Sarah Braman, 'Breakfast,' 2011. (Courtesy the artist and Mitchell-Innes and Nash)

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, has selected artist Sarah Braman as the winner of its 2013 Maud Morgan Prize, which is given every other year to a female Massachusetts artist "who has demonstrated creativity and vision, and who has made significant contributions to the contemporary arts landscape." Ms. Braman, who resides in Amherst, Mass., and is a co-founder of the Lower East Side's Canada gallery, will receive a $10,000 prize and a one-person show at the museum.

“I am thrilled to be acknowledged by the MFA, where my passion for art was stoked as a teenager," Ms. Braman said in a statement. "An invitation to show in the museum is an honor and one that is very personal for me. What a thrill to imagine that high school students coming to the MFA for the first time might encounter a sculpture of mine!”

Ms. Braman's sculptures often combine translucent plexiglas boxes with found materials (hunks of campers, chairs, slabs of wood). Marked with patches of paint (often neon-colored spray) and balanced at precarious angles, they're elegant and gritty works, like Joel Shapiro pieces that have suddenly taken an interest in light and air and the detritus of modern American life. It's handsome, sometimes melancholy, stuff. She has had recent one-person shows at Mitchell-Innes & Nash in New York, and International Art Objects in Los Angeles.

Congratulations, Ms. Braman.

333 Broome Street.

It’s hardly been a year since Marlborough Gallery's top director, Pierre Levai, appointed his then-23-year-old son, Max, to revive the institution’s blue-chip, but stodgy, reputation. As the new director of Marlborough Chelsea, the younger Mr. Levai has already rebranded the gallery into a youthful enterprise totally distinct from its Midtown forebear, introducing names like Robert Lazzarini, Rashaad Newsome and duo Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe to a roster once devoted to Fernando Botero, Dale Chihuly and other established market-makers.

Now, Marlborough Chelsea is digging even deeper into the downtown scene with plans to sublet a project space that measures close to 2,000 feet at the soon-to-be new home of Lower East Side gallery Canada.

Until its lease expired this summer, Canada, which represents indie stars Devendra Banhart, Joe Bradley, Xylor Jane and Joanna Malinowska, operated in a small space off a shared hallway at 55 Chrystie Street, just above Canal. So when co-founder and director Phil Grauer discovered that the former printing shop at 333 Broome Street (between Chrystie and Bowery) was for rent, it seemed like the ideal upgrade: roughly 4,200 square feet, industrial architecture and direct street access.

But it was too expensive for Canada alone. “We needed to find a tenant, and we thought it would be nice to find someone who wasn’t doing retail and wasn’t a Chinatown bus station,” Mr. Grauer said. Canada considered approaching neighboring galleries, but ultimately decided against it. “We wouldn’t want to be governing over local friends in the Lower East Side," he said. "Plus, given the square footage, it’s still out of reach for the small, independent spaces we would’ve liked to support.”

Chelsea heavyweights like Lehmann Maupin had opened annex galleries in the neighborhood before, so Mr. Grauer thought of his old friend Pascal Spengemann, who joined Marlborough Chelsea as a director earlier this year, after the gallery he founded with Kelly Taxter back in 2003, Taxter & Spengemann, closed.

Indeed, Mr. Spengemann was interested. “Not every artist is ready to show at a 7,000-square-foot gallery on 25th Street,” he said. Canada signed a 10-year lease, while Marlborough Chelsea agreed to a year-by-year sublet for the adjacent gallery at 331 Broome Street. “This space will be for artists who have less experience showing their work and are less well known,” he said.

Speaking from the NADA Hudson fair this past weekend, Mr. Spengemann added that the artist on view at the gallery’s booth there, Amy Brener, was a good example of a candidate for the Broome Street gallery. Her resin and plexiglass sculpture, a kind of rainbow-colored stalagmite on sale for $10,000, had garnered attention at the gallery’s recent group show “More and Different Flags,” but, at 30 years old, she doesn’t exactly have a sprawling CV.

Details about opening exhibitions and any changes to the galleries' programs are still up in the air, but both parties said they hope to open in November. Except, "realistically," Mr. Spengemann added, it will probably be closer to January.

