If Frieze New York feels like an assembly-line salad this year, then the Independent art fair feels like the assembly line.

Entering the fair, which continues through this Sunday, May 17, entails batting your way through a grid of flailing sheets of thick yellow plastic dangling from the ceiling, like going through a car wash. Pier 36, where it is being held for the first time, is warehouse-like and vast, with neat little booths ticking all the way down to the end of the sightline.

On Independent’s by-invitation-only opening night yesterday, May 14, hundreds of people — a notable number wearing blazers draped over shoulders and long, silk skirts — milled around the 76 booths.

Whereas the last edition of Independent felt very New York — even hyperlocal to downtown, set at Spring Street Studios in Tribeca with a strong representation of galleries in that neighborhood — this one feels cosmopolitan, international, even a little no-man’s-land. It’s set in the Lower East Side, but, like, down to the water “low” and all the way east — I’ve spent the last quarter century of my life in New York, and I think it’s just about the second time I’ve ever set foot here.

On the bright side, the venue is airier — more space to breathe, an environment that allows for a better experience of the work on view compared to the slight claustrophobia of last year’s edition.

“It feels less hierarchical,” writer Hindley Wang, who was gallery-sitting for Galerie Buchmann, told Hyperallergic. “There doesn’t feel like there’s one booth that’s better located, or a better shape than the others.”

Artist Jeanette Hayes put it even more cutely: “It’s like we’re all in a schoolhouse, and we’re going classroom to classroom. It feels like a reunion.”

But Independent, now in its 17th year, is also a little tamer than years past — that wild downtown energy tamped down into something more respectable. The fair might’ve only gotten a year older, but the clientele seemed like it aged about a decade. “It felt a bit hungrier last year,” public relations consultant Kristin Sancken said.

The partnerships Independent has made in the past few months suggest a sort of identity crisis. In September, its 20th-century edition, which is moving from the Battery Maritime Building downtown to the well-heeled Marcel Breuer building on Madison Avenue on the Upper East Side, recently announced a partnership with Sotheby’s. Hard to get less scrappy than that. But a month later, Independent also announced a partnership with Henry Street Settlement, the Lower Manhattan social services nonprofit — torn between head and heart, perhaps?

Independent’s identity feels a little in flux, but it’s still home to some of the strongest work in the art fair game.

“For some cities, it makes sense to have an art fair because it’s the only time of year when you have access to global art,” Steven Guberek, director of Bogotá-based SGR Gallery, told me. “But in New York, there’s this endless offer of art all year round.”

With that in mind, let’s show the rest of the world some love. Below are the best booths from around the nation and world — each marking the first time the artist is showing their work in a solo presentation in New York.

Sea View: William Wright

I just love an artist who clearly finds the world endlessly fascinating. London-based painter William Wright is one such artist; he translates ordinary views — including those from inside his own studio — into intimate, pared-down canvases with a distinctively desaturated visual palette.