With Frieze week upon us, art amateurs and cognoscenti alike will be looking to see what styles and concepts are emanating from the New York City art scene. Historically, the fairs have been a reliable barometer; this time around, they match what’s on at major Manhattan institutions—and diversity in all senses is the name of the game.
Four women artists currently have major museum shows—Wangechi Mutu at the New Museum, Sarah Sze at the Guggenheim, Georgia O’Keeffe at MoMa, and Cecily Brown at the Met—a showcase of identity, ideology, and practice that has been historically sidelined in the art world. The gloriously diverse visions of two of the four, Mutu and Sze, set a tone for the city at large, working, as they do, in surrealism, science fiction, futurism, spirituality, ritual, hapticality, and temporality. From this swath of modes, we can tease out a cluster of related themes that is presently bouncing all over the New York scene: celebration of craft and hapticality, spirituality and a return to ritual, and new mythologies and world-building. This overview of gallery shows and fair presentations articulates a picture of the New York City art scene in this moment.
Across the city, craft objects of all kinds—ceramics, textile, sculpture, assemblage—tell stories of touch and tradition, engaging in practices largely sidelined in art history. At NADA New York (May 18–21), Rebecca Camacho Presents will show delicately rendered copper-wire sculptures in the form of butterflies and chains by ektor garcia, and Maria Herwald Hermann’s boldly colored, impeccably hewn ceramic sculptures that reframe our relationship to domestic objects and everyday life. “There is a tactile, mark-of-hand thread that connects all the work,” Camacho says of all six artists in her presentation for NADA...
Svetlana Kitto