July 30, 12 p.m.: Updated the size of the spaces.

You might say NADA, an organization that now boasts some 300 members and has run an annual fair in Miami since 2003, is in expansion mode. Last summer it inaugurated a modest fair in Hudson, N.Y. And earlier this month Gallerist visited, for the purposes of leading a panel discussion, the first installment of Nada Cologne, a 33-exhibitor event that took place inside the vast, 186-exhibitor Art Cologne, which, now in its 46th edition, is the world’s oldest art fair.

Inserting one fair inside another and cobranding them with posters around town that read “Art Cologne + Nada” is unprecedented. Generally, satellite fairs are considered distractions by the mothership, parasites that sap it of collectors. The experiment that is NADA Cologne came about because NADA director Heather Hubbs has known Art Cologne director Daniel Hug since the mid ’90s in Chicago, where he had an art gallery and she was working for one. Mr. Hug moved to Los Angeles and opened a new gallery, and Ms. Hubbs went to work for Chicago fair organizer Tom Blackman. Mr. Hug joined Art Cologne in 2008, when Ms. Hubbs was five years into her job with NADA, and, as he began thinking of ways to inject new life into a regional fair, they began talking about collaborating.

NADA is an international fair, but in Cologne it came off as very New York. The entire Cologne fair features only 12 New Yorkers. But NADA alone had 11, a full third of its exhibitors. When Gallerist stopped by the booth of Lower East Side gallery Invisible-Exports, we were told that one German had asked, “NADA. Is that an Orchard Street thing?”

Arguably, Art Cologne has as much to gain from NADA’s hip brand as NADA does from Art Cologne’s hefty one. New Yorker David Zwirner, who is regularly named among the world’s most powerful dealers, was a high-profile addition to the fair this year, with a sizable booth in the main part of the fair, and while it’s true this was a homecoming for him—his father, Rudolf Zwirner, founded Art Cologne—a Zwirner director, Kristine Bell, told us that they’d been excited about the addition of NADA. (The fair, incidentally, was a rousing success for Zwirner, who parted with a Georg Baselitz painting for $3 million and an Isa Genzken sculpture for €250,000 [about $329,000], among other artworks, selling mostly to German clients.)

On the panel discussion Gallerist moderated, New York collector Michael Hort groused about certain NADA galleries that came to Cologne with only art that was easy to ship—what some in the art world refer to as “suitcase art.” It’s a cost-saving approach that avoids the risk of shipping heavy work and failing to sell it, but one that can make the booth look unambitious. But let’s be fair to these mostly undercapitalized galleries who struggle to keep their overheads low, and who can only afford Cologne—consider the air fare for employees, and Germany’s steep VAT taxes, especially for editioned artworks like prints and photographs—because of NADA’s low, low booth cost of around $4,500.

There were, though, plenty of booths that passed the Hort test. Nicelle Beauchene, for instance, brought a solo show of abstract paintings by Jim Lee, priced from $3,500 to $10,000 (a lot of the work at NADA skewed toward this low price point). James Fuentes also had a solo booth, an appealing, minimalist display of monitors showing World Trade Center-related films by Jonas Mekas. “In a way, we are testing the market here,” said a Fuentes rep.

By Thursday evening, when Gallerist departed, NADA’s New York dealers were looking a bit weary—especially those like Canada, Lisa Cooley and Untitled, who had come to NADA straight from the Dallas Art Fair and whose jetlag was likely heightened by culture shock. (Untitled’s Joel Mesler gamely sported a Mavericks cap.) Sitting on a couch in his booth beneath wilting houseplants—a project by his artist Elena Pankova—Canada’s Philip Grauer observed that in Cologne, NADA’s European exhibitors had the advantage over the New Yorkers commerce-wise, which was maybe just as well, as a bit of payback: the New Yorkers have long had the upper hand in Miami. He conceded Mr. Hort his point about suitcase-art. “There are real art forces at work here,” he said. “He’s giving us advice.” Some New Yorkers, like Lisa Cooley and Invisible-Exports, had already broken even, but none were raving about sales. “Waiting to see what happens over the weekend” was a common refrain.

