An award-winning NYC blogazine, primarily about painting
Thursday, July 10, 2025
Contributed by Fay Sanders and Bob Szantyr / Spring fair season is here, and our annual tradition is to try to see as much art as possible in one day. This year, Spring/Break Art Show, located at 75 Varick Street, was less sprawling, recalliing the spirit and energy of the event’s earliest years. The location made it a quick trip from the Future Fair in Chelsea via the 1 train.
In this thoughtful exchange, artist Erin Lawlor talks to Diana Copperwhite about the role of intuition and emotion in their work, their love of music, and their mutual interest in painter Howard Hodgkin. Copperwhite’s paintings will be on view alongside Hodgkin’s work at the Auckland Art Fair from May 1-4, and Lawlor ‘s solo “Divining” opens at the Highlanes Municipal Gallery in Ireland on April 26.
Contributed by Jac Lahav / What does “outsider art” mean when the work so labeled is framed in a glossy finish and sold for six figures? When Sanford L. Smith founded the Outsider Art Fair in 1993, he meant it to promote true outsider artists and showcase their work. In 2013, New York art dealer Andrew Edlin bought the fair and it has since become one of New York’s most beloved art events. But it now presents something of a paradox: a space dedicated to self-taught, visionary, and unconventional artists, yet increasingly colonized by prominent galleries and high-end collectors.
Contributed by Adam Simon / This year’s Upstate Art Weekend (July 19 – 21) included a most unusual venue. The Zero Art Fair exhibited the work of over seventy artists in a barn in Elizaville, New York, owned by Manon Slome. All the work was available to take home and none of it was for sale once the fair began. Surprisingly, or not, many of the artists that were included normally sell their work for prices that would have been out of the question for most browsers at UAW. Yet here those browsers were taking art home for free. The Zero Art Fair was scheduled to last for three days but by the end of the second day almost nothing was left. The following is a Two Coats of Paint interview with Jennifer Dalton and William Powhida, the two people primarily responsible for the Zero Art Fair.
Contributed by Sharon Butler / Andrew Gori and Ambre Kelly pulled together another Spring Break Art Fair, this one on a floor at 75 Varick Street in Soho. The theme, INT./EXT. (or, as I like to say, interior/exterior) was pretty expansive, but they provided interesting reading lists and films to inspire applicants. The press release kicks it off by calling for a “PB & J of tactility and intangibleness, a plea for Landscapes, Streetscapes, or works of Anatomy…
Contributed by Kenneth Greiner / Having recently relocated to London, I was delighted when a friend offered me a free ticket to the twentieth-anniversary Frieze Art Fair in Regent’s Park. On a sunny Saturday, I took the Jubilee Line tube from my new flat in northwest London to Baker Street before joining the line in front of the fair’s enormous white tent. This, I would discover, was where the contemporary works were on display. With 130 galleries participating, I knew I’d need to be a bit discerning if I was going to spend more than a few seconds with any particular painting. I soon found myself standing in front of The Only Thing Left Behind, a mid-size oil painting by British artist Martyn Cross at the Hales Gallery booth.
Contributed by Fay Sanders and Bob Szyantyr / In a shift befitting this year’s theme, !WILD CARD!, the Spring/Break Art Show departs from its past trajectory of more-and-bigger spectacle, year after year. Building on the “Secret Show” of this past spring, which returned to the Old School where the fair began, the organizers asked artists for this year’s show at 625 Madison to revisit past themes with a mix of nostalgia, homage, and cheekiness.
Contributed by Fay Sanders and Bob Szantyr / This year much of the work at Spring/Break is engaged with our tenuous grasp on truth, along with themes of Catholic iconography, shame and marginalization, Medieval craft, and speculative and mythological imagery that is readily framed as heretical in a puritanical, Western sense.
Contributed by Peter Plagens / When the annual The Armory Show art fair — which takes place on the piers on the Hudson River in […]
Contributed by Fay Sanders / In its ninth year, SPRING/BREAK continues its tradition of turning mundane office spaces into elaborate and vibrant venues for art. […]
Contributed by Leslie Wayne / How do you look at art at an art fair? Do you do a quick pass through the whole thing […]
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Swiss-American photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank is now 94, which means he has been in the midst what he calls […]
Contributed by Erin Langner / In the center of the 2018 Seattle Art Fair, Chilean-born artist Alfredo Jaar‘s white neon script, hovering in Galerie Lelong’s booth, reads […]
Contributed by Sharon Butler / I just read a piece by Rachel Corbett in artnet News about Mitchell Algus, a dealer who manages a small […]
This year the Independent Art Fair showed a slew of conventionally good paintings, which is not necessarily de rigueur for�the�enterprise�that prides itself on being the […]
