Founding director, Hannah Traore Gallery, New York
Toronto-born Hannah Traore launched her eponymous gallery in New York’s Lower East Side in January 2022 at the age of just 27, with the avowed purpose of ‘advocating for and celebrating artists who have been historically marginalised’. These include artists whose careers are well established outside the United States, but whose New York representation has been scant – for instance, the Moroccan photographer Hassan Hajjaj – and those whose careers are just taking off, such as the Pakistani artist and fashion designer Misha Japanwala. Traore’s combination of art with fashion and photography speaks to an impressive fearlessness at blurring generic lines that is entirely in keeping with the contemporary moment. The gallery showed works by Renée Cox at the latest edition of the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair in New York, and a booth featuring the New-York based, Colombian artist Camila Falquez and the Toronto painter Moya Garrison-Msingwana at Frieze LA this year.