But it’s possible these NADA dealers have been spoiled by the abundance at their Miami fair where, even during the darkest days of the recession, the booths thrummed with collector activity. It was headier than ever this past December, when NADA amped up the me-first frenzy by introducing an additional, earlier, super-VIP preview hour for members of the recently formed “Friends of NADA” group, something they plan to also do in New York. By comparison, Cologne may have looked sleepier. People tended to trickle in, and then be rendered inconspicuous by the sheer vastness of the convention center. But looks, let’s remember, can be deceiving. Ludwig Museum director Kasper König may not have rolled with an entourage, as museum directors tend to do in Miami, but he did come by.

A final judgment of the NADA Cologne experiment will have to wait until all the participating dealers’ postmortems roll in. In the meantime, for Art Cologne, it may already have paid off: on Thursday, the fair’s overall attendance was up 12 percent over the corresponding day last year, even despite competition from the opening of the Art Brussels fair, a two-hour train ride away. Next year, Mr. Hug said, he plans to shorten the fair by a day, bringing it in line with the Wednesday through Sunday model familiar from fairs like Art Basel and, probably, concentrating attendance for that packed-aisle effect.

As for NADA, next week its expansion continues with New York where, as opposed to the Cologne edition’s open-plan format, which is also favored by the Independent fair, the booths will have solid walls designed by the architects Common Room. Which may be for the best. Good fences, it’s said, make good neighbors, especially at art fairs.

sdouglas@observer.com

"Ooey Gooey" (2011) by Nicholas Buffon. (Courtesy Callicoon Fine Arts)

In “Applied Flesh,” his first New York solo show, Nicholas Buffon uses five paintings and two incredible drawings to get a view of what it means to live in time—in the paintings, by recording the full weight of the momentary action of making a mark; and in the drawings, by diagramming the full scope of the patterns created by singular actions when they’re repeated.

In Ooey Gooey, That Icky Sticky, Gummy Stuff and Space Nugz IV, space is something that must be simultaneously built up and covered over. Using varying shades of white, along with pale blues and pinks, Mr. Buffon divides his canvas, like a child with a coloring book, into roughly rectangular blocks that can be dealt with piece by piece. (Also like a child’s coloring book, the paintings are marked by whatever occasional snot, blood, dirt or footprints might happen to happen to them when they’re unstretched.) In place of a coloring book’s preprinted lines, but with the same effect of pre-empting conscious decision making and pinning the process of composition directly to the material surface, Mr. Buffon uses the natural irregularities of cheap canvas. The paintings becomes transparent records of their own making.

In between the whitish blocks are repeated, linear forms in various shades of green. On Ooey Gooey, they seem to move in slow motion, like the visual trails left by a too-bright light; on Space Nugz IV, they’re delicate and pale, like new spring leaves. A small, untitled canvas by the artist’s father shows a face mostly painted over in white, with only a red-lipped mouth and single large eye still visible.

If the paintings try to picture time by isolating its process, the drawings work by mapping its effect: like medieval comic strips, they imagine themselves in God’s place and see everything at once. Made to design, diagram and document Mr. Buffon’s performance pieces, as well as to be pieces in their own right, Time Curtain and Time Drain show multiple iterations of the artist, with yellow hair, blue jeans and white socks, as he poses, dances, marches, vamps, does somersaults, whacks himself on the forehead in surprise, pretends his hands are eyeglasses and crawls under another Buffon’s legs. Drawn in ordinary black pen and colored pencil with a casually decisive, cartoonish line, their tone is funny without being jokey and honest without being overwrought. The obsessive filling of space is pushed to the back: in Time Drain, in the form of a monochromatic field of black, but in Time Curtain, in the form of black and green horizontal ruled lines that begin to skip as they get higher on the page. The artist’s nib got dirty. The reality of happenstance—the fact that however it happens to happen is how it will be—is given its due but not asked to bear any symbolic weight. If it were meant to mean anything more than it does, it would no longer be happenstance.

