Last year, during the whirlwind of Art Basel Miami Beach, a quieter fair cropped up just across the causeway in Miami’s Design District. Unlike most of the other events taking place that week, there was little glitz and glam. And instead of boasting marquee names and astronomical price tags, the works on view were created by artists whom most people had never heard of, with costs that were approachable even for relatively penurious collectors.

This was the Open Invitational, a fair dedicated to exhibiting artists with disabilities and treating their work with the seriousness it deserves, elevating it out of the spaces to which it is usually relegated—exhibitions of “outsider” artists or kumbaya-tinged fundraisers where attendees care little about art and pat themselves on the back for helping the less fortunate.

That experiment was a success, and now one of the Invitational’s founders, David Fierman, is expanding upon it in New York with a new space called Open Studio. The gallery, which he co-founded with Rachel Carle Cohen of Shelter, both aims to introduce the public to art being made outside of traditional studios and argues that the best of this is just as worthy of consideration as anything else in the contemporary-art landscape.

At Fierman, the founder’s main gallery, “Introducing Open Studio: A New Gallery for Artists With Disabilities” is a group exhibition that highlights the range of artists working in progressive art studios: nonprofit organizations dedicated to supporting artists with mental-health conditions or intellectual and/or developmental disabilities.

At some 6 by 5 feet, Paula Brooks’s “The Beast” (2023) is the largest work in the show and offers a lush, botanical journey into psychedelia. Flowers bloom out of two faces as vines twist their way across the surface of the painting, its topsy-turvy composition—with buds branching toward the center from both the top and bottom of the panel—rewilding our view of the floral world. This is no cultivated garden but an explosion of life untamed by human hands.

William Scott draws on his native San Francisco, sci-fi and black culture in his paintings. The last of these inspirations is especially apparent in his striking 1997 portrait of Jasmine Guy, who rose to fame on the “Cosby Show” spinoff “A Different World.” She stares at us proudly, her lifted chin and a cocked shoulder giving her a regal air befitting the Southern belle she played on TV.

Color is a central character in a show that stands out for its vibrancy. Highlighter yellow dominates Maxx Reith’s “Club Gemini” (2025), with its mass of twisting bodies reminiscent of Ernie Barnes’s scenes of rocking juke joints. James Kusel’s “Super Ego” (2024) is evidence of his abilities as a graffiti writer, the titular phrase captured in explosive purple and shimmering silver. And Sunner Soohoo’s painting of helicopters in attack formation throws viewers into the heat of battle, the work’s green ground giving it the feel of night vision as the brushiness of the choppers embodies their terrifying speed, a spurt of blazing-white fire erupting from the guns of one.

While the group exhibition aims to raise awareness of myriad artists, around the corner at the new space the focus is on a painter who has already made a name for himself. “John Tursi: Lozenges” collects a series of works from 2010 that are assembled from a number of painted diamond-shaped canvases, each about the size of a traffic sign. Mr. Tursi has been exhibited in galleries and museums, and has received favorable reviews in a number of arts publications, so is well suited to inaugurate Open Studio: He has marched into the mainstream and thus opened a trail for others from unconventional backgrounds.

These works have a musical air about them as sexy geometric shapes in bright colors dance a foxtrot across their surfaces, dotted circles suggesting swaying breasts and scalloped forms echoing kicking feet. The figures that emerge out of these vibrating scenes hint at Mesoamerican carvings, transforming a danse joyeux into a spiritual ritual.

For some time now the art world has been making room for voices that previously hadn’t been part of the conversation. This latest arrival is a welcome addition to that trend. While these advancements have sometimes led to overcorrections, where identity overshadows quality, Open Studio avoids such pitfalls, looking beyond narratives of hardship to focus on the art itself. It’s an inspiring project in more ways than one.