, Beatriz Milhazes and Nohemí Pérez
On Earth Day 2025, we look at some of the artists at Frieze New York this year are exploring our evolving relationship with the earth and other living beings. In particular, those working in Central and South America have created works that connect with the urgencies of climate change and habitat destruction, but also the ways in which the global Covid pandemic has changed the way humans understand their place in the natural world. In works by artists such as Pia Camil, Claudia Alarcón, Maria Nepomuceno and Beatriz Milhazes, we see how environmental connections can be expressed through community-making and an awareness of ancestral traditions of creative kinship.
Beatriz Milhazes at Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel (Stand B14)
Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel is showing works by Beatriz Milhazes in a three-way presentation with Antonio Tarsis and Tadáskía. During Frieze Week, she is also the subject of a display at the Guggenheim, ‘Rigor and Beauty’, which focuses on the environmental aspects of her practice. Milhazes has always referenced nature, particularly the flora of her native Brazil, in her paintings and collage works (her Rio studio overlooks the city’s botanical gardens), combining it with geometric elements to tend towards abstraction rather than depiction. Her singular technique of using flat dried sheets of paint as collaging material even hints at the traditional domestic craft of pressing flowers and plants to preserve them as 2D images. Her most recent paintings investigate more explicitly the spiritual and healing power of nature in a post-pandemic world, and how the natural order shows us cycles of life, death and renewal.
Beatriz Milhazes: Rigor and Beauty is on view at the Guggenheim Museum, New York until 7 September 2025.
Pia Camil at OMR (Stand D4) and Instituto de Visión (Stand D9)
Mexican artist Pia Camil is renowned for her large-scale, community-generated installations, reflecting her interest in the way artists might collaborate and engage with other people. Her most recent works, on show at Frieze New York with both OMR and Instituto de Vision, were created during her 2024 artist residency at Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, California. They signal a shift of focus to exploring the relationship between humans and other species, introducing erotic elements to suggest a mythical dimension to that dialogue (and that, if you see the natural order in fetish terms, humans might be subs more than doms). Camil, who relocated to the historic Aztec city of Acatitlán during the Covid pandemic, is currently planning a community gathering space specifically focused on sharing and learning about humans’ relationship to the natural world.
Claudia Alarcón at Proyectos Ultravioleta (Stand C4)
Part of Proyectos Ultravioleta’s group presentation (alongside Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Hellen Ascoli, Edgar Calel, Rosa Elena Curruchich and Paula Nicho) Claudia Alarcón’s suspended woven textiles employ natural materials and organic forms, reinforcing their implicit (and literal) interconnectedness. Alarcón, a textile artist from the Wichí people of northern Salta, Argentina, was featured at the 2024 Venice Biennale. Working with a collective called Silät, she spins and dyes fibres from the native chaguar plant, before weaving them into textiles. Both in material and narrative, the resulting pieces represent a connection with water and land, and the traditional stories dreamt and told by elders in the community about the relationships that humans forge and break with all living things.
Nohemí Pérez at Instituto de Vision (Stand D9)
The curated stand at Instituto de Vision called ‘Twisted Bodies’ features five artists from the Americas who consider the body as a geographical agent and a singularity that shares the collective struggles of its community. Colombian artist Nohemí Pérez reflects on bodies crossing the Darién Gap, a notoriously dangerous area of marshland and rainforest between Colombia and Panama on a regular migrant route. Over the years, Pérez’s works have consistently used raw linen, charcoal and cotton-thread embroidery supported by copper tubes, as though the paintings themselves have had to be manufactured from available materials, or that they might need to be dismantled and moved at short notice. Her recent canvases, though, explode with dense green foliage, with leaves like scales of armour, suggesting both protection and the violent repulsion of frail bodies. The irony is that the Darién forest itself is one of the most vulnerable living things in these pictures.
Denilson Baniwa, Kelton Fausto Campos and Maria Nepomuceno at A Gentil Carioca (Stand B17)
Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo gallery A Gentil Carioca is also presenting a curated stand, based on the idea of Brazil as earth – as terrain, surface, homeland, nest and fertile ground. The stand’s three artists, Denilson Baniwa, Kelton Campos Fausto and Maria Nepomuceno, each consider the earth in terms of the physical substrate and source of life, but also as a symbol of memory and future, and as the focal plane for urgent social, political and environmental issues. Getting to grips with this material, there is an emphasis on clay in the presentation. Non-binary artist Kelton Campos Fausto, who works in ceramics, performance and painting, looks at the ‘misunderstanding of the Black diaspora in Brazil’, in canvases daubed with earthy tones and peopled by crude black acrylic figures. Maria Nepomuceno references Indigenous communities, weaving traditions and Carnival in her work to question political ideas of ‘cultural diversity’. Indigenous artist Denilson Baniwa creates interventions in his work, interrupting complacent linear ideas of creative evolution and incorporating elements such as beads, seeds, armadillo tails and feathers in his pieces.
Further Information
Frieze New York, The Shed, 7 – 11 May, 2025. Tickets are on sale – don’t miss out, buy yours now. Alternatively, become a member to enjoy premier access, exclusive guided tours and more.
A dedicated online Frieze Viewing Room will open the week before the fair, offering audiences a first look at the presentations and the opportunity to engage with the fair remotely.
Frieze New York is supported by global lead partner Deutsche Bank, continuing its legacy of celebrating artistic excellence on an international scale.
