Frieze New York may be the main draw this week—it runs May 4-7, with a preview day on May 3—but there are also satellite fairs on offer, including the Miami-fixture NADA (the New Art Dealers Alliance Fair), which will set up shop at the old Dia Art Foundation building at 548 West 22nd Street, from Read More
Our preview of artworks that will be at Frieze New York comes to a close today with 20 more works. In this edition we have pieces by Keltie Ferris, Richard Aldrich and Amanda Ross-Ho, as well as a collaborative work by Ei Arakawa and Sergei Tcherepnin. For those looking to view more artworks from the fair, Read More
Our preview of Frieze New York continues. The fair is now only a week away. We will see you on Randall’s Island.
The first edition of our Frieze preview is available here.
At a press breakfast on Tuesday, the Frieze Art Fair organizers said the tent that will house the inaugural Frieze New York beginning next week was the largest temporary structure ever built in North America. They took a few journalists out to the island and we caught a glimpse inside. To quote a fellow journalist, Read More
“People have to have time to go through stages with you,” the sculptor John Ahearn explained on a recent morning, standing in his sun-filled studio in the South Bronx. “You can’t just grab someone like this!” He gripped my arms tightly, then let up with a quick laugh.
Mr. Ahearn, who is 60 and classically handsome—square jaw, piercing eyes, neatly buzzed gray hair—was explaining how he and his artistic partner, Rigoberto Torres, have made art for the past 30 years. They cover their subjects’ faces and shoulders with a toothpaste-like goop called alginate, the stuff dentists use to make molds, and a layer of plaster bandages. The subjects breathe through straws while the materials harden. The whole process takes about 20 minutes, and a fair amount of trust. The two artists then take those molds and fill them in with plaster to make positive casts, which they build up and carve, and paint into startlingly lifelike wall reliefs. Read More
Up until the announcement last spring that London’s Frieze Art Fair would be coming to New York for the first time, there were maybe five main reasons for a person to be on Randall’s Island: You are a high school student on an organized sports team—probably lacrosse or track or, perhaps, soccer—and you are utilizing the island’s athletic fields for practice; you have tickets to Electric Zoo or Cirque du Soleil; you like golf, but you do not want to leave the city to play it; you are a patient at the Manhattan Psychiatric Center on the adjoining Wards Island; you are John McEnroe, it is 2010 and you are inaugurating the John McEnroe Tennis Academy at the Sportime Randall’s Island Tennis Center. Read More
Eventually, as art fairs continue to proliferate and expand, something is going to have to give. But that day has not yet arrived. Frieze New York lands in New York for the first time next week, running May 4–7. It is going to be a busy time in New York. Tom Eccles, the director of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard, has curated a sculpture park on the island. Frieze’s annual commissions will be executed this year by an impressive selection of artists, including Virginia Overton, Latifah Echakhch, Frances Stark, John Ahearn and novelist Rick Moody. There will be several talks, including a discussion on May 4 with Glenn Lowry, Adam Weinberg and Sheena Wagstaff on the future of museums’ impact on culture. Read More
On Saturday, May 5, in conjunction with Frieze New York, the galleries on West 26th Street between 10th and 11th Avenues in Chelsea will stay open late and hold a good old fashioned block party. Read More
VIPs taking rides to and from Frieze New York on Randall’s Island in cars provided by BMW will encounter a special surprise inside those luxury automobiles: sound pieces by Martin Creed, Frances Stark and Rick Moody. (Plebeians, take heart: the pieces will be available for download on Frieze’s site beginning May 4.) The pieces were commissioned as part of a new initiative called Frieze Sounds, organized by Cecilia Alemani. Read More
A letter sent Thursday by the New York City District Council of Carpenters to Deutsche Bank, the main sponsor of Frieze Art Fair, announced a labor dispute between the organization and the London fair that is preparing for its inaugural year in New York. It was sent to us as well. The letter claimed that Frieze is using contractors who “do not pay the area standard wages to all their employees including providing or fully paying for health benefits and pension.” Read More
