Frieze Week NY 2025

New York’s Young Galleries Fight On Oskar Proctor ’s Bar Crawl

Secrets of the Met’s Vanguard Council Hannah Levy’s Unsettling Embrace

Pilvi Takala Walks Among Us What Artists Love About the Frick

ACCELERATING IDEAS

CHAMPIONING ASIAN CINEMATIC HERITAGE AT M+, HONG KONG

FOSTERING DIALOGUES ON STAGE AT TAIPEI PERFORMING ARTS CENTER, TAIWAN

INAUGURATING A CONTEMPORARY ARTS LIBRARY AT POWER STATION OF ART, SHANGHAI

ADVANCING CULTURE

EXPANDING THE BOUNDARIES OF INSTALLATION ART AT HAMBURGER BAHNHOF – NATIONALGALERIE DER GEGENWART, BERLIN

ENVISIONING SUSTAINABLE LANDSCAPES AT FONDATION BEYELER, BASEL

New York is a place of spontaneity. A place for the runin — at a gallery opening, on the streets of Tribeca, at the Odeon or a talk at MoMA, in the manual elevator at 508 West 26th. A place that encourages the unexpected, where a solitary moment suddenly turns communal. A co ee, a martini, a conversation.

is year at Frieze New York, our programming reflects that. For the second time, we have a co-commission by High Line Art and Frieze, taking place at the fair and in the public park built on a former railway track, just next to Frieze New York’s home at e Shed. is year, it’s by the Finnish artist Pilvi Takala, whose immersive performance disrupts systems of surveillance. Carlos Reyes’s durational work activates the liminal spaces around e Shed with sound, and Berlin-based artist Asad Raza takes inspiration from the High Line’s horticulture by nurturing seedlings with grow lights, art and music.

e landscape of the High Line is dotted with outdoor sculptures. At its southern end is the Whitney Museum of American Art and at its northern end is Frieze New York. Between them is Chelsea, home to institutions like Dia and galleries such as 303 — a presence in the area since 1996 — which are now neighbors to newcomers including Karma and Kurimanzutto.

Frieze New York presents established and emerging galleries from more than 20 countries. e Focus section, curated by Lumi Tan, o ers an opportunity for galleries 12 years and younger to showcase solo presentations by emerging artists. is year, there are galleries from Brazil, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Indonesia, Kenya, Korea, Mexico, Portugal, Singapore and Ukraine.

Frieze New York’s collaborations with non-profits o er dedicated space to support the larger cultural ecosystem of the city. ese include the Artist Plate Project, which supports Coalition for the Homeless through its unique artist editions, and Printed Matter, the world’s leading nonprofit dedicated to disseminating artist books.

Artists featured in the fair have exhibitions throughout the city: Christine Sun Kim and Amy Sherald at the Whitney, Rashid Johnson at the Guggenheim, Luana Vitra at SculptureCenter and Jack Whitten at the Museum of Modern Art, to name just a few.

New York is both the center of the global art market and home to a vibrant and diverse community of artists. With emerging spaces and established institutions situated within a short walk of each other, it brings together the full spectrum of arts and culture. During Frieze Week, the city’s spontaneity is in full e ect. I look forward to running into you at the fair.

Messineo Frieze Director of Americas

Left Christine Messineo.

Photograph: Brendon Cook/BFA

Christine

CONTENTS

“All things seem possible in May.” When the sun is shining and the blossom is blossoming, I tend to agree with American naturalist Edwin Way Teale. If anything, such an abundance of options can lead to stress or stasis. This issue is conceived to cut through all that, offering a concise and practical edit of this dynamic week of activity in the art world’s global center, from must-see shows (p.34 and 36) to artists’ picks from the reopened Frick (p.38) and a guide to some of the city’s most iconic bars, stunningly captured by Oskar Proctor (p.52).

On the cover is an image Alex Lockett caught while visiting some of the next generation of downtown dealers (p.18). During a year when, from the stock market to the Smithsonian, anything seems possible — for better or worse — Lockett’s image seems to ask: what meaning can symbols like Lady Liberty still hold? Is her promise to the world’s tired and poor still as solid as steel, or as fragile as her plastic replicas? Something to discuss over a drink this week. Mine’s a Diet Coke.

Matthew McLean, Editor, Frieze Week

18 Doubling Down Three young Lower East Side galleries

22 Unsettling Forms Hannah Levy’s uncomfortable medical aesthetic

24 Frieze New York, from A to V The artists at the fair span the globe

28 The Agitator Pilvi Takala keeps it close to her chest

31 Blue Sky Thinking The Shed’s Open Call commission lets artists think big

34 Chelsea (Art) Market Unmissable shows in the neighborhood this Frieze Week

36 Five to See Standout institutional exhibitions

38 About Frickin’ Time Four artists on what they’ve missed during the Frick’s five-year closure

44 Collecting Aligned in art: Sacha Janke and Andrew McCormack

48 Soft Power Behind the scenes with the Met’s Vanguard Council

52 The Perfect Manhattan A visual essay by Oskar Proctor

68 Margeaux Goldrich The terror of the Upper East Side has views

Iconic New York City Real Estate

Emerging galleries often face a tough ride. But three young New York dealers showing in this year’s Focus have a secret weapon: complete commitment to their artists. Shanti Escalante-De Mattei reports.

Photography by Alex Lockett

YOUNG GALLERIES DOUBLE DOWN

In the perpetual turning of the market wheel, the last two years have been a difficult season. So, what’s it like running an emerging gallery in New York in 2025? “Well, I don’t recommend it,” says Anton Svyatsky of Management with a laugh. But, for young galleries exhibiting in the Focus section at Frieze New York, there is one path to success: sticking to the basics and supporting work you really believe in.

Svyatsky opened Management in Chinatown in 2021. In Focus this year, he will be showing new works by New Yorkbased artist Tahir Carl Karmali, made from construction materials and bodily fluids. “I don’t necessarily think that the Leo Castelli model is in need of revision,” he says, referring to the Italian American who pioneered the contemporary art gallery system in the 1950s. “That model

is to seek out exceptional talent and to become the viral agent for those artists, the mode of contagion that spreads that talent around the world.” Castelli represented influential artists across different movements, from abstract-expressionist painters like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning to pop artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol. He was also known for the unswerving financial support of his artists, effectively paying some of them a salary whether their work sold or not.

In these times of uncertainty, Svyatsky perhaps counterintuitively suggests that this kind of all-in commitment is the only way to survive. Boom periods, when people are chasing market trends, can work to the detriment of young artists’ careers: as margins narrow, smaller galleries need to keep

the attention of collectors who may have lost trust when the market slowed down.

For Svyatsky, the only way to attract the trust of collectors is by sticking to an ambitious program and, of course, showing the best work possible wherever collectors happen to be, including art fairs.

For Sophie Mörner of the Lower East Side’s Company, participating in art fairs has been essential in establishing the gallery. “Art fairs are a big expense for young galleries with all the staffing, travel and shipping,” she says, “but collectors expect you to be there.” Yet, as someone who has also participated on the committees of art fairs (including Frieze), she has witnessed the efforts that fairs around the world have made to reduce the financial burden of exhibiting for emerging galleries. Focus,

for example, sees both Frieze and section sponsor Stone Island subsidizing the participating galleries.

