Butter Fine Art Fair Los Angeles and Its Artist-First Model

Feature image: Butter Fine Art Fair. Photograph by Erhan Us.

BUTTER Fine Art Fair brought its Indianapolis–based art fair to Los Angeles for the first time. Held from February 26–March 1, 2026, at Hollywood Park in Inglewood, the fair offered a four–day experience highlighting the creative output of the African diaspora. The event featured independent, emerging, mid–career, and established artists and was organized concurrently with LA Art Week.

The fair is organized by Stoodeo, a production initiative launched by GANGGANG founders Mali and Alan Bacon. Stoodeo aims to scale artist–focused projects nationally, and BUTTER LA is the company’s first major project. Built upon five years of fair experience in Indianapolis, the organization presents a program in LA that prioritizes artists, emphasizing access, arts education, and community engagement.

Micah Johnson, who began his career as a Major League Baseball player, transitioned into art and storytelling as a visual narrator and sculptor. When confronted with his young nephew’s question, “Can astronauts be Black?” [04:17], he redefined his creative purpose, creating the character Aku. This question motivated Johnson to focus his art and storytelling on empowering children’s imaginations.

Johnson’s portfolio ranges from pencil portraits to live digital animations, from the cover of TIME magazine to a 30,000–square–foot exhibition at Art Basel, and collaborations with brands such as Beats by Dre and Starbucks, establishing a significant impact in both the art world and digital media. His work is centered on creating worlds that encourage young dreamers.

Ashley Nora [09:35] is a visual artist combining painting and sculpture, exploring the depths of human emotion and identity. Highlighting shades of blue in her work, she invites viewers into meditation and introspective spaces through light, shadow, and color; her pieces foreground melancholy, introspection, and the nuances of the human psyche.

She developed her practice without formal education, entirely through personal exploration, color theory, and emotional resonance. This intuitive approach manifests in both her two and three–dimensional works. In recent works such as Of Heaven, Still, she meditates on divine origins and the resilience of Black identity. Figures in her paintings reinterpret Renaissance traditions, situating Black bodies in historically excluded spaces, asserting their sanctity, strength, and visibility.

Fulton Leroy Washington, also known as Mr. Wash, is a fully self–taught [07:18] artist, educator, and speaker. In 1997, he was wrongfully convicted of a nonviolent crime, and while serving his sentence, he developed his skills in oil and acrylic painting. After serving 21 years, his sentence was commuted by President Obama in 2016.

In his early works, Mr. Wash depicted fellow inmates in civil clothing, portraying them as free and idealized through photorealistic portraits. Some portraits include shared fears and anxieties, while others depict psychological fractures, such as large facial scars. At the fair, Mr. Wash participated with a canvas including a large version of his birth certificate and the socio–political work Y USS. He continues to create in his studio in Compton today.

Kaima Marie, the daughter of a Nigerian immigrant father and a white mother, focuses her collage practice [10:00] on identity, belonging, and erased narratives. Her work addresses urbanization, capitalism, and spatial memory, encouraging viewers to re–examine often overlooked spaces. Layered compositions establish tension between personal experience and collective history, treating memory as a rewritable structure rather than a fixed record.

Marie began creating not as a historian but to ensure certain narratives 'take up space', confronting archives, documents, and memories that demand preservation. In large–scale immersive collages, she merges archival material with personal photography, deliberately interrupting linear narratives through geometric transformations of paper, positioning identity as fluid and multi–layered.

Deonna Craig, founder of Art by Deonna [11:14], defines her practice not as an escape but as an internal refuge and site of resilience. The canvas becomes a surface where the perception of the world is directly transmitted. Her creative process operates “inside–out,” with conscious brushstrokes forming composition while intuitive layers guide the work. Craig regards the unconscious as the true project manager, likening her technique to the plotting of a mystery novel: “Each painting progresses along a tension line whose outcome is unknown.” The result is a record of exploration rather than a finalized design.

Her professional experience includes production assistance on The Jerry Springer Show and corporate management and investigative work. After a fifteen-year corporate career, she fully transitioned to art, positioning creativity at the center of her professional identity. Her practice bridges painting with pedagogical and social engagement, framing art as a space for collective experience and transformation. Works at the fair were shaped by experiences of visiting a cave and viewing the earth from an airplane.

Israel Solomon [11:41], based in Indianapolis, began drawing at an early age. Childhood and teenage sketches of cartoon characters, superheroes, Star Wars figures, and sneaker culture laid the foundation for his visual curiosity.

Over the years, his practice evolved from drawing to painting, shaped by over a decade of technical and aesthetic exploration. Though often linked to Cubism, Solomon’s approach emphasizes structural balance over formal reference. Each form and color layer in his compositions [regardless of foreground or background] is visually weighted equally. Positive and negative spaces are consciously balanced to produce light, shadow, dynamism, and emphasis, creating a 'color pulse' that guides the viewer’s eye fluidly through the composition. His work celebrates process and vitality as much as final outcomes.

FITZ! [12:08] grounds their practice in personal narrative, belonging, and perseverance. Growing up in Indianapolis [referred to by the artist as “NAPTOWN”] shaped a dynamic, fragile, yet character–building environment that informs their visual language. Relocation across schools and to the South, including Florida during high school, deepened explorations of identity and direction.

Production intertwines with biographical ruptures. Physical disabilities, personal challenges, and mental disruption serve as driving forces drawing FITZ! closer to art. Drawing functions not only as an aesthetic choice but as a structure to regain control over inner chaos. The works are energetic, direct, and often bear traces of an internal necessity. The creative process operates as an act of reckoning with the past, reconciling with belonging, and situating personal narrative within a collective context, rendering the practice both a visual expression of personal history and an affirmation of selfhood.

Brochevski (Amai Rawls Jr) transforms legal tender into both material and symbolic artwork, treating money not only as circulating value but as a psychological, historical, and emotional carrier. His collages, made entirely from hand–cut U.S. dollars, explore wealth, desire, social mobility, and intergenerational fragility.

Each piece begins with a pre–designed sketch, followed by highly controlled, irreversible cuts using X–Acto knives. The limited color palette of U.S. bills demands precision in layering and surface balance. Every cut carries both aesthetic satisfaction and material risk, making failure both formal and financial. The process is thus both conceptual and performative.

By deconstructing money, he subjects one of the most sacred symbols of American mythology to disassembly; his works can also be read as an archaeology of economic iconography. National identity, power, and value imaginaries are renegotiated on the cut and reassembled surfaces of banknotes.

Leading the curatorial team is Nakeyta Moore, founder of ARTLOUDLA. Creative directors such as Mali and Alan Bacon Jr. join the team, while London–based curator and writer Kimberly Drew has joined BUTTER LA for the first time. The system, operating with an artist–focused model, directs all sales revenue to the artists, applying no commissions or censorship.

The fair offers a cultural experience across 14,000 square meters and outdoor activities on the Hollywood Park campus, bringing together 18 California–based, 9 national/international, and 12 Indiana–based artists with the LA audience. The organization positions itself as both a celebration and a commemoration within the context of Black History Month. Previous editions’ artist rosters have included creators whose works have been held in prestigious collections and museums such as the Smithsonian NMAAHC, SF MoMA, Whitney, LACMA, Tate Britain, Rubell Family Collection, Studio Museum in Harlem, and Dakar Biennale.

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