Slow and steady, as the old adage goes, wins the race. Jack Shainman Gallery stands as proof, evolving gradually but assuredly over the past four decades to become one of New York’s most important venues, with a sterling reputation for introducing new talent and nurturing artists’ careers to international superstardom.

Founded in 1984 by Jack Shainman and his partner, Québécois artist Claude Simard, the gallery early on garnered attention for its international and broad outlook, at a time when the view from Manhattan was—like that of the old Saul Steinberg cartoon on the cover of The New Yorker—decidedly blinkered. In particular, the gallery championed Black artists, both from the diaspora and from Africa itself, giving New York debuts to figures who have since become some of the most acclaimed practitioners in contemporary art—Kerry James Marshall, Nick Cave, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, and Hank Willis Thomas among them. 

The gallery has also long presented the work of senior artists such as El Anatsui, Barkley L. Hendricks, and Malick Sidibé. Rather than a deliberate program, however, the gallery’s orientation grew organically. “We were always looking for art that we loved,” Shainman remembers, “and voices that had not been heard, and new ideas that we thought could have a place in the art world”.

Then, just last year, Shainman cut the ribbon on a spectacular new Tribeca gallery, occupying the 20,000-square-foot landmarked banking hall of the 1898 New York Life Insurance Company building on Lafayette Street. Beaux-Arts details include marble columns and paneling, a gracefully curving grand staircase, an ornate gilded coffered ceiling, and even the original vault. These, coupled with detached and reconfigurable white walls, and self-contained pods for the staff offices, make the imposing interior feel simultaneously venerable and futuristic. The impressive statement space has so far seen major exhibitions of Cave, Ojih Odutola, Thomas, Faith Ringgold, and Elizabeth Neel.

For Shainman, the Tribeca venue felt “like a life dream”, he says. “It was not that I was looking for an older historic space but I was looking for the volume, and that was really to give the artists that I work with space that could accommodate their ambitions.” A historical coincidence really confirmed his commitment to the location. The building that now houses the gallery (once home to the famed alternative art space Clocktower Gallery, from 1972 to 2013), although completed by the architectural firm McKim, Mead & White, was begun by the 19th-century architect Stephen Decatur Hatch, who, Shainman discovered the night before The New York Times interviewed him about the new space, also designed the building where he lives.

The recent practice of Québec-based Lapointe, who was born in 1957 and is an established and revered figure in her native Canada, delves into emotional and psychological states by deploying solitary human figures—generally female or androgynous—along with collaged found objects. At once expressionist and metaphorical, her works convey a feminist charge and a consideration of queer subjectivity, while the associations of her materials ripple outwards. A piece of branchy white coral, affixed to the torso of a figure drawn in ink and clothed in sand, for instance, comes from Okinawa, alluding to the communities of women there, who for millennia dove for pearls without the use of any sort of equipment.

The boldly experimental abstract sculptures of Weston enlist process and materials in pursuit of resonance and analogy. In her work, architectural surveillance glass—melted, warped, slumped, fused and precariously balanced, pushed towards its breaking point—is conjoined with lead, concrete, photographic decals, and etched texts. Oscillating between transparency, opacity, and reflection, both literal and not, Weston’s works allude to Black interiority, under pressure and subject to an ever-shifting gaze. Hers is a slow burn, seemingly at odds with the viewing conditions of an art fair. But, she believes, “that friction can be productive. If the work creates a moment of pause inside that accelerated context [...] then the fair's speed becomes part of the pressure the work is already about. In a sense, the fair doesn't work against the piece; it intensifies the very dynamics the work is trying to stage.”

Jack Shainman Gallery’s presentation at Independent, true to form, developed organically, without too many curatorial preconceptions. “The strategy is to make it a small exhibition,” Shainman says, “to put together a cohesive body of work.” Yet, as Weston sees it, “all three of us are working with materiality in ways that refuse easy legibility; there is a shared commitment to process, to the body's entanglement with what it encounters, and to the question of what a material knows or withholds. The conversation between us will be generative precisely because it does not need to be narrated in advance.”