Another way that Mörner has found to diffuse outlay is through collaboration. In this year’s Focus section, Company will be presenting works by Bulgarian painter Stefania Batoeva in collaboration with Champ Lacombe, a gallery with spaces in London and Biarritz in France. For an artist who has primarily shown in Europe, the Focus section at Frieze “is a great opportunity for her to get some New York eyes on the work,” says Taylor Trabulus, a partner at Company since 2022.

Getting eyes on the work by getting young collectors into their physical spaces to discover artists i s a shared goal for this community of young dealers. Comparing notes with dealers who have been in the art world for decades,

Opposite Merged portraits of Alec Petty (King’s Leap), Anton Svyatsky (Management) and Sophie Mörner (Company), 2025

Photography Alex Lockett

emerging gallerists are noticing that new collectors are increasingly likely to initially encounter the market through online platforms. Hence, there is a new breed of collector who is less dependent on dealers to guide them through the opacities of the art world. While this might offer new collectors easy access to buying art (since the social dance of buying work at a gallery can be intimidating), it can also mean that there is less support for more challenging work, as collectors miss the chance to be educated by art experts. But there is still a core group of people who avail themselves of the daring and erudition that small physical galleries are well placed to provide.

“People are interested in King’s Leap because of the new conversations my artists are trying to stimulate,”

says Alec Petty, who opened the Lower East Side gallery in 2017. “Sometimes, those conversations line up with the desire of collectors; other times, it’s more challenging. That’s something my artists and I are unafraid of and I take pride in that.”

Petty cites the exhibition “Ever” by Nandi Loaf in the fall of 2024 as an example of a particularly ambitious show that required a great deal of hands-on education. Loaf, according to her CV on the gallery’s website, uses “hyperparticipation” to “investigate the existential state of the artist,” in effect needing an audience to physically realize the work. “Nandi’s work is performative in nature,” says Petty. “But the performative elements involve instructing me, the audience and t he oretically collectors to take part in the

work, in this case actually fabricating boutique, minimalist objects.”

In Focus, Petty is showing works by painter Audrey Gair while simultaneously opening a solo show of her work at King’s Leap. Doubling down in this way is not just about more exposure to more people, but providing the space and time for collectors to really understand Gair’s deeply involved, process-oriented practice. “This isn’t just going to be a booth of pretty paintings,” says Petty. “I wanted to bring something really thought-provoking.”

Properly getting to grips with the challenging work of emerging artists, as opposed to a household name, often requires a willingness to encounter, to engage and to learn. This is why invest igating the work in person, whether in gallery spaces or forums like Focus,

remains so vital for these galleries, who are determined that the best way to survive is to champion artists who want to confront, challenge and even confuse their audience. For these Lower East Side galleries, at least, one thing is clear: in today’s market, playing it safe is too big a risk not only financially but for the soul of the profession.

Above From left to right: Alec Petty (King’s Leap), Anton Svyatsky (Management) and Sophie Mörner (Company), 2025

Body anxiety, betrayal and “flesh cages” in the work of New York artist Hannah Levy, subject of a solo presentation at the fair

UNSETTLING FORMS

Ripe and bulbous, or spiky and penetrative, Hannah Levy’s works exist in a state of tension. Silicone is stretched, continuously; glass is frozen in time; metal acts as a support or a directional vector. The works continue to evolve once on display: they accumulate dust and residue through touch, their physicality mediated by their environ ment. Levy likens this to sweaty skin sticking to a leather car seat on a hot day. Some of her works look like they are about to ricochet across the room. Sometimes, they do worn by dancers as appendages. In 2023, at ICA Philadelphia, Sigrid Lauren activated Levy’s sculptures with choreography, the performers bala ncing on metal stilts with talons. In a 2017 performance at MoMA PS1, dancers wore cumbersome silicone and latex costumes, and jackets with extra­long arms that trailed on the floor.

But, even without the dancers, in Levy’s hands things floor lamps, chandeliers, chairs, umbrellas, handrails a ll teeter on the verge of animation. Organic forms materialize: a super­sized peach pit or a giant piece of floppy asparagus. Object as subject, form over function, industrial versus organic: binaries collapse under Levy’s deft touch. Rather than working from drawings, the artist begins with a small set of images that she collages together into something entirely new. “If I were to show you my desktop right now, it’s a jumble of images I’ve collected,” she says. “A weird desk, a chrysalis and a ladder.” Her sculptural pieces are the result of an idiosyncratic combination of fabrication practices and traditional craftsmanship, from glass­blowing to welding. Generally, Levy combines two

materials and uses their interactions as the point of push and pull that energizes the work. For her upcoming presentation with Casey Kaplan at Frieze New York (her first­ e ver solo stand), Levy’s sculptures cling to the walls in suspense, teasing gravity.

“My initial attraction to art came through making,” she explains in our recent conversation. “Although my mom wasn’t practicing as an architect during my childhood, she was very supportive of me and my brother expressing creativity through making things.” Levy, who grew up in New York, recalls a photograph of herself at three years old, wearing a dress she had made by pinning fabric to her body. Aged six, she made a wooden stool using a hand saw in art class. She later did a stint in a metal foundry for a summer job during

college. In these environments, Levy was often the only woman in the room.

“It helps that I am six feet tall,” she says with a laugh.

Levy greets me over video, wearing a black hoodie with her wavy, dark hair pulled back, framing her thick eyebrows. She has been making art publicly for a decade, and with every new work the concept of body anxiety arises again. “The idea of body anxiety is so intrinsically part of the human condition,” says Levy. “We might want to think of ourselves as cerebral beings, but we are just humans, walking around in vulnerable flesh cages. Our bodies can betray us.”

That “betrayal” manifests in Levy’s fascination with crutches, calipers and other medical equipment rendered in fleshy tones and distorted shapes. “It’s been a conceptual element of my work

Hannah Levy is showing work in a solo presentation with Casey Kaplan at Frieze New York 2025 (Stand B11).

since college,” says Levy, “but the adaptive elements that I’m inspired by came to the fore when my dad passed away a few years ago. He had ALS, a degenerative disease that caused paralysis in the last year of his life.” As Levy and her family cared for her father, she developed a new relationship with handrails and harnesses, lifting aids and supportive devices. “I wouldn’t call it inspiring, and it certainly wasn’t at the time,” she says, “but it’s another element that I incorporated into my understanding of body anxiety.” This brought her interrogations of design into focus: how spaces do or do not adapt to different bodies. How the possibility of disability is always waiting in the shadows.

“It’s an odd thing to think of the disabled as a minority group,” says Levy. “Or in architecture and design, to think that

not every space needs to be accessible because it’s not all of us.” Levy has experienced the crux of such denial firsthand: “As a culture, our eventual frailness is scary and something that we don’t want to admit.” So many of the structures that we create are based on the idea of self-preservation, the drive to conceal our own limitations. When a handrail juts out of a wall, it is a subliminal confrontation; when steps are cut into a slope, they are a passive aid for even the most able bodies.

“One of the things that I like to play with is the way in which the objects and architecture we live in and around reflect larger societal values,” says Levy. Illness and death are taboo in a culture preoccupied with the proverbial fountain of youth, and she observes that our design instincts follow this. This paradigm

is not her sole focus, but it underscores Levy’s work. There is something con f rontational about her forms, both vulnerable and exposed. They embody these conflicted architectural spaces as well as being Frankensteined characters who are as defined by their inherent personalities as by the more hefty conceptual ideas they carry.

