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Revolt of the Ultra-Contemporaries

When two ascendent artists showed up on the front page of the Times as examples of a young art market collapse, they decided to rally together, offering their generation a little more agency in a ruthless, unforgiving system.

Lewis and Zuckerman launched the Artists First Collective, whose mission is to champion fairness, transparency, and collaboration in the art world—or, “support artists in the ways we needed to be supported,” Lewis told me. Photo: LaMont Richardson
Julie Brener Davich
March 7, 2025

Amani Lewis pulled up to 311 East Broadway last week with two paintings in the trunk of their car. Lewis, who paints soulful, brightly colored portraits of the people in their life, was in town for the installation of their group show, Primary Voices in a Secondary World. The Miami-based artist had driven 18 hours up I-95 because it’d been too expensive to ship the artworks to New York. Their co-curator was Brooklyn-based artist Allison Zuckerman, who paints uproarious mashups of famous portraits with cartoonish iconography.