LOS ANGELES — Yesterday, I bypassed Frieze’s VIP opening and headed to two of the city’s alternative art fairs instead: the Post-Fair and the Other Art Fair. As the former’s name suggests, the new kid on the fair block addresses the exclusivity and privatization of typical art fairs by offering low-cost entry while hosting its 29 galleries and project spaces in Santa Monica’s repurposed Art Deco-style post office. Later in the day, the Other Art Fair opened for its 13th edition in Los Angeles, presenting work by 140 independent artists who took center stage and engaged with visitors who could purchase pieces directly. Refreshingly, the only white cubes to be found were floating in craft cocktails.
At Post-Fair, galleries occupied walls along the space’s cavernous wooden corridors. At the booth of PPOW, artist Harry Gould Harvey IV completed a hero’s journey with four new large-scale works on view. Harvey transforms simple materials — matte board and found wood from abandoned mansions — into ritual objects meant to translate esoteric spiritual literature into sources of personal reflection. I was particularly drawn to “Fools Rush In Where Angels Fear To Tread” (2025), which Harvey explained has a direct tie to Los Angeles. On the work’s righthand side, he included a Xerox transfer of late artist Wallace Berman’s “Untitled” (c. 1967), a grid of photos of a hand holding a transistor radio superimposed with symbolical mass-media images. Harvey’s tribute to the pivotal West Coast artist takes the form of a tombstone meant to imbue the work with his positive spirit.
Visitors circled Dylan Spaysky’s three-dimensional hanging works at Good Weather gallery’s presentation, admiring their multiple layers of framed mirrors backlit by night lights with exposed extension cords. Spaysky draws inspiration from cel animation, a technique popularized by Walt Disney animators in the 1930s and a callback to Los Angeles’s film history. Each mirror is embossed with overlapping characters or sets from these early films, reconsidering their contextual and literal construction. Look closely at “1961 mirror” (2025), and you might spot Pongo and Perdita from the animated film One Hundred and One Dalmatians — released in the artwork’s titular year.
Meanwhile, hanging from the walls and adorning the floors at Harlesden High Street were Angela Anh Nguyen’s gun-tufted textiles. The LA-based artist uses tufting — which she coincidentally learned through YouTube tutorials — to contemplate the reflexive nature of American culture wars exacerbated by online media. “I’ve been reading a lot of theory lately” (2023), for one, amusingly depicts a figure having lost a battle to a fallen bookcase awash in titles such as Das Kapital by Karl Marx, White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo, and A Book of Common Prayer by Joan Didion. As I meandered through the rest of the presentations, the atmosphere was cheerful and curious, aided by the long stretches of empty space that allowed for breathing room between the art (and the visitors).
After a rare traffic-free drive back from Santa Monica, I geared up for the opening night of the Other Art Fair in Atwater Village. I had lovely conversations with several artists at the humming fair, including Eden Miller, who debuted paintings of liminal, dreamlike scenes with seraphim taking the shape of blue-toned pelicans and winged fish. Down the hall, I encountered Jess Lin’s works exploring her Taiwanese-American identity as an expat who grew up abroad. Her newer paintings, among them “Marina Martinis” and “Taroko Bao” (both 2024), unexpectedly combine childhood foods with Singaporean and Taiwanese cityscapes to create surreal yet delicious compositions.
In addition to the artist booths, the front room featured a two-person show: In the Land of Gods and Monsters, curated by Feia Studio’s Thomas Martinez Pilnik and Jake Cavallo, who recently raised money for artists impacted by the January wildfires. Anna Marie Tendler, author of Men Have Called Her Crazy (2024), also held pop-up portrait photography sessions, while local artist Judy Baca debuted a mural titled “The Great Wall of Los Angeles” (2025) and artist STVNDID’s “The Play Pen” encouraged visitors to paint in an interactive space.
Both the Other Art Fair and Post-Fair are billed as “alternative” shows — another option, perhaps less stodgy, outside of the blue-chip circuit. However you choose to label them, though, these fairs shared an air of lively jubilation as community members came together to support the real stars of the show: artists.
