Small but mighty micro-fair Open Invitational is making big international moves this week with its debut edition in Basel. The dedicated platform is part of a wider movement to bring long overdue, sustained recognition to the practices of artists with developmental disabilities who work in supported studios.
“We want to be were the art world is,” co-founder David Fierman told me during a preview of the fair on Monday, “and to expand the definition of what an artist is and who gets to show in professionalized contexts.”
There could, then, be no more suitable location than Basel for Open Invitational’s fifth edition since its Miami debut in 2024. International art VIPs are descending on the small Swiss town en masse to attend the preview of the prestigious Art Basel. Just a 15-minute walk away, in the multi-use community space Franck Areal, a much scrappier operation has been pulled together on a shoestring thanks to a mix of passion and pluck.
Cynthia Stickler, a 3-headed monster (2025). Image courtesy the artist and Community Access Art Collective, New York, NY.
Hidden in Plain Sight
Open Invitational has invited six supported studios from the U.S. and Switzerland to exhibit, for free, on the venue’s second floor. The open plan, booth-free exhibition includes a mix of artists who are gaining institutional recognition and those who remain overlooked, but who have built up a strong body of work over several decades.
This is certainly the case for Cynthia Stickler, an artist in her 70s whose subtle use of crayon color has enlivened semi-figurative ink sketches, presented by New York’s Community Access Art Collective. The works are small-scale gems, yet they have the power to pull a viewer from across the room and into an otherworldly realm. Stickler has never received a solo exhibition and her works are a steal at around $500 a pop.
Among other standout works on view are a series of abstract compositions in acrylic on paper by Michael Angelo Mangino that elegantly balance loosely articulated planes of color in an array of configurations. The paintings, costing upwards of $1,000, are presented by Studio Route 29 in Frenchtown, New Jersey, which previously showed Mangino at Open Invitational’s Miami debut. There, he caught the eye of Scott Ogden, who gave the artist, still in his early 20s, a solo show at Shrine gallery in New York last year.
Installation of paintings by Michael Angelo Mangino on Studio Route 29’s booth at Open Invitational x Living Museum in Basel, 2026. Photo: Jo Lawson-Tancred.
Mangino’s success demonstrates how quickly artists are able to ascend, if only they are given the opportunity to present their work to new audiences and, crucially, influential members of the art establishment. It begs the question, too, of whether an older artist like Stickler’s story would have been different if disabled artists weren’t so long excluded from the mainstream art world.
A Turning Tide
This status quo is changing. Another Studio Route 29 artist, Theo Baransky, stood out to curator Matthew Higgs at Open Invitational’s Miami debut, and recently received a solo show at White Columns, one of New York’s most important nonprofit art spaces. The year prior, painter Marlon Mullen, was the subject of a solo exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, featuring works from the past decade that riff on art magazine clippings.
Also in 2024, SF MoMA celebrated 50 years of Creative Growth studio by exhibiting more than 140 of its artists, including a cache of newly acquired works. Another monumental survey is being planned by the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art for 2028.
Nnena Kalu. Photo courtesy of the artist and ActionSpace.
One of the most visible wins for an artist working in a supported studio came last December, when Nnena Kalu won the Turner Prize, the U.K.’s most prestigious prize for contemporary art. The artist received her award live on BBC News.
Kalu has been developing her abstract drawing and sculpture practice at ActionSpace in London since 1999. The supported studio is keen for her breakthrough achievement to not be treated as a one-off, but as a starting point to broaden opportunities for other artists.
In March, ActionSpace co-hosted the “Curating and Coalition” symposium with Stanley Picker Gallery and curator Lisa Slominski. The speakers stressed that the prize win followed decades of advocacy, and that supported studios remain a critical infrastructure for facilitating the integration of artists with disabilities into the broader contemporary art ecosystem. The panel also agreed that more progress is needed in establishing curatorial approaches for artists whose communication does not align with the art world’s expectations, such as those who are “non-verbal.” Slominski expressed her hope that these approaches can hold uncertainty while still recognizing artistic agency.
Léonard Périès, Enfiloché on Creahm Fribourg’s booth at Open Invitational x Living Museum in Basel, 2026. Photo: Jo Lawson-Tancred.
With his extensive experience dealing in outsider art—a category that has been vulnerable to exploitation, ableism, and classism—Fierman is also cautious about how best to contextualize the work of disabled artists for new audiences.
“The market has taken so much of art’s social power away,” he said. Denying disabled people opportunities to create is a form of “dehumanization,” Fierman stressed, making the stakes of his mission much higher than merely the attainment of mainstream success.
Open Invitational has joined forces with the Living Museum Basel, a dedicated art space for people with mental health conditions that opened at Franck Areal in March 2025. It is just one branch of the international Living Museum Society, founded by Janos Marton in New York in 1983, which has 16 branches in Switzerland since it first opened in 2002. The society has taken over the venue’s first floor, where it is exhibiting some 125 works by 117 artists from Europe and the U.S.
Open Invitational x Living Museum is on view through June 19. Franck Areal is also home to Basel’s arts, food, and fashion festival OMG, Franck!, running through June 20.