The American Art Fair celebrates spring 2021 American Art Week from May 15-22 with Open Houses by appointment at most galleries during the opening weekend, featured in-gallery exhibitions, as well as online highlights at theamericanartfair.com through June 30.

The Spring 2021 American Art Week heralds new May dates for The American Art Fair beginning in 2022. As announced by the Fair’s Founder, Tom Colville: “We are initiating a comprehensive collaboration under the umbrella of American Art Week with The American Art Fair, lectures and other programming, museum and gallery exhibitions, and the spring American paintings sales to make New York in May a destination for collectors and curators.”

Exhibitors in American Art Week include Alexandre Gallery, American Illustrators Gallery, Avery Galleries, Bernard Goldberg Fine Arts, Conner • Rosenkranz, D. Wigmore Fine Art, D C Moore Gallery, Debra Force Fine Art, Forum Gallery, Godel & Co., Graham Shay 1857, Hirschl & Adler Galleries, John H. Surovek Gallery, Jonathan Boos, Kraushaar Galleries, Menconi + Schoelkopf, Meredith Ward Fine Art, Questroyal Fine Art, Taylor | Graham, Thomas Colville Fine Art, and Vose Galleries.

Gallery highlights include works by Reynolds Beale, Ludwig Bemelmans, George Wesley Bellows, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Robert Indiana, Jacob Lawrence, Frederick Kann, Edward Lamson Henry, Doris Lee, Harriet Frishmuth, Frederick MacMonnies, Willard Leroy Metcalf, Paul Howard Manship, Reginald Marsh, Alfred Maurer, George L.K. Morris, Dale Nichols, Maurice Brazil Prendergast, Raphael Soyer, and Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones.

American Art Week gallery exhibitions include Debra Force Fine Art’s American Impressionism and An Adventurous Spirit: Julian Alden Weir (both through June 18; Hirschl & Adler Galleries’The American Dream: Eight Decades of Reality and Imagination in American Art; and Godel & Co., Inc.’s Director’s Choice: 19th- and Early 20th-Century American Paintings.

Meredith Ward Fine Art’s exhibition Frank Diaz Escalet (1930-2012) features the Puerto Rican-born artist who lived in New York City and Maine, where he created bold and innovative images based on the everyday lives of working people. Largely self-taught, Escalet was a painter and master leather crafter and developed his own technique for creating images out of cut leather that vividly capture the mood of the scene.

Two gallery exhibitions relate to the founding of American Abstract Artists. D. Wigmore Fine Art’s The Birth of American Abstraction: Revisiting the 1936 Concretionist Exhibition considers the 1936 exhibition organized by Albert Eugene Gallatin as a protest against Alfred Barr’s exclusion of American artists in MoMA’s Cubism and Abstract Art. Gallatin’s exhibition included works by Charles Biederman, Alexander Calder, John Ferren, George L. K. Morris, and Charles Green Shaw. In the summer the exhibition traveled to Paris (Galerie Pierre) and London (Mayor Gallery) and Gallatin replaced Calder as the fifth exhibitor. Menconi + Schoelkopf’s The Park Avenue Cubists focuses on Gallatin’s circle which established American Abstract Artists later in 1936 to create opportunities for abstract artists decades before abstract painting would become synonymous with New York painting. A related exhibition focused on American abstract artists is Kraushaar Galleries’ The Contours of Abstraction (through July 2) with works by Esphyr Slobodkina and Dorothy Dehner among others.

Forum Gallery’s Then and Now: American Social Realism (through July 2) focuses on the interwar period when American social realism developed in response to the social, economic, and political upheavals of the 1920s and 30s. Featured are works by Isabel Bishop, Raphael Soyer, Jack Levine, Reginald Marsh, and Ben Shahn.

Finally, two of the American Art Fair’s American Art Week exhibitions have forward-looking themes. Questroyal Fine Art’s Hope Springs Eternal  explores the spirit of optimism in three centuries of American paintings from Bierstadt to Wyeth. Vose Galleries’A Break in the Clouds showcases beach scenes by Charles Hawthorne and Leslie Prince Thompson, colorful garden scenes by Boston School women painters Lee Lufkin Kaula and Edith Scott, and lively landscapes and seascapes by Jane Peterson, William Trost Richards, Robert Salmon, and Theodore Wendel (online and on view at the gallery through June 30).

For all details on American Art Week exhibitions, highlights, and gallery contacts, visit theamericanartfair.com. Please note that most gallery visits including the Open House weekend are by appointment.

The next actual American Art Fair will be held May 14-17, 2022 at its usual venue, Bohemian National Hall at 321 East 73rd Street New York City.