Frieze Art Fair, New York
May 4th to 7th 2012
Over the last ten years the Frieze Art Fair has become a major fixture in London. This May it makes its debut in Manhattan, but not in a part of Manhattan that many contemporary art lovers will know. The fair will be on Randall’s Island, an area along the East River between uptown Manhattan and Queens that’s less than a square mile in size. Once a quarantine spot for smallpox victims, it was transformed into a park and sports area in the 1930s and has been the site for some legendary moments in sprinting—from Jesse Owens in 1936 to Usain Bolt in 2008. Over tea at The Delaunay, one of Frieze’s founders, Matthew Slotover, told a small group of journalists, “We want to show people something new.”
For those more accustomed to smart commercial galleries on Madison Avenue, it will be a new-ish experience to take either the ferry from 35th Street or the Frieze bus service from 125th Street/Lexington Avenue. Unless they’re tennis fans, of course, in which case they’ll already know Randall’s Island as the home of the John McEnroe Tennis Academy (ten DecoTurf hard courts, ten Har-Tru clay courts) which nurtures rising stars, including two young New Yorkers, Noah Rubin and Jamie Loeb.
Other than the location, though, not much else looks new at the moment: two-thirds of the exhibitors have previously been on show at Frieze, London. Eight artists have been commissioned to do projects for this inaugural fair. Uri Aran will turn an abandoned ticket office next to the boat pier into a fake examination room, in which actors will morph into doctors and patients. Virginia Overton, who makes sculptures from raw materials, will fix bendy mirrors onto trees, and Ulla von Brandenburg’s passion for artifice will be on display in her construction of an alfresco shadow theatre hidden inside a brightly-striped tent. But these projects are newer than new. They have yet to be created.
From The Editors’ Blog, More Intelligent Life.com, March 2nd 2012.
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