The BFA’s of AAP NYC have capped off a week overflowing with art, artists visits, galleries, shows, and more. With New York’s art scene more popular than ever, we were lucky to explore both more intimate and larger shows.
We began the week by attending the New York Gallery Open Tour with visiting lecturer Linda Norden, as a part of our NYC Professional Practice class. Organized by the New Art Dealers Alliance, this gallery tour was essentially gallery speed-dating; among other New York visitors, collectors, curators, and critics, we were able to visit six distinct galleries around the Lower East Side, all within two hours. We started the day at the Mitchell Algus Gallery (featuring Magalie Comeau, Dan Burkhart, Agustin Fernandez, Steve Keister, Robert Greene), followed by Bureau Gallery (featuring Brandon Ndife & Diane Severin Nguyen), Chapter NY (featuring Magalie Guerin), Shoot the Lobster (featuring FLAME), Callicoon Fine Arts (featuring Nicholas Buffon), and finished with Lyles and King (featuring Aaron Gilbert). In a season where grand, often extremely expensive art fairs take over New York, tours like NADA’s give opportunity for budding galleries to participate in this local and international collective sharing; with this in mind, it was fantastic to be able to give our full attention to many of these smaller galleries.
Later in the week, we had the fortune of being able to visit the studio of Brooklyn-based installation artist E.V. Day, where our questions sparked from homework reading about the history and varieties of installation art created a stirring discussion, covering everything from E.V’s personal process to her broader conceptual ideas. E.V. Day is a New York-based installation artist and sculptor whose work often explores the greater themes of feminism and sexuality. Her work often presents conceptual and literal suspension techniques, creating great tension for the viewer both visually and internally. Her grand studio in Brooklyn was like an installation artists playground, full to the brim with bins and boxes decoratively labeled things such as “wire”, “tissue paper”, and “FURRR”. E.V.’s studio complimented her big personality and bigger ideas very well, as demonstrated through the thick cable cords hoisted to her designated “messy” room walls. She was able to explain to us the concept she was currently working regarding the concept of shattering the glass ceiling, and noted the real challenges she needed to overcome, particularly, how to capture the attention of the target audience of this exhibit (children and their families) would be able to comprehend the deep message.
To top off an already fantastic week, we all received tickets to the Armory Show. The Armory Show is New York City’s biggest and best annual art fair, and is a popular destination for roughly 65,000 artists, curators, critics, and the public alike to view, discover, and collect the world’s most significant art of the twentieth and twenty-first century. Located at Manhattan’s Piers 90, 92, and 94, it featured not only local and international galleries, but wide scale public programs and various other artistic programs. While we all attended separately or in smaller groups, it gave us the opportunity to explore the incredibly wide collection of art presented at the show. Each pier seemed to get larger and diverse than the one before, and we left in awe, with a few handfuls of cards and tons of inspiration.
