by Michael Anthony Farley on March 8, 2016
Finally, a manageable week for New York. If you survived Armory Week and still want to look at art, we salute you. Thankfully, this is a calm week for the city. While we’re busy preparing for our own Spring Break fundraiser next week, you can also unwind with some low-key art events. Thursday, check out several centuries of the macabre at Ricco/Maresca Gallery. Friday, return to the living with Genesis Breyer P-Orridge’s reincarnation-informed solo show at Rubin Museum of Art. Then head to the Bruce High Quality Foundation’s Sunset Park digs for an artist talk and party to kick off the BHQFU Book Fair. Be sure to come back Saturday for more readings, activities, and goodies from vendors. Sunday, check out Foxy Production’s new Chatham Square digs. Save your energy, though, because you’ll want it for our party next week!
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by Michael Anthony Farley on December 4, 2015
Now in it’s 12th year, NADA Miami Beach is still full of surprises, even compared to younger satellite fairs. For the first time, NADA is taking place in the storied Fontainebleau hotel. Since 2009, the fair had been located in the nearby Deauville’s quirkier, seemingly grander mid-century ballrooms. Paddy had mixed feelings about that context, but I find myself missing it. The Fontainebleau’s more recently-renovated spaces feel a little more generic and paradoxically fancier but less glamorous. The ceiling is lower, there’s no sweeping ocean view from the booths, and visitors must now pay a $20 admission fee. This iteration of NADA is only slightly geographically closer to the convention center, but significantly less far-off from Art Basel proper in spirit.
But while we were disappointed by Basel’s predictability and lack of variety, NADA 2015 is wonderfully inconsistent. NADA’s exhibitors seem to have grown out of a collective trend-invested “cool kid” adolescence and matured into thoughtfully idiosyncratic connoisseurship. Gone are the days of interchangeable booths with matching pastel-and-neon abstractions—here there’s a greater diversity of good work than we’ve witnessed at art fairs recently. Part of this might be attributed to NADA’s shifting demographics: the fair feels less New-York-centric and more international. Many of the booths that impressed us the most were from Germany, Latin America, or Japan.
Below, highlights from the fair, delightfully all over the map:
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