“Some are funny, some are sexy, some are goofy,” says Levy, who starts each object with a specific moment of tension in mind and lets the materials dictate how they want to act it out. “This often plays off the very rudimentary sculptural concept of two materials interacting with one another.” A simple idea in which the artist sees endless potential.

Limp or erect, Levy’s disfigured forms could be at home in a David Cronenberg film, and yet her references are less in line

with the father of body horror and more in the spirit of what he was preoccupied with: the body and the structures that hold it. The body as a conduit for motion, and the objects we build that respond to it. For Frieze New York, Levy is working on three multi-armed wall works made of stainless steel and glass, an extension of her recent wall-mounted clawed hands holding glass bubbles. There will also be two freestanding sculptures. As usual, variations on themes from across her practice congeal. “I’ll bring them back again and again until I feel like they’re settled,” she says. “Maybe they will never be settled.”

Above left Hannah Levy, Untitled 2023. Courtesy: the artist and Casey Kaplan, New York; photograph: Jason Wyche

Above right Hannah Levy, Untitled 2024. Courtesy: the artist and Casey Kaplan, New York; photograph: Dan Bradica Studio

Meka Boyle is a writer, editor and photographer. She lives in New York, USA, and Los Angeles, USA.

Spanning Antigua to Vietnam, rural Poland to queer LA, this year’s fair draws together a world of artistic positions. Matthew McLean takes a whirlwind tour

FRIEZE NEW YORK, FROM A TO V

Frank Walter Bailey’s Hill, Antigua, Antigua and Barbuda Andrew Edlin Gallery (D1)

Along a dirt road overlooking Rendezvous Bay on Antigua’s southern coast, visionary artist Frank Walter chose to build his studio in 1993. Born on the island in 1929, Walter traveled around Europe as a young man a lonely experience shaped by the racist reception he received. In his art, he rebuilt a sense of belonging through expansive semi-imagined genealogies (including tracing the British royal family as distant relatives) and, primarily, through the prolific production of paintings and sculpture. With exhibitions at the Venice Biennale (2019) and The Drawing Center in New York (2024), Walter’s pensive meditations on nature and place have won many admirers, the artist Josh Smith among them. The writer and curator Hilton Als once remarked that this often heartbreaking body of work “gives more glory and truth than we think we can bear. And then gives some more as we

rush to meet it.” Paired with works by self-taught Illinois painter Abraham Lincoln Walker, this presentation should do exactly that.

Denilson Baniwa Barcelos, Amazonas, Brazil

A Gentil Carioca (A5)

Though he lives and works today in Niterói, across the bay from Rio de Janeiro, Denilson Baniwa’s work is redolent of the place of his birth: Dari, a remote village in Barcelos, deep in the Amazonas state. Baniwa once told an interviewer that he tries “to think as an Indigenous person in a non-Indigenous world.” In his collages, he layers elements from colonial archives, popular culture and Baniwa mythology with his own fierce fictions. On view at the fair is Tatá (2023), an epic work displayed at the 35th Bienal de São Paulo (2023), made in collaboration with fellow Baniwa artist Aparecida Baniwa. Painted panels incorporating feather embroidery present imagined episodes of the first contact between Indigenous peoples and Catholic missionaries along the Rio Negro.

Opposite top Wanda Koop, No Words (Not Titled) 1990. Courtesy: the artist and Night Gallery, Los Angeles; photograph: William Eakin

Opposite bottom Karol Palczak, Hey little bird, fly away home / Your house is on fire, your children all alone 2024. Courtesy: the artist and Emalin, London; photograph: Błażej Pindor

Above Nikita Kadan, Nine Sirens, 2024. Courtesy: the artist and Voloshyn Gallery, Kyiv

Against undertones of violence and tragedy, the piece is full of wonder and strangeness i n one section, an angel’s trumpet faces down a bemused parrot.

Wanda Koop

Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada Night Gallery (D6)

In the serene waters of a moonlit lake, reflections are cast smudgily: a cooling tower, pylons and grain silos. In the painti ngs of celebrated Canadian artist Wanda Koop, the natural and the technological inhabit the same world one that’s all the more beautiful and mysterious for it. This sensitivity to the deep ecological context of human industry seems fitting for an artist based in Winnipeg, which is among the coldest cities in the world. From a series painted on plywood shown at the fair, No Words (Stonehenge) (1990) pairs one of the epic triliths from the titular monument with the outline of a pylon, as if to remind us that, one day, our industrial structures will appear as mysterious and “natural” a part of the landscape as an ancient megalith.

Citra Sasmita Batubulan, Bali, Indonesia Yeo Workshop (F4)

Sometimes known as “the island of the gods,” Bali also holds a rich artistic heritage. On the southeastern side, where the Telaga Waja flows from the sacred Mount Abang into the sea, is the village of Kamasan, where the local painting tradition, born out of shadowpuppet theater, stretches back to at least the 17th century. Telling tales from folklore, Kamasan paintings are typically deeply patterned and radically flat a nd only painted by men. Citra Sasmita, a Balinese physics student-turned-newspaper illustrator-turned-fine artist has been engaging with this tradition for a decade, working with priestess Mangku Muriati one of the few women permitted to practice the art. Populating her scenes with powerful women and knowing references to Balinese modern history, Sasmita wrests Kamasan into self-consciously new territory. Recognition of her achievements includes participation in this year’s Sharjah Biennial and Hawai’i Triennial.

Kishio Suga

Itō, Shizuoka, Japan

Tomio Koyama Gallery (D13) and Mendes Wood DM (B7)

If ever proof were needed that sometimes less is more, it can be found in the work of Kishio Suga. Take Law of Situation (1971): in a lake in Ube, Japan, ten flat stones placed on a sheet of plastic board float on the surface of the water. Suga is a member of the Japanese art movement which came of age around the student protests of the late 1960s and was eventually known as Mono -ha, or “the school of things.” He employs unexpected, unrefined materials in arrangements evoking both tension and harmony.

An eagerly anticipated exhibition opening at Dia Beacon this summer o ers a chance to consider 30 years of Suga’s practice; at the fair, a work like Sliced Stones (2018) provides a chance to encounter an artist whose command of their formal language is absolute.

Kim Bohie

Seogwipo, Jeju Island, Korea e Modern Institute (A4) ough it constitutes less than two percent of the country’s territory, Jeju Island occupies a large place in the Korean imagination. It’s easy to see why, with its subtropical climate, volcanic peaks, untouched ancient forests and beaches of black sand, as well as several art spaces like the Tadao Ando -designed Yumin Collection. It was here that, in the early 2000s, the artist Kim Bohie established a studio. After years in Seoul, where “only a small portion of the sky

was visible,” the island’s verdant, open landscape was a revelation. Over the last two decades, Bohie has been absorbed by her immediate surroundings: plants, the ocean, her garden, her dog. Painting on bare canvas, she combines disparate cultural inheritances, channeling the sansuhwa tradition in which the dom inant Chinese painting style was applied to Korean landscape, balancing full and empty space. A brandnew work at the fair demonstrates her quiet but masterly ability to combine moments of insistent mark-making with serene, gauzy abstraction.

