The Art F City Survival Guide to the 2016 Armory Week Fairs

Deemed by the New York Times as a “respite from [big art fair] chaos”, the 12th edition of this so-called mini art fair hosted by the LES’s Galerie Zürcher will spotlight five galleries from New York, Brussels and Paris. New to the fold is the Paris-based Marie Finaz (last in NYC for the Outsider Art Fair), who will be presenting the American debut of textile and thread artists Marie-Rose Lortet and Jill Gallieni.

In a world increasingly crowded by art fairs, SPRING/BREAK stands out for its focus on independent curators. This year’s iteration is loosely organized around the theme ⌘COPY⌘PASTE, a timely topic given our collective obsession with appropriation and all things digital. The fair opens Tuesday to VIP card holders (tickets available) with public hours from Wednesday to Monday. Highlights this year include a booth curated by AFC fav Andrea McGinty, digitally-printed copies of iconic punk shirts from John Richey at Marley Hammer’s booth, circuitboard-and-glitch-inspired tapestries from Robin Kang at Rachel Phillips’ KNIFE HITS, and Brendan Carroll’s Polaroid portraits of youth from the 1990s at Krista Saunders Scenna’s space.

The 28th edition of the Art Dealers Association of America’s annual art show has for the past five to six years been focusing on single artists. This year’s highlights include Marilyn Minter at Salon 94’s booth, and newcomer Hauser & Wirth showcasing the “rediscovered” Italian modernist poet Fausto Melotti. Attend for the feel good vibes: all ticket proceeds will go to LES social services non-profit Henry Street Settlement.

VOLTA has now become Armory’s sister fair, and you can see both for the combined admission fee of $60. VOLTA promises to be better (or at least a little different) from standard art fair fare, because the entire show is devoted to solo presentations by artists. That was a strategy I felt redeemed the otherwise basic offerings at Zona MACO. Let’s hope that success is replicated in this year’s iteration. With artists as different and talented as Anthony Goicolea and Kristen Schiele onboard, it might just be.

The stodgy, stalwart show that everyone loves to slag. Haters gonna hate the world’s second most-attended fair (after Art Basel in Miami Beach), but if you want front row seats to the start of the art world’s season and a gleaning on blue-chip trends (naked female performance artist in cage! slow-mo car crashes!), this is the ticket.

The “boothless” fair is moving from the Dia building to Soho’s Spring Street Studios. Always a favourite among curators for its gallery-led focus, this year will feature over forty mostly NYC exhibitors, including Gavin Brown’s enterprise, CANADA and Paula Cooper.

With iterations piggy-backing on bigger fairs in Basel, Miami, and New York, chances are you’ve been to a Scope at least once. It’s more or less okay. Expect a lot of mid-tier dealers with better business sense than curatorial ethos. That usually translates to reflective materials, neon, and way too much work derivative of some combination of Pop Art and/or the Beautiful Losers generation. That’s not to say there’s not usually some good work hiding behind something shinier. My advice is usually to check out Scope if you have a free pass and free time. It’s a fair that I recommend seeing, but it’s not a priority.

In many ways, Pulse is like Scope’s little sister who more consistently has had her shit together and got into a slightly better school. They open the same day, confusingly at venues with nearly identical names 30 blocks apart. They both offer a mix of commercial schlock and worthwhile art, but at Pulse the scales are more balanced in our favor. This year, for example, the fair commissioned Macon Reed’s Eulogy for the Dyke Bar, which we showed excerpts from as part of our own gay bar pop-up inside an art fair, F.A.G. Bar. The project will include a week’s worth of queer-centric programming and all the fun of a real-live lesbian dive bar.

A curated fair devoted to moving images—from video installations to animated GIFs—is a fair after our own hearts. Here, invited institutions and commercial galleries alike will present some top-notch video art alongside programming such as 2nd Opinion, where our own Paddy Johnson will be pairing video artists with curators and critics for 15 minute consultations on Saturday. There’s even a chance for artists to win tickets to our Spring Break themed fundraiser! This is such a cool art fair it will make you angry that every art fair isn’t so great.

This fair consists exclusively of contemporary art from Tokyo galleries. Which looks to be great. New City is free, small, and focused on a group of artists we might not otherwise have a chance to check out in New York, or even on other art fair circuits. It may end up being the show with the best ratio of manageability to viewer payoff this week.

In all honesty, we don’t know much about the Clio Art Fair. A quick skim of the participants reveals no familiar names—but that’s something noteworthy in and of itself. The fair is open only to artists without gallery representation, which makes for a more diverse (and gender-balanced) list of artists than we’re used to seeing at more mainstream fairs. Starting Friday, Clio is free to the public, so it’s totally worth investigating while making the Chelsea rounds this weekend.

Yes, it is what it is: a fair focused solely on paper-based art at a far more affordable price point than what you’ll find at Armory. For its second edition, the fair — produced by Art Market Productions, the organization behind Miami Project and Art Market San Francisco, among others — boasts more galleries and public installations. Highlights include a massive installation by Beijing’s Li Hongbo and cut-outs Larry Rivers made in collaboration with New York School poets via his foundation.