# Independent Art Fair 2026 | Booth 421

URL: https://vielmetter.com/fairs/independent-art-fair-2026/
May 14 — 17, 2026 · Artists: Samuel Levi Jones, Nate Lewis, Robert Pruitt

**Installation photo credit: Dawn Blackman**

Pier 36, New York, NY
 **VIP Preview:** Thursday, May 14, 2026
 **Public Days:**Friday May 15 – Sunday, May 17, 2026

Vielmetter Los Angeles is excited to present new works by Samuel Levi Jones, Nate Lewis, and Robert Pruitt for the 2026 iteration of Independent. The presentation, conceived of as three interrelated exhibitions, will spotlight each of the artist’s distinctly tactile approaches to image-making.

Indianapolis-based artist Samuel Levi Jones’s paintings and assemblages question authority, representation, and recorded history. Jones’s practice is centered around physically deconstructing books associated with systems of power and control – primarily medical, legal and historical textbooks – then re-assembling them into abstract, grid-like compositions. The finished works expose the seams of their source material, which is laboriously rearranged and combined with pulped paper to create painterly surfaces. His newest body of work echoes this metaphorical “undoing”, incorporating elements of a disassembled American flag and alluding to an empire in decline.

Nate Lewis’s intricate drawings treat the surface of the paper as a sculptural material, pulling back individual layers to create a dimensionality that recalls topographic maps or animal hides. Figures rendered in graphite and ink are interspersed with frottage, embossing, and other printing techniques in dynamic visual interpretations of music and capoeira, the Afro-Brazilian spiritual martial-arts practice which doubles as a defense and a dance. Lewis’s new works introduce imagery of butterflies, their flight patterns and delicate wing structure acting as a framework to portray figures in motion and to experiment with surface treatments, texture, and pattern.

Robert Pruitt’s portraits fuse together the mundane and the surreal in their representations of figures shrouded in sumptuous textiles, ethereal substances, and otherworldly adornments. Grounded in coffee- washes, Pruitt’s large-scale figurations in conté, charcoal, and pastel evocatively bring to life the artist’s visualization of a Black past, present, and future. The works incorporate religious and spiritual iconography, images culled from science fiction and comic books, and depictions of African artifacts and symbolic objects in their exploration of a Black American conception of transcendence and mythology. These new works expand his use of color to include vibrant blues, greens, pinks and bronzes, drawing from a growing mythology of characters, gestures, and forms articulated in earlier bodies of work.