Dr Esther Mahlangu Mthambothini, Mpumalanga, South Africa

Jenkins Johnson Gallery (B18) e Southern Ndebele people began their inhabitation of the northeastern stretches of present- day South Africa in the 17th century: today, Dr Esther Mahlangu is one of their most beloved cultural figureheads. Fast approaching her tenth decade, Mahlangu began painting at ten years old, when her grandmother first taught her the Ndebele mural tradition. Informed by collective memory, though infused with her own vision, her boldly graphic works painted with a chickenfeather brush feature geometric patterns, in which sensitively colored tiles alternate with bands of white and black. She was included in Jean-Hubert Martin’s landmark Centre Pompidou exhibition “Magiciens de la terre” in 1989; last year, her retrospective opened at the Iziko National Gallery in Cape Town before

touring the US under the title “ en I Knew I Was Good at Painting.” A solo presentation of Mahlangu’s painting at the fair is a chance to see just how good she is.

Karol Palczak

Krzywcza, Subcarpathia, Poland Emalin (C5)

Two geese hang in a loft, seemingly suspended midair; smoke billows from a cleft in a tree; a lone pig, in a damp cellar, its skin as white as milk, is roused by a shaft of light. e moments captured in the paintings of Karol Palczak have the rough and unsettling poetry of folktales, and the surreal cinematic beauty of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror (1975). e precise paintwork of Palczak, who is based in a village in the rural southeastern-most part of Poland, captures the hardscrabble traditions of country life and its contemporary pressures (depopulation, militarization) with a sense of the awesome strangeness of living amid nature.

Nikita Kadan

Kyiv, Kyiv Oblast, Ukraine

Voloshyn Gallery (F9)

In “Kyiv Siren,” Ukrainian artist Nikita Kadan utilizes the motifs of statuary and ruins to convey — and complicate — the idea of cultural conflicts and continuities. e title refers to both the daily air-raid warnings in Kyiv during the current war and the bird-women of ancient Greek myth, whose songs lured sailors to their doom. Charcoal drawings of broken classical sculptures evoke the looting of heritage common to war zones, suggesting civilizations under threat, and invoking the fluid patterns of history; Ukraine’s Black Sea coast, now occupied by Russia, was also once the site of ancient Greek settlements. Featuring almost entirely new works, including a sculpture made in part from material recovered from a Ukrainian battlefield, this will surely be one of the most charged presentations at the fair.

Below Citra Sasmita, Timur Merah Project IX: eater in the Land of

© Citra Sasmita, ailand Biennale Chiang Rai and Yeo

Joey Terrill

Los Angeles, California, USA Ortuzar Projects (B16)

A second-generation Angeleno, Joey Terrill studied at the city’s Immaculate Heart College after meeting its former

sta er, Sister Mary Corita Kent. Kent’s socially progressive approach to pop art was influential on his practice, as were the guerrilla theatrics of Chicano collective Asco. He infused the pop legacy of Richard Hamilton and Tom Wesselmann with signifiers of queer and Chicano identity. An interest in photorealism and the construction of the flat picture space is deepened in the “Still Life” series (1997–2024), which he began after his HIV treatment reduced his viral load to an undetectable level. e presence of antiretroviral medications, alongside everyday consumer products, questions how the mass-marketing of life -saving treatments reshapes our attitude to illness and health. But the collage -like layering of domestic details in the paint ings also points to local social identities and personal histories, giving their cool style a dose of tenderness.

Tuan Andrew Nguyen Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam James Cohan Gallery (B4) Caught between the Annamese Mountains and the East Vietnam Sea, the province of Quang Tri was the site of intense fighting during the 1955–75 Vietnam War. Today, it is the part Vietnam most contaminated with unexploded ordnances (UXO) — munitions that have not yet been detonated — with more than 200 square miles still posing a danger to inhabitants. Tuan Andrew Nguyen moved from Ho Chi Minh City to the US at five years old as a refugee, but has since returned to live and work in the city of his birth. By transforming salvaged UXO into sculptures, he creates works that “help us translate death to life, destruction to healing,” as he told Frieze’s Livia Russell in a recent interview. At the fair, Nguyen presents three freestanding mobiles that have been “tuned” with the aid of a sound healer to create vibrations on a “healing frequency” as they gently whirr and spin.

Matthew McLean is creative director of Frieze Studios and editor of Frieze Week . He lives in London, UK.

Above Denilson Baniwa, Panambi , 2024. Courtesy: the artist and A Gentil Carioca, Rio de Janeiro

God and Beast, 2023. Courtesy:

Workshop, Bali

Finnish artist Pilvi Takala has posed as an office worker, security guard and Snow White in a bid to disrupt social constructions. Ahead of a new interactive performance co-commissioned by High Line Art and Frieze, she talks to Jesi Khadivi. Portrait by Christian Werner

THE AGITATOR

JESI KHADIVI

In your practice, you intervene in actual social scenarios, sometimes undercover. What is your relationship to the people you encounter in your interventions? Do you conceive of them as an audience or as co-performers or a hybrid of the two?

PILVI TAKALA

When I have a video in an exhibition, I have chosen what to include. The people who see it are coming to see art and they have certain expectations and distance from those events. But “audience” is not the word I would use for the people who are not knowingly coming to see art. There’s a much more experimental, alive relationship with these people.

When I make my work, my primary concern is the people who are “participants.” I am trying to understand their codes of behavior and relate to them in a way that brings out something interesting. I’m trying to cause conflict, to have some kind of conversation. I choose to do things in a way that’s a bit off. There are power relations with the undercover aspect; I’m not revealing everything. But, at the same time, art or not, it’s a real activity in the real world and I have to stand by it ethically i f somebody gets angry, if people really hate it. I can’t rely on the fact that, in the end, it will be revealed to be “just art.”

JK Many of your works, like The Trainee [2008], for which you “did nothing” in the Deloitte offices for a month, or The Stroker [2018], where you posed as a wellness consultant providing touching services in a co-working space in London, have a disquieting effect on the people occupying those spaces.

You’ve also worked in shopping malls and at Disneyland Paris, all spaces with a crossover between public and private.

PT Many of the early works take place in spaces to which I had access anyway, like shopping malls, and are exactly that mix of private and public. I asked myself why those contexts rubbed me up the wrong way. This led me to explore how behavior is controlled in such spaces. When looking at specific workplaces that are new to me, I need time for observation. With The Trainee, I didn’t assume anything about the setting. Of course, I have preconceptions about any kind of office, but I arrived knowing nothing, and just tried to fit in and see what popped up. Then, after two and a half weeks, I decided: “I’m going to sit and do nothing.”

At Second Home, the co ­working space in London where The Stroker took place, I only did a few days’ site visit init ially and arrived at the idea based on that. I didn’t need as long because the space felt more familiar to me. I work a lot in contexts where I feel I can navigate the social scenery to some extent. There has to be an aspect of “I could belong here,” even if I clearly don’t.

JK W hat is your role as an artist in these spaces: agitator, pest, irritant?

PT A ll those things! There are official rules, people who have official control, like the security team or the boss.

But there are always other kinds of social rules and control that aren’t written anywhere and aren’t so visible. If you play in this gray area and challenge these rules, control appears in different ways. My role is to open up something about how that control functions and what are some of the assumed shared rules and,

by doing that, start a conversation about what we actually want.

