If by Friday, Monday feels like a year ago, then New York Art Week 2025 did its job. JANET MERCEL art crawls the days away.
Day One
Diving into my first injection of art via an actual fair, I arrive at NADA bright and early preview morning. The 11th annual edition takes over the gargantuan Starrett-Lehigh building in Chelsea. With the Hudson’s startling blue outside the warehouse windows, the 120-gallery showcase has a spectacular backdrop. My favorites are mixed-media hybrids blending painting with form—2D wall works shown alongside sculpture, like the dancing bear and sexy, silly canvases in Yan Bingqing’s “Look Me In The Eye.” Strong showings as always from Montreal’s Pangée, L.A.–based Stroll Garden, and NYC’s own Superhouse. In a nearby booth, a large-scale ceramic smashes on the floor and bursts into thousands of pieces, which I have never before witnessed in all my years of fair-ing and will now haunt my dreams.
Was The Shed gentler this year? Is everyone slightly subdued while watching the SMP? For whatever reason, the endless escalators of the 13th Frieze New York feel less migraine-inducing. I still miss the fresh air boat ride to Randall’s Island, even if I always had a hard time figuring out the ferry schedule. Diminutive as they are, Guim Tió Zarraluki’s teeny tiny oils are hard to miss—isolated figures evoking a sad Burt Lancaster in The Swimmer, all from just a few inches. While not from the 14th century, or Italian, the color wallop of Malo Chapuy’s solo show out of Paris will speak to anyone who coveted the medieval liturgical art and illuminated manuscripts of last winter’s Siena exhibition at The Met. Meanwhile, I am a sucker for a creative “canvas,” as in Wanda Koop’s 1980s plywood paintings. If Frieze were one big cafeteria, the fun table would be Artist Plate Project’s booth, where founder Michelle Hellman is giving out welcome hugs with boundless energy. Stopping by revives me for the next leg.
“A large-scale ceramic smashes on the floor and bursts into thousands of pieces, which I have never before witnessed in all my years of fair-ing and will now haunt my dreams.”
A few gallery-crawling blocks away is the opening for Will Cotton’s fantastical “Instinct and Reason.” The crowd is spilling out of Templon onto the street, lured by the cotton candy cowboys playing with mermaids and unicorns in ice cream castle clouds. There is something about the sloppy candy in “Sweet Trash” which brings to mind Cindy Sherman’s “Untitled #175”- the first and last work to make me inexplicably burst into tears upon seeing it in person. A couple of streets down, strolling around like a latter day Halston, Pierre Yovanovitch’s party packs as many people as possible that match his attractiveness level—high—into one haute couture design atelier. (This is one of his evergreen skills.) After witnessing a full-scale make-out session at the bar, it’s time to make an exit.
Swapping out Marni heels for handbag-friendly Vibi Venezias, I head to the old-school art district canteen Cookshop for a debriefing with my best friend, Janet Hicks, the Vice President of Artist Rights Society. Having a bestie with the same improbable name as yourself, who also happens to be your own highly informed BTS hotline is endlessly delightful.
Day Two
The TEFAF Collector’s preview at the Park Avenue Armory is crushed body to body with the full gamut, from all the Ladies of Madison Avenue to Alan Faena earnestly shopping for jewels at Sabba. Mingling among the Magrittes, I realize how apropos it is that Ruinart sponsors both Frieze and TEFAF. That stuff will RUIN ART for you—two glasses in and I’m nodding a tick too earnestly at 5,000-year-old Greek sculpture. Two train transfers later, it’s late and I’m in Brooklyn at Saatchi Art’s The Other Art Fair, experiencing full aesthetic and vibe whiplash. Between the DJ, Kelli Kikcio’s tattoo pop-up, Anna Marie Tendler’s elaborate portrait booth, Scott Campbell’s hemp gummies and 130 emerging artists, it’s a cranial challenge to process how wildly different these two art worlds are. Angus Hampel’s ghostly aquatints and etchings are still with me days afterward.
Day Three
Independent Art Fair is so chic. My old friend, the artist Tod Lippy, has a room to himself for his political portrait series “My Fellow Americans,” and A Hug From The Art World gallerist Adam Cohen (husband to Michelle Hellman) is having a lot of fun upstairs with Guy Richards Smit’s New Yorker cartoons.
The American Art Fair Gala preview uptown is once again complete culture shock, but a lovely one. Classical 19th and 20th century works line the walls of the neo-Renaissance Bohemian National Hall, where gobs of crystals swing from the ears of fair-goers and the chandeliers. Is it dumb to inquire why one Francis Augustus Silva is priced at $135K, while a significantly smaller one is $385K? The gentleman from Questroyal Fine Art on Park Avenue assures me that it is not and tells me I have a good eye. For a revered luminist, it is apparently the quality of light that makes a work technically more desirable. My favorite party trick with my father (or it would be, if I ever went to parties with my father) is to text him pre-20th-century landscapes of the Hudson—usually from the Hudson River School—with zero context and have him identify the exact stretch of river. He answers correctly, as usual.
Day Four
The curation at alternative art fair Esther in Murray Hill leans more historic house tour than white cube. Surrealist candle sculptures by Edith Karlson are tucked into stair landings; mixed media by Wenjue, a young Shanghai poker player, accent the elaborate ionic pilasters of the Beaux-Arts Estonian House. The international mélange brings new (or old?) meaning to “site-specific,” and proves that wherever there’s a will to show art, there’s a way.
Switching gears again, I step into the audio-visual dreamscape of Miu Miu’s Tales & Tellers. It takes me a full five minutes to realize Terminal Warehouse is the old Tunnel nightclub—which I did manage to experience once during a party revamp about a decade ago (speaking of dreamscapes). Actor models wander about the near black-out dark cavern, interacting with iPhones, iPads, movie screens and Miuccia Prada’s clothes in Goshka Macuga’s moody, disorienting film, fashion, and art installation. (Tread carefully—lots of selfies happening. Lots and lots of selfies.) Since we’re in the neighborhood, the Murakami exhibition just opened at Gagosian West 21st, and the Willem de Kooning show runs for another month at Gagosian West 24th.
In a save-the-best-for-last move, the Toyin Ojih Odutola show at Jack Shainman Gallery Tribeca feels like going to church. The spatial tension of the work in the 20,000-square-foot historic Clock Tower building is jaw-dropping, in one of the most beautiful configurations I’ve seen. The Nigerian artist has constructed her own literal and conceptual sense of place—and then translated it to all of us. It was exactly the clean breeze through my brain I needed to close out the week, and it’ll do the same for anyone who steps into it. Go right now.
