Events

05.18.2026

The Ceramic Standouts at NADA New York 2026

The ceramicists you couldn't walk past at NADA New York and the nine galleries behind them

By: Ilsy Jeon

May 18, 2026


Starrett-Lehigh Building
601 W 26th Street
New York, NY 10001

Sprightly bursts of color and whimsy welcomed visitors as they arrived at this year's NADA New York fair, a timely antidote to the long shadow of a frigid winter. 120 galleries, art spaces, and nonprofit organizations from fifteen countries gathered at the Starrett-Lehigh Building in Chelsea from May 7th to 11th.

Ceramics appeared less dominant this year, surfacing instead in sprinklings of mixed media, with clay elevated and expanded beyond its traditional sensibility. Tappeto Volante Projects devoted their solo booth to Keiko Narahashi, whose playful and interactive works combine glazed stoneware and steel silhouettes exploring portraiture and landscape. Pure clay forms were present too, their glazework reminiscent of Narahashi's watercolors, with evocative titles contextualizing the animated faces and vignettes.

Western Exhibitions presented the works of Lilli Carré, whose clay forms, shaped like anvils, are inlaid with lenticular prints of a face morphing into a flower, a fire-starter rope suggesting a fuse about to blow, or a tongue licking the base of the sculpture. The images shift as you move, cheeky and clever, demanding a second look.

Other mixed-media uses of clay were found at Ala Projects with the works of Gabriela Agreda, whose image transfers on reclaimed ceramic tile, embedded in cement blocks, memorialize the deteriorating architecture of Caracas, Venezuela. At Galerie Isabelle Lesmeister, Johanna Strobel's installation combined ceramics, cotton webbing, metal fasteners, and aluminum leaf into forms that evoke bones and abstracted bodies suspended from above. At Con Altura, George Rodriguez conjures ancient relics in the form of colossal ceramic guardians, tomb sculptures, and shrines, fusing funk ceramics with pre-Columbian statuary into a boldly contemporary context.

Beyond the hybrid material explorations, a handful of artists demonstrated what ceramics alone, fully mastered, is capable of. Yuka Nishihisamatsu at Eunoia Gallery, Raina Lee and Sachi Moskowitz at La Loma Gallery, Saskia Fleishman at Galleri Urbane,and Mel Arsenault at Galerie Nicolas Robert each demonstrate a profound fluency with the material, their vibrant vessels and sculptures marked by magisterial glazework and meticulous detail. Their work speaks to the vitality of a new generation of ceramicists actively shaping the future of the medium.

Here are nine standout galleries showcasing ceramics at this year's NADA New York.

EUNOIA

Kobe, Japan

Yuka Nishihisamatsu

Ala projects

Miami, United States

Gabriela Agreda

Returning to Caracas in the aftermath of Venezuela's violent 2019 protests, Gabriela Agreda photographed her surroundings—the architecture, buildings, streets, and people—documenting the deterioration and recording what once was. The names of those killed, written on the streets, have faded with time. Yet, Agreda resists that erasure by creating concrete slabs, “abstracted sidewalks,” that are part archive, part tombstone, memorializing a city and its people.

Tappeto Volante Projects

New York City, United States

Keiko Narahashi

La Loma

Los Angeles, United States

Raina Lee & Sachi Moskowitz

Raina Lee returned to NADA New York, this time with La Loma Gallery and a body of elevated work: sculptural paintings larger in scale, with exquisite trompe-l'œil frames inspired by oil paintings. The source material is canonical (Vallayer-Coster and Moillon, pulled from the Louvre), but Lee isn't interested in facsimile. She reinterprets these paintings as textured, luminous ceramics that contemporize the Old Masters with reverence and a playful charm.

_{Sachi Moskowitz | Big Sur Vase | 2026 | stain and glaze on stoneware | 34 x 14 x 14 inches | Photo: Sam Jeon}

_{Detail shot of Big Sur Vase | Photo: Sam Jeon}

_{Detail shot of Big Sur Vase | Photo: Sam Jeon}

_{Detail shot of Big Sur Vase | Photo: Sam Jeon}

WESTERN EXHIBITIONS

Chicago, United States

Lilli Carré

GALERIE ISABELLE LESMEISTER

Regensburg, Germany

Johanna Strobel

Skeletal forms (torso, pelvis) are suspended from above, the unglazed ceramics resembling bones, with cotton webbing woven through and around the clay scaffolding, dramatizing the body's architecture. Looking closer, brown apples treated with silvery aluminum leaf are caged within, glimmering against the metal fasteners that hold everything together. Strobel's works are both fragile and dominant, soft in their cotton and hard in their clay, an allusion to the contradictions of the body itself. Against the wall, ceramic pillows stamped with facial features (an ear and eyes) reference memory foam, a visual paradox, again playing soft against hard.