A moving tribute to Jenni Crain, who died in 2021 at age 30 due to complications of COVID-19, stands out for its quiet minimalism amid the busy aisles at Frieze New York. New York’s Gordon Robichaux has devoted its booth, in the fair’s Focus section, to the artist, curator, and dealer, with a selection of her wood and glass sculptures, as well as a painting and several photographs.

The presentation coincides with a two-part exhibition at the gallery’s Union Square space. It pays tribute to Crain’s own art practice, showing her own work, as well as her career as a curator, with a group show featuring artists she championed, many of whom were women. That includes March Avery, now 92, for whom Crain curated a 2019 solo show at the Louise McCagg Gallery at New York’s Barnard College—leading to representation for the artist at international gallery Blum and Poe.

“Jenni’s career as both an artist and a curator are very intertwined,” gallery cofounder Jacob Robichaux told me. “What keeps Jenni’s legacy alive, frankly, is the relationships between all these different aspects of what she did.”

To continue her work supporting other artists, the artist’s family has established the Jenni Crain Foundation, running a grant program that has already helped roughly a dozen artists.

Gordon Robichaux’s booth featuring Jenni Crain at Frieze New York 2025. Photo: by Greg Carideo, courtesy of Gordon Robichaux, New York.

“These are small grants, finishing grants for projects, because Jenni always needed that when she was working on something—you know, $3,000 for framing or $5,000 for this research trip,” gallery cofounder Sam Gordon told me. “So that’s been incredible, because that’s what she did. She lifted up so many artists.”

It has been hard for the dealers to cope with Crain’s death, but they’ve looked to the work they’ve done with artists involved with ACT UP, the grassroots political group fighting the AIDS pandemic, for an example.

“That’s a really important group, and they talk about [turning] grief into action. So that’s what we did,” Gordon said.

Concurrent with Frieze, the gallery is hosting a solo presentation that realizes the final artwork Crain conceived, a site-responsive sculpture she designed for the space. Based on her fabrication drawings, it was her largest and most ambitious design, a lattice with complex joinery made of basswood.

Installation photograph of Gordon Robichaux’s gallery exhibition featuring Jenni Crain’s last work. Photo: by Greg Carideo, courtesy of Gordon Robichaux, New York.

“Jenni actually met with us right before she passed away,” Robichaux said. He was emotional talking about his late friend, as the wound of Crain’s untimely passing is still fresh three and a half years later.

“I met Jenni when she was an assistant to an artist who I was friends with. She actually was very instrumental in helping us in the early years of our gallery, working at the gallery, helping us,” he added. “She was a person with high level of sensitivity to the world and to other people, who had a great deal of integrity and focus and energy and generosity.”

Crain worked in a variety of mediums, including smooth, neatly joined modular walnut sculptures that reflect her interest in small details, and canvases rubbed with wax, a material that would blend into the surface, leaving traces of the artist’s hand, as well as the wooden supports on the backside of the canvas.

Jenni Crain, Study III (2020). Photo: Greg Carideo, courtesy of Gordon Robichaux, New York and the Jenni Crain Foundation.

A trio of related works, each titled Gesture, all take the dimensions of an industrial sheet of plywood, 48 inches square. One is a canvas, slick with wax, deceptively simple. The second, a sheet of tempered glass, stands upright, mounted in a metal support. In the third, the glass is neatly framed in an open-sided plywood box.

“This is the largest display of her mature body of work,” Robichaux said, noting that prices are between $6,500 and $36,000. “It concerns the relationship between architecture, design, space and also memory, bodily experience, perception.”

Barbara Probst, Exposure #158: N.Y.C., Grand & Mercer Streets, 06.10.20, 11:46 a.m. (2020). Jenni Crain is the model. Photo: courtesy of Kuckei+Kuckei, Berlin ©VG Bild-Kunst, Barbara Probst.

There are also photographs, small but carefully framed snapshots with impeccable lighting, capturing plants and rocks in the desert, and furniture in museums, inspired by Crain’s interest in how an object’s meaning can shift with time.

A vintage family photo, where she was unable to identify the person reclining in a deck chair, has been paired with a recreation of the furniture in the image, propped against the wall—but they are two separate works, so as they pass to new owners, the origin of the chair will become just as much a mystery as the sitter in the black and white image.

Jenni Crain, A & B (…not of light on things but of things in light), 2016. Photo: courtesy of Gordon Robichaux, New York and the Jenni Crain Foundation.

“It’s very exciting for us to bring all these works together. I think even some of her close friends have not seen all of these works [in person], only in images in some cases,” Robichaux added. “But also, you can imagine, it’s bittersweet. We’re just happy that the work is still here and that Jenni left all of this incredible work for us to share.”

Frieze New York is on view at the Shed, 545 West 30th Street, New York, New York, May 7–11, 2025. 

“Jenni Crain” and “Untitled Exhibition (for Jenni)” are on view May 4–June 15, 2025 at Gordon Robichaux, 41 Union Square West, #925 and #907, New York, New York (enter at 22 East 17th Street on Saturdays and Sundays).