Inside New York’s Affordable Art Fair, from Persian miniatures to Mylar

The Affordable Art Fair opened its fall New York edition Wednesday night at the Starrett-Lehigh Building in Chelsea. As the First Look crowd thinned, Ciaran Escoffery stood on the sidewalk outside with two bubble-wrapped canvases under her arms, one of them marked with her name in marker.

Escoffery, an administrator in the president’s office at Dartmouth College, bought three pieces. She has been coming to the fair for years.

The fair returns to New York twice a year. This fall, it fills the Starrett-Lehigh Building with more than 90 galleries from 14 countries. Prices run from $100 to $12,000.

Escoffery started collecting about 15 years ago in Chicago through an access program at the Hyde Park Art Center, where a friend ran the place. She does not call herself an art expert.

“All I know is what speaks to me,” she said. “I just know when I look at it, I have a certain feeling and it speaks to me.”

Most of what she owns stays wrapped in her small New York apartment, waiting for a home with more wall space. “Right now just having them makes me feel happy,” she said. Every so often she unwraps one to look at it.

Two of the three pieces she carried out were by Lee Bu-Kang, a Seoul artist who builds hillside townscapes from wood pulled from demolition sites, shown by Mookji Art Contemporary.

Up close, the little houses are scraps of salvaged lumber, their paint and grain left as found, stacked into dense neighborhoods climbing a slope. His wall text calls the work “a diary of nostalgia” for blocks giving way to high-rises.

The third piece was a commission by Judith Laurence, a stylized mountain landscape with blue peaks over a pale foreground. Escoffery had wanted it on an earlier visit but found it already sold. Laurence agreed to make her one but would not copy the sold work exactly, Escoffery said, so its first buyer would keep a one-of-a-kind.