But is he actually whacking himself in disbelief, there in the bottom right-hand corner of Time Curtain, or is the sequence an illusion? Mr. Buffon draws himself kneeling on one knee, with four faces mutating through four grotesque expressions and six overlapping right arms in alternating shades of healthy pink and jaundiced yellow. It’s a convention of indicating motion as old as figurative art, and we read it as automatically as we read a black circle in a white circle as an eye, or a pointy blob of yellow as hair, or a sunrise followed by a sunset as a day, or a sequence of logically associated thoughts as a mind, or a line of marks that wander across two dimensions as a painting. But his hand could be moving the other way, down from the forehead, or even not at all. If we could see them all at once, we would appreciate that each moment was its own moment—each part its own part, each mark its own separate mark—and a multitude of new relationships among them would become clear. The separation would have the paradoxical effect of reinforcing the unity of the whole.

In the center of Time Curtain, like a wrong-headed but desperately difficult-to-dislodge habit of counting days and taking things for granted, or like the shaped relics of image and word that we use to travel from moment to moment, is a little brick wall. Half a dozen little Buffons are trying to get past it—they peer over, they lean to the side, they stick their tongues out like Snoopy when he’s exhausted. But one of them—is it the one who began the drawing, the one who dated it at the end, or the one who drew this very section?—finds a round hole drilled through the middle of the bricks, and he puts his eye to it. We can’t see his face—we can only see the eye, because he’s on the wall’s far side, looking at us. A black exclamation point hangs over his head.

Recording the action of making a mark with rigorous silence and simplicity, on the other hand, are the series of “frottages” that Gerald Ferguson, who died in 2009, made in the last decade of his life. Arriving at his technique by way of text paintings, and stencils of letters and punctuation marks, Ferguson draped canvas over such sturdy, functional objects as trash can lids and steel drain grates, and rolled over them with black enamel paint. The dense black says “sign,” or “stasis,” but the off-white backgrounds say “work,” or “process,” and if you look at 19 Drain Covers and think “chicken coop,” “prison” or “Tower of Babel,” or at the deep, multiple overlapping lines of 1 Km Rod and think of a primeval Jungian forest—or even at the concentric circles of 9 Ash Cans and think of Jasper Johns—you feel immediately rebuked, because the marks on Ferguson’s canvases refuse to be anything but what they are. The rest is in your head.

editorial@observer.com

Tour: ArtWalk Chelsea: David Zwirner, Gagosian and Gladstone
The American Federation for the Arts takes visitors on a tour of three exhibitions of three very different artists in Chelsea--Doug Wheeler, Damien Hirst and Shirin Neshat. --Michael H. Miller
Meet at David Zwirner, 519 West 19th Street, New York, 4–6 p.m., $25 for AFA members, $35 for non-members.

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 9

Opening: "Happenings" at the Pace Gallery
Over 300 photographs document performance pieces from the movement, featuring work by Jim Dine, Simone Forti, Red Grooms, Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, Lucas Samaras, Carolee Schneemann, and Robert Whitman. Sounds like a stellar tribute to a too-short movement, and you never know, someone may stage a be-in right at the opening. --Dan Duray
The Pace Gallery, 534 West 25th Street, New York, 6-8 p.m.

Opening: Xaviera Simmons: "When You're Looking at Me, You're Looking at Country" at Guild Galleries
The multi-media artist will debut and talk about her latest project, which involved giving free photographic portraits to community members at Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea Houses, at two simultaneous locations (she'll be making appearances at both). --M.H.M.
Guild Gallery II, 119 9th Avenue, New York, 5-6:30 p.m., and Hudson Guild Gallery, 441 West 26th Street, New York, 6-7:30 p.m.

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 10

Opening: Per-Oskar Leu, "Crisis and Critique," at Triple Canopy
Norwegian artist Per-Oskar Leu makes his U.S. debut with this hybrid video-sculpture installation, which includes a film that splices together iconic trial scenes from films like Fritz Lang's M (1931) and Hangmen Also Die! (1943). A clue to the goings-on here is provided in a poster that has been printed for the 10-day exhibition: an English translation of Otto Freundlich's 1931 essay "The Artist and the Economic Crisis."
Triple Canopy, 155 Freeman Street, Brooklyn, 7–9 p.m.