JK W hat is your process of determini ng a context? Is it sparked by any particular personal interest? Or is there a social urgency that you detect in such places?

PT There are different routes, but one big factor is access. For Close Watch [2022], for which I worked as a guard for a private security firm for six months, I was more proactive in creating access, but that was also possible because I had backing, since I was going to represent Finland at the Venice Biennale in 2022. And, for The Trainee, I had backing from the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki; Deloitte wanted to work with artists and they were sponsoring the museum, so the curators made the connection. It’s always somewhat through personal relationships, and somebody has to want it.

But, sometimes, I just come across a phenomenon and look into it and see if there’s an access point or anything that I can do with it.

JK Has your project at Frieze and the High Line evolved from previous works or experiences? Is it emerging from longer-form research?

PT A s always, it’s going to be some kind of social experiment, but it is live performance which is not something I’m super comfortable with, even though I’ve done it before. Normally, the performative part of my work is research for me, and then the actual artwork comes later in the form of a video or something else.

This new work takes place at both Frieze and on the High Line. I’ll have actors interacting with passersby and the

performance is initiated by that interaction. I can’t share much: it’s not particularly important for people not to know or recognize that it’s a performance, but it’s important that they don’t have a description of what to expect. The audience will be both people expecting a performance and showing up for that, as well as passersby and tourists who don’t know they are being approached by a performer. Recently, I was invited to take part in a Finnish National Defense course run by the military. It’s an elite course for influential people in society that has been running since the 1960s. Having gone through it, I have become part of this select group, which is weird, but also flattering. For me, participating was, of course, also a great opportunity for artistic research. The course was in the background when I started thinking about what to do in New York. So the performance is inspired by that experience, even if the connections are quite abstract. I look forward to seeing how it’s going to work out in this context. Live performance is definitely exciting because it could work out the way I imagined it would, or in some completely different way I hadn’t envisaged.

Opposite Pilvi Takala, 2025

Photography Christian Werner

Pilvi Takala, The Pin, co ­ commissioned by High Line Art and Frieze, curated by Taylor Zakarin, associate curator, High Line Art, takes place on May 7, 9 and 11 at Frieze New York 2025 and on the High Line. For more details of Frieze New York performances, including new works by Asad Raza and Carlos Reyes, visit: frieze.com

Jesi Khadivi is an independent curator, writer and editor. She lives in Berlin, Germany.

Pilvi Takala is an artist. She lives in Helsinki, Finland, and Berlin, Germany.

The Shed’s Open Call commissioning program allows early-career artists to work on a grand scale. Assistant curator Dejá Belardo talks to participating artists Sandy Williams IV and Victor “Marka27” Quiñonez, recipient of the 2025 Frieze Los Angeles Impact Prize

BLUE SKY THINKING

DEJÁ BELARDO

Sandy, you were in our last cohort of the Open Call program at The Shed and, Victor, you’re in our current one. How has the experience fostered what you do and the work you make?

SANDY WILLIAMS IV

There are a number of reasons I applied to Open Call. Firstly, when I saw the budget was $15,000, I thought: That’s the exact price of skywriting! I had already done one skywriting project in Virginia and had been looking for the next location. The Shed was the perfect partner for this project because they encourage you to dream big; the institution invites projects that go deeper than just aesthetics and encourages a connection

to larger communities that are often marginalized.

DB Victor, it’s early on, and your show with us will open this summer, but what led you to apply and what has your experience been like so far?

VICTOR “MARKA27” QUIÑONEZ

When I saw works by previous participants, I was really blown away by the projects and their social community aspect. That was the biggest draw for me. The fact that there was money to expand the project through programming was incredibly important. This is by far my most ambitious project to date. I’m speaking here for all Black and brown artists: I’ve worked with institutions that make you feel like you’re being tokenized, like they’re checking

a box, because they only come and look for you during Hispanic Heritage Month or Black History Month. Then there are institutions that are the real deal, like The Shed.

DB Sandy, in previous projects, you had already worked on a monumental scale and you continued that with Open Call. What does working at that scale mean for you and what does it mean to work in the public realm?

SW I ’ve been working in public art in earnest since 2017. In 2020, I had the chance to make my first “monumental” project at Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens, New York. Doing these bigger public projects opens up a whole new world. The audience is not just liberal-

leaning art-world viewers but everyone, in a way that is both complicated and beautiful. For me, the skywritings are like public-service announcements. DB W hat does community-building and working across institutions mean for you? I know, Sandy, that you built a relationship with the Weeksville Heritage Center through your Open Call project.

SW My project, 40 ACRES: Weeksville, started with me hiring a skywriter to trace the dimensions of the historic Weeksville neighborhood, one of the first free Black communities to be recognized in the country. It was established in the 1830s, when Black people were first given the right to own land. New York

Above Sandy Williams IV, 2023. Courtesy: The Shed; photograph: Noel Woodford

Overleaf, top Victor “Marka27” Quiñonez, “I.C.E. SCREAM,” 2025. Courtesy: the artist, Frieze and CKA; photograph: Casey Kelbaugh

Overleaf, bottom Victor “Marka27” Quiñonez with Limon Paleta, Guilty Flavor 2025. Courtesy: the artist; photograph: Malik Yusef Cumbo

was one of the first states to give them that right and Weeksville thrived until the 1930s, when it lost its identity to urban renewal.

The skywriting was a way of holding space for that memory, but it also serves as a metaphor for the dissipation of that community. More recently, Weeksville has been remapped and reestablished as a historical community, but I think it is emblematic of Black neighborhoods and Black cultures all over the country that have had such an impact on the American vernacular and our culture, something that often fails to be acknowledged.

DB Victor, what is your Open Call project?

VQ I ’m creating a 20-foot-tall-by-15-footwide pyramid out of coolers. I want to make a huge monument dedicated to Indigenous cultures, honor the people that are vulnerable right now because of the political climate, and foster awareness of their humanity and resilience. Thinking about the rich ancestry of cultures from Aztec to Maya to Inca, in Central and South America, the pyramid is a symbol that reminds people that many of us were already here, so we’re not illegal. Laws change, wars happen, land gets lost, but humanity should never be lost.

DB W ho are you collaborating with?

VQ I ’m working with an organization called Make the Road New York that fights for immigration rights and supports undocumented workers. The project is called Elevar la Cultura, which means “raise up the culture.” We want to help vulnerable people be seen and have the rights to make an honest living. When you go to Corona, Queens, or Sunset Park, or even if you’re on the subway, you const antly see people who are just starting out in this country with coolers. It really became a symbol for me; in US culture, the cooler means you’ve made it you’re celebrating the Fourth of July, you’re doing all these leisurely things. But, on the flipside, it’s a survival tool: you’re just trying to feed your family.

DB A nd you’re putting things inside the coolers?

VQ Yes, several of the coolers will be lined with textiles. It’s a nod to Chicano culture and the use of vibrant fabrics. But I’m going to be using fabrics of mixed heritage, from South and Central America and Haiti, as well as mud cloths from different parts of Africa, because I really want to show that this isn’t an immigration issue: this is a humanitarian issue. Even though the pyramid is associated with mostly Black and brown cultures, I feel like what’s inside these coolers represents a diaspora of people that has so much in common, not least resilience. Besides the textiles, there are also objects: ceramics, prayer hands, candles, healing stones and a lot of what you’d call “spiritual objects.” I’m also going to include fruit, flowers and some very festive, beautiful items that celebrate some of the things that we love to do as a people, to celebrate each other.

DB You both resurface and highlight important histories: how does being an agent of civic action sit alongside your day-to-day studio practice?

SW For me, understanding and digging through these histories is a way to contextualize our present. History is a framework for what’s going on right now. The problems that we’re facing have such deep historical roots.

VQ A lot of the subjects I take on are ones I’ve had to live through personally. When I was a child, my father was

deported. For me, art is like therapy. Those experiences, among many others, really influenced me in a negative way.

I turned to painting on the streets to try and stay out of trouble and find an outlet; I evolved from graffiti to murals. Instead of being eaten up by looking at political unrest on social media every day, I create work that speaks to it.

SW I relate to that so much. As many hats as I wear a rtist, filmmaker, professor I ’m also a concerned citizen. I participate through my art. I’m one of so many people who care about our collective future and, as Martin Luther King Jr. said, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” My work wants to be a part of that lineage and that bend.

DB W hat are the risks involved with making works in the public realm?

VQ W hether it’s film, music or visual arts, the works that impact us the most tend to be those which we clearly remember seeing for the first time. No matter if that feeling was anger or joy or sadness. Recently, I was awarded the Frieze Los Angeles Impact Prize and created the “I.C.E. SCREAM” series. The acronym I.C.E. is a play on immigration: “Inhumane and Cruelty Enforcement.”

From a distance, you see brightly colored Mexican paletas, which draw you in immediately. But then you get to see something that you weren’t expecting. We can’t control how people react. Over the course of 30 years, I’ve had reactions that have been extremely inspiring, and I’ve also had people calling for my artwork to be removed.

SW I get a nervousness which excites me, because it makes me feel like I’m doing something important. When I make public artworks, there is the possibility of being misinterpreted, but there is always risk involved in encouraging change on that scale.

Dejá Belardo is assistant curator of visual art and civic programs at The Shed, New York, USA. She lives in New York. Sandy Williams IV is an artist, filmmaker and professor. They live in Richmond, USA.

“Marka27” Quiñonez

A stone’s throw from The Shed, the Chelsea gallery district comes alive during Frieze Week. Plan your visit with this guide, including exhibition listings and some insider tips

CHELSEA (ART) MARKET

Casey Kaplan, 121 West 27th Street | “ Igshaan Adams” | May 8–July 25

South African artist Igshaan Adams presents new tapestries and sculptures. These organic, delicate, ethereal works have an unexpected, quiet power, continuing Adams’s exploration of the body as a vessel for memory and the healing potential of movement.

Karma, 549 West 26th Street | “Thaddeus Mosley: Proximity” | Until May 24

Explore the latest wood works from the 99-year-old Pittsburgh-based master. Carved directly into local salvaged timber, Mosley’s majestic sculptures resonate with the far-ranging influences of jazz, Isamu Noguchi, Constantin Brâncuși and African art.

“This is dorky, but Kremer Pigments at 247 West 29th Street is a weird, freaky store. It makes the Harry Potter store look like shit. If I was going to lift one pigment in there? It would be lapis lazuli. It’s basically blue. But a banger.”

Jamian Juliano-Villani, artist and founder of O’Flaherty’s

Pace, 508 and 510 West 25th Street |

“Alicja Kwade: Telos Tales” | May 7–August 15

Polish-German artist Alicja Kwade, whose ambitious public installations appear around the world, presents new largescale sculptures marrying organic with human-made, hard-edged forms.

Pace, 540 West 25th Street | “Robert Indiana: The American Dream” and “Robert Mangold: Pentagons and Folded Space” | May 9–August 15

From the 1960s onward, Robert Indiana embarked on an exploration of US identity. With loans from prominent institutions, “The American Dream” brings together paintings and sculptures, connecting his personal history and the cultural and political realities of postwar America.

A concurrent exhibition features the latest paintings and drawings from octogenarian minimalist Robert Mangold. The master of monochrome’s latest canvases are all variations on polygons.

Gagosian, 555 West 24th Street | “Willem de Kooning: Endless Painting” | Until June 14

Curated by Cecilia Alemani, “Willem de Kooning: Endless Painting” examines the artist’s approach to figuration, abstraction and color. Focusing on the 1980s alongside important earlier works, Alemani charts connections within De Kooning’s oeuvre and considers his enduring impact.

“The best place to find a chic wardrobe item that will quickly become an endlessly complimented staple: Lucky Selectism at 346 West 14th Street.”

Rujeko Hockley, Arnhold associate curator at the Whitney Museum and curator of “Amy Sherald: American Sublime”

Hauser & Wirth, 542 West 22nd Street | “Francis Picabia: Éternel recommencement/Eternal Beginning” | Until July 25

First shown at Hauser & Wirth Paris, “Francis Picabia: Éternel recommencement/Eternal Beginning” focuses on the artist’s final period of 1945–53. Following a career marked by abrupt

shifts in style, these last paintings show the development of his own language of abstraction.

Hauser & Wirth, 542 West 22nd Street a nd 443 West 18th Street | “William Kentridge: A Natural History of the Studio” | Until August 1

In an immersive installation across two floors of the West 22nd Street gallery, William Kentridge presents the nineepisode film series “Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot,” alongside sculptures and drawings created during the making of the film. At the West 18th Street gallery, Kentridge presents prints from the last two decades.

Nara Roesler, 511 West 21st Street |

“Marco A. Castillo: From the Circus to the Star” | Until June 5

Marco A. Castillo, who works as both an individual and as one of the founding members of the collective Los Carpinteros, presents his first solo show in New York. He brings his own brand of Cuban modernism to town with new wall- and floor-based sculptures.

Illustration

Lucinda Rogers

Sara Harrison is a freelance editor. She lives in London, UK.

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, 521 West 21st Street | “Laura Lima: Balé Literal” and “Dana Powell: The Moon Is Still Free” | Until May 30

Originally a one-off event on the streets of Rio de Janeiro, Laura Lima’s Balé Literal (Literal Ballet) is now on to its fourth iteration, with “ballerinas” hanging from a pulley system dancing through the space, powered by a performer ped a ling a modified bicycle.

In “The Moon Is Still Free,” North Carolina-based Dana Powell presents her latest small-scale oil paintings of moonscapes, still lifes and landscapes peppered with powerlines and trash that celebrate the beauty of the earth and reveal our lack of respect for it.

“ I lived on 10th Avenue & 18th Street a while ago. I loved walking up and down the river in the park, getting takeout from Bottino and browsing 192 Books. Even though I was living next door to the galleries, I somehow still missed exhibitions.”

Clarissa Dalrymple, curator and NYC legend

Gagosian, 522 West 21st Street | “Takashi Murakami” | May 8–July 12 Takashi Murakami’s paintings responding to Hiroshige’s “100 Famous Views of Edo” return to New York, where they appeared last year at the Brooklyn Museum. They are shown alongside intricately detailed new paintings presenting the artist’s own spin on Japonisme.

