On Saturday, California Oceanic art dealer Michael Hamson sold an Abelam pre-contact stone carved male/female Janus ancestral figure, from Papua New Guinea, for $40,000 to the same unnamed collectors who bought some small masks from him at the opening.

Tribal Gathering gallery of London sold a coco de mer, or double coconut, from the Seychelles; the object had been collected as a curiosity by the first European sailors to pass by, in the late 18th century.

Several first-time exhibitors did well. Galerie Charles-Wesley Hourdé from Paris sold his major piece, a Mangbetu harp, from the Democratic Republic of Congo, for just under $100,000. Brussels dealer Joris Visser reported selling three of the seven works he brought, for six-figure prices. And playwright Edward Albee was seen in the booth of New York’s Jacaranda Tribal, which specializes in art from Southeast Africa, more than once on the show’s final day, though owner Craig de Lora would not discuss it.  

Pre-Columbian Art
Howard Rose, owner of New York’s Arte Primitivo, said he was pleased with the opening night, when his sales included a Colima dog and a Valdivia stone slab.

But it was a first-time exhibitor, the private New York gallery Arte Precolumbino, that had what many — including this writer — thought was the best booth in the fair, filled with wearable pre-Columbian jewelry in a wide range of prices. Necklaces made of thousand-year-old carved amber beads, for example, went for $2,000, while the star of the booth, a Tairoma gold necklace composed of six birds with long beaks and six tubular beads (ca. 200–600 AD) was set at $125,000. Also attracting much favorable attention was a necklace hung with six gold shells, priced at $25,000. Although the gallery's Luz Miriam Toro had no major sales to report as of this writing, she was very positive about the fair, saying that she made “important contacts” and “certainly had the right women in her booth.”