Opening: Juergen Teller at Lehmann Maupin
The photographer shows photos from three series, seductive pictures of Kristen McMenamy and Vivienne Westwood, then "Keys to the House," which features his home in Suffolk, and then another series of portraits featuring Vivienne Westwood, William Eggleston and Teller's own son. --D.D.
Lehmann Maupin, 201 Chrystie Street, New York 6-8 p.m.

Screening and Talk: Beatrix Ruf on Rosemarie Trockel at The Artist's Institute
Kunsthalle Zurich director Beatrix Ruf, who organized a Trockel show back in 2010, will screen and discuss the artist's Wollfilm (1992)—that's Wool Film—in which the a female torso is slowly exposed as the thread of a sweater is pulled. Space is limited, so arrive early to guarantee a seat. --A.R.
The Artist's Institute, 163 Eldridge Street, New York, 7 p.m.

SATURDAY FEBRUARY 11

Opening: André Saraiva, "Love Letters" at Half Gallery
The baron of Le Baron and graffiti artist extraordinaire offers his first solo New York show, featuring love notes and French letter boxes that he used to paint in Paris. Not to be missed. --D.D.
Half Gallery, 208 Forsyth Street, New York, 6-8 p.m.

Performance: Gerald Ferguson, "Choral Reading," at Canada
The late Canadian conceptual artist Gerald Ferguson's Standard Corpus of Present Day English Language Usage Arranged By Word Length (1972) will be presented by a chorus of 26 performers, one for each letter of the alphabet. This is also a last chance to see Canada's show of the artist's paintings—his first in 40 years in New York—before it closes on Sunday. --A.R.
Canada, 55 Chrystie Street, New York, 7 p.m.

Performance: Clifford Owens: Anthology Performance at MoMA PS1
As part of the artist's first major museum retrospective, Mr. Owens will perform scores by Rico Gatson, Lyle Ashton Harris, Lorraine O'Grady and Kara Walker. --M.H.M.
MoMA PS1, 22-25 Jackson Avenue, Queens, 3 p.m.

The sister to whom Ms. Bernhardt’s referred is the Brooklyn painter Katherine Bernhardt, who is perhaps best known for her vigorous portraits of supermodels, all rail thin and sharply angled.

Given that massive acquisition of Moroccan carpets, it is perhaps unsurprising that they have begun appearing in Katherine’s work. For her 2010 show at the Canada gallery, on the Lower East Side, some of her paintings featured the bright, energetic patterns of kilims, and there were carpets for sale, too.

On Dec. 8, a new batch of carpets will arrive at Canada. Elizabeth, Katherine, and Katherine’s husband, Yousef Jdia, whom she met at a souk in Essaouira, Morocco, recently went into business under the name the Magic Flying Carpets of the Berber Kingdom of Morocco, and they will install a “pop-up souk” at the gallery. Pieces will be available at prices from $200, for smaller, contemporary examples, to more than $8,000 for the largest vintage work.

“This is an extension of her interest in women’s work and portraiture,” Suzanne Butler, a partner at Canada, told us on the phone this afternoon. “It’s part of her practice and her persona.”

Canada is not taking a cut of revenue from the four-day sale, which has been scheduled in between exhibition. “We’re helping them get the business going,” Ms. Butler said. “She has an absolute love for and devotion to these rugs, and her rug paintings.”

Those who visited this year's Armory Show may recall that the gallery also had a number of Moroccan carpets for sale at its booth. "[P]aintings by Michael Williams, Xylor Jane, Carrie Moyer, Katherine Bernhardt and others establish a rewarding pictorial dialogue with the floor, which is thick with Moroccan rugs," New York Times critic Roberta Smith wrote at the time.

Elizabeth, who has a Ph.D. in Renaissance and Italian Studies, handles the details of the business, but said that Mr. Jdia, who has sold carpets for a number of years, and Katherine pick most of the works, on visits to Morocco. “She has an incredible eye for them,” Elizabeth said.

“Sometimes people call these carpets fallen paintings, and they hang them on the wall” she added. “They’re art for the wall, or the floor.”

Click the slide show above to see works that will be on offer at Canada, unless they sell privately before Dec. 8. Elizabeth Bernhardt has written commentary to accompany each image.