Tina Kim Gallery, 525 West 21st Street | “The Making of Modern Korean Art: The Letters of Kim Tschang-Yeul, Kim Whanki, Lee Ufan and Park Seo-Bo, 1961–1982” | Until June 21

This exhibition pinned to the publication of previously unseen correspondence from the 1960s to the 1980s between four major figures of 20th-century Korean art offers a fascinating insight into the evolution of the country’s modernism. Major works by the artists are presented alongside archival materials.

303 Gallery, 555 West 21st Street | “Jeppe Hein: Expect a Miracle” and “Mary Heilmann: Breaking Waves” | Until May 31

Expect playful minimalism from Berlinbased Dane Jeppe Hein, whose new work

Institutional Shows in Chelsea The FLAG Art Foundation, 545 West 25th Street | “A Rose Is” | Until June 21

Hill Art Foundation, 239 Tenth Avenue | “Sam Moyer: Woman with Holes” | Until August 1

Dia Chelsea, 537 West 22nd Street | “Steve McQueen” | Until July 19

continues to draw on his fascination with the sea its reflective qualities, movement and constantly mutating forms.

Mary Heilmann is famed for her upbeat, bold minimalism. The New Yorkbased artist, now in her 80s, always brings the sunshine of her native West Coast, seen here across paintings, ceramics and furniture.

Kurimanzutto, 516 West 20th Street | “Miguel Calderón: Neurotics Anonymous” | Until June 7

Mexican artist Miguel Calderón exami nes through photographs, sculptures, found objects and a new video h is anxieties and reflections on the art world and the world at large.

Hales, 547 West 20th Street | “Jordan

Ann Craig” | Until June 7

Grounded in museum and archival research into Indigenous material culture, New Mexico-based Jordan Ann Craig explores her Northern Cheyenne heritage through bold geometric abstractions.

“I enjoy going to the Frenchette bakery at the Whitney, where I get the jambon beurre: delicious. The other thing I do

religiously is go to Intelligentsia at the High Line Hotel, a really handsome period building that was originally a monastery; I get an iced matcha or a cortado with oat milk and take it into the garden at the back. If I’m feeling fuzzy from the night before, I go to the deli at the corner of 22nd Street and 10th Avenue and get their BLT sandwich with extra mayo. There are six seats in the window, which are great for a quick bout of people-watching.”

Malik Al-Mahrouky, partner, Kurimanzutto

David Zwirner, 525 West 19th Street | “Tomma Abts” | Until June 14

The Turner Prize-winning artist continues her exploration of process and form, in a marriage of geometric and organic abstraction for the 21st century.

David Zwirner, 533 West 19th Street | “Michael Armitage: Crucible” | May 8–June 27

Zwirner inaugurates its new Chelsea building with an exhibition of paintings and teak panels reflecting on the theme of migration by British Kenyan artist Michael Armitage.

There’s a wealth of great institutional shows to see in New York during Frieze Week, from Rashid Johnson at the Guggenheim to Sonia Gomes at the newly reopened Storm King Art Center

FIVE TO SEE

“Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers” | Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum | Until January 18, 2026 New York-based Chicagoan Rashid Johnson is taking over the Guggenheim’s famous rotunda for this 90-work survey of his 30-year career. Things took off for Johnson when he was included in Thelma Golden’s landmark 2001 exhibition “Freestyle” at Harlem’s Studio Museum a show credited with introducing the term “post-Black art,” with which Johnson is often associated. Known for an interdisciplinary approach that incorporates history, philosophy and art history, Johnson pairs the explicitly gestural with the conceptually rigorous, combining materials and themes that reference African American culture with an analysis of the intellectual debates surrounding that culture’s commodification, as well as notions of race and class within contemporary art. The exhibition covers his wall-based works, including his famous blacksoap paintings and sprayed text pieces, alongside film, video and a conceptual centerpiece, Sanguine, which includes a built-in piano for musical performances. There will also be an accompanying events program.

Rashid Johnson is showing as part of Hauser & Wirth’s presentation at Frieze New York 2025 (Stand B8).

“Carolyn Lazard: Two-way” | Artists Space | Until May 10 Until 2020, all medical mannequins in the US were white. That bald fact is one of the points of departure for Carolyn Lazard’s “Two-way.” Lazard has frequently used ideas of chronic illness and disability in their work, including the piece Extended Stay at the 2019 Whitney Biennial: a wall-mounted hospital television that changes channels every 30 seconds. “Twoway” presents a pair of films: in Vital, a Black person played by the artist and film maker Martine Syms goes for their first prenatal appointment; in Fiction Contract, medical professionals in a “simulation center” at New York’s Elmhurst Hospital enact various challenging childbirth scenarios. The “fiction contract” of the title refers to a document signed by par t icipants in simulations agreeing to treat them as if they were real, while knowing that they are not. The two films offer complement ary ideas of identity, reproduction and institutional perception; the background to “Two-way” is that brown-skinned mannequins were finally introduced to medical training in an effort to help “eliminate disparities in maternal mortality between Black and white women.” Life is a two-way street, often determined by accidents of birth, but some of those “accidents,” Lazard suggests, pose troubling questions.

“Christine Sun Kim: All Day All Night” and “Amy Sherald: American Sublime” | Whitney Museum of American Art | Until July 6 and August 10 Christine Sun Kim’s identity and experience as a Deaf artist profoundly informs her work in ways that are both inclusive and genre-defying. The California native is fascinated by communication and notation music, sign language, the written word, infographics and pictorial renderings of abstraction c reating work that is intriguing, playful and elusive. Her drawings, videos, sculptures and installations explore the non-auditory, political dimensions of sound, particularly the ways in which society places such trust in the spoken (and listened-to) word. The 2024 site-specific mural Ghost(ed) Notes recreated here across the Whitney’s eighth floor renders her practice on a huge scale. Also at the Whitney is a survey of Amy Sherald, renowned for her stylized and often disconcertingly impersonal paintings of Black Americans, including, most notably, her epochal portrait of then First Lady Michelle Obama in 2018. Sherald’s works have an imposing directness in person, so the opportunity to see them in this context should not be missed.

Christine Sun Kim is showing as part of François Ghebaly’s presentation at Frieze New York 2025 (Stand D8). Amy Sherald is showing as part of Hauser & Wirth’s presentation at Frieze New York 2025 (Stand B8).

“Jack Whitten: The Messenger” | Museum of Modern Art | Until August 2 It might be that Jack Whitten’s eccentric journey into art-making gave him the imaginative lateral thinking to become one of the great innovators of postwar American painting, along with the raw anger that fueled both his creativity and politics. Born in segregated Alabama in 1939, Whitten arrived in New York at the age of 21 as a civil-rights activist before deciding to take up art. He then undertook another journey, moving from abstract expressionism to forge a unique approach that deconstructed the material hierarchy of conventional painting. Whitten treated paint almost like an industrial material a nod, perhaps, to the menial blue-collar career expectations of many Black men of his generation. He swept it across the floor, cut sheets of hardened acrylic into

tesserae and generally deprived painting of its inherent cultural status in order to reinvigorate it. Across his six-decade career, Whitten also made sculptures, works that more explicitly reference the violence he had experienced in his life: upright blades set in mounts, quasiritual items and denuded figures. This retrospective is the first to span all eras and every medium of Whitten’s practice, through more than 175 paintings, sculptures and works on paper. Simultaneously ancient and contemporary, process-driven and instinctual, Whitten’s art explores history, language and human fallibility moving beyond the constraints of political activism to operate on a mythic plane.

