March welcomed the first frost-free days, a new project in studio to work on, and arguably the biggest week of the year for art in New York City. Armory Arts Week, from March 6th through 9th officially consists of the Armory Show in Piers 92 and 94. In addition to the cavernous space of the piers which houses booths of contemporary and Modern art, Armory week extends itself throughout the city with a range of associated exhibitions and arts events. One of these semi-affiliated exhibitions is The Independent Art Fair—an offshoot of the Armory designed to showcase galleries and nonprofit spaces through a more curatorial and less market driven perspective. The Independent was an interesting departure from the somewhat fatiguing commercialism of The Armory. Headed by gallerists Elizabeth Dee and Darren Flook and in collaboration with creative adviser and director of White Columns gallery, Mathew Higgs, it was more intimate and featured artworks that may have been overlooked in the Armory.
We visited the Armory Show together as a class when it opened on March 6th. Accompanied by professors Jane Benson and Jane Farver as our guides, we wound our way through endless booths and even got the chance to meet a few of the artists and curators along the way. The Armory show was a spectacle of equal parts giddy wonder and smothering disillusionment. The truth is art fairs are not amazing venues for viewing art. In contrast to the gallery and museum settings most of us are used to experiencing, there is a disheartening department store feeling in which paintings are stacked from floor to ceiling with little consideration of content or form and carted off by the highest bidder. However, this is the art world in which we exist today and I think it was an amazing experience and opportunity as an aspiring artist to see another, very real side of what it means to create work for an increasingly global art market.