Jack Whitten’s work is on view as part of Hauser & Wirth’s presentation at Frieze New York 2025 (Stand B8).

“Sonia Gomes: Ô Abre Alas!” | Storm King Art Center, New Windsor | Until November 10

This month, two landmark events coincide in upstate New York: the reopening of Storm King Art Center and the first museum solo show in the US devoted to Brazilian artist Sonia Gomes. The 500acre sculpture park set in the Arcadian splendor of the Hudson Valley has recently invested more than $50 million in new facilities and acquired works by Arlene Shechet and Lee Ufan. Now in her late 70s, Gomes came to international prominence after her inclusion in the 2015 Venice Biennale, and in 2018 became the first living Afro Brazilian woman to have a solo show at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo. Born in the former textile center of Caetanópolis, she uses discarded and secondhand fabric both industrial and domestic i n her work, along with found objects and natural materials such as logs. In another first, her new work is her only site-specific outdoor installation to date, with pieces suspended from the branches of a tree on Storm King’s Museum Hill. In a 2023 interview with frieze magazine, Gomes said: “I have an ongoing process in which linear time does not apply. I think artists’ time is different, and it must be respected. I prefer to live in a spiral time.” It will be fascinating to see how her work responds to such a dramatic and out-of-time setting.

Sonia Gomes is showing as part of Mendes Wood DM’s presentation at Frieze New York 2025 (Stand B7).

Chris Waywell is senior editor of Frieze Studios. He lives in London, UK.

Below Sonia Gomes, Lu , 2023. Courtesy: © Sonia Gomes and Mendes

After a landmark five-year renovation, The Frick Collection’s unique perspective on art history is ready to be explored again. Four contemporary artists, born or based in New York, share what they can’t wait to revisit on Madison Avenue

ABOUT FRICKIN’ TIME

Jesse Wine on Holbein

In 2013, a friend came up with a brilliant game called “Best Quality Worst Quality” (BQWQ). Each player takes it in turns to say what their BQ and WQ is. And so, gathered in a pub, the fun/hell/therapy ensued. After around 30 minutes, a patently obvious pattern was emerging: someone’s BQ was often also their WQ.

A classic might be, “BQ: My confident nature. WQ: Friends find me overbearing.” The game showed that the same quality can be interpreted as negative and positive about the same thing at the same time.

In 2016, I moved to the US. America’s BQ is definitely the Q I found most difficult to grapple with. It is informal. There is a distinct lack of rules and life unfolds in ways that are hard to anticipate. It was a daily shock to see a driver racing in the slow lane, undertaking as if their life depended on it. It emerged that, here, the BQ was also the WQ for me, at least. The paradigmatic example of this is “sure:” a word that means both “yes” and “no” all at once not so much a case of two things being true at once, more that neither thing is true at all!

Sometimes, though, despite the findings of BQWQ, two things are not allowed to be true at once. This is what draws me to the two paintings by Hans Holbein in the Frick: one of Sir Thomas More (1527), devotee of the Catholic Church; the other of Thomas Cromwell (1532–33), devotee of the Church of England and the reformation. At the time, it was not allowed for the two things in which these

men believed to both be true at once. More and Cromwell could not exist at the same time t heir belief systems were so strict that, should one prevail, the other must inexorably fail (by losing his life). But, at the Frick, we find them as eternal bedfellows.

So, what are Holbein’s BQWQ? Is he offering paintings to the future that contain profound insights on the political and ideological titans of his world? Or is he a commissions mercenary, taking jobs from the highest and most influential bidder? Or are both these things true at the same time?

I look forward to revisiting the Thomases: Cromwell’s crown of wallpaper sitting atop his head; More’s earnestness so visceral it defies photography. In a US that frequently seems to deny even the existence of “truth,” these two embodiments of their respective faiths live on alongside one another, maybe each needing the other to make sense of his own reality. We can play BQWQ with these men, too: so finely painted, so exquisite in their silk and velvet garments, so enlightened, that the way in which their respective BQs and WQs actually manifested t heir capacity for dogma, for cruelty, for intolerance becomes almost an abstraction.

Left Hans Holbein the Younger, Sir Thomas More, 1527. Courtesy: The Frick Collection, New York; photograph: Michael Bodycomb Opposite Jesse Wine, Reality tinkerer, 2024. Courtesy: the artist and The Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd., Glasgow; photograph: Sebastiano Pellion di Persano

Jesse Wine is an artist. His work is presented by the Modern Institute at Frieze New York 2025 (Stand A4). He lives in New York, USA.

Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi on Delacroix I lived in Harare and Johannesburg for 12 years prior to attending university in the US. Once there, I suddenly had a perception of myself as lagging behind in my knowledge of “art history.” EuroAmerican art history, that is. Knowing more than anyone in my painting class including my lecturer about African art history didn’t seem to count. I was in a game of catch-up, and my insecurities were spotlit one day in my second year when a lecturer asked if we all knew who Eugène Delacroix was. I reluctantly lifted my hand to admit that I did not and was scolded in front of the entire class: “How can a secondyear art student not know who Delacroix is?” Followed by: “You shouldn’t be here.” Delacroix has occupied a unique place in my thinking ever since. Moroccan Interior (1832) a sketchy watercolorand-gouache painting over a graphite drawing i s his only work in the Frick’s collection. It’s from the artist’s visit to Tangier in the early 1830s, during which he filled notebooks with images of people, mostly women, as well as a few interiors, including this one. A simple stroke of graphite describes an Islamicstyle horseshoe archway; a smudge of brown watercolor denotes the back wall of an interconnecting room. Delicate but unfussy details of rugs and cushions tell a small story, turning the space into a specific, personalized place. I love it for its careful and poetic functionality as much as for the unintended questions it raises about the European gaze on Africa. Over the years, it’s become a symbol to me: a reminder to pay attention to how histories are told or taught, and by whom. I think of this work, in its spare beauty, as a complex reminder that I belong.

Left Eugène Delacroix, Moroccan Interior, 1832. Courtesy: The Frick Collection, New York; photograph: Michael Bodycomb

Below Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi, untitled, 2025. Courtesy: © Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi and Stevenson, Cape Town/Johannesburg/ Amsterdam

Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi is an artist. Her work is presented by Stevenson at Frieze New York 2025 (Stand D3). She lives in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Ann Craven on Renoir Counting down the days until I see Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s La Promenade (1875–76) again at the Frick. I am obsessed with the paint and that the girls are similar, probably twin sisters, and dressed the same. I find myself transported into an intimate moment between mother and child that critics have too often dismissed as merely pretty. Meanwhile, it took me no time to understand why I gravitate toward this painting, yet years to brave repeating my own subject matter, as I always thought I was a twin separated at birth, and that this, too, sends me flying. The mother’s and little girls’ repeated eyes look upward with such tender assurance that I find myself reaching, too, wanting to touch not just the imagined flowers but the paint itself.

Renoir’s painted edges kill me softly: there’s no beginning and no end, just hovering brushstrokes and colors against lights and darks. The dresses of the woman and the children dissolve into the surrounding greenery while remaini ng distinct. It’s so Renoir to play with the brushed edges melting into reflected

light that turns into a symphony of blues, pinks and violets that would shock those who consider him to be decorative. This is radical painting.

The edges where woman meets nature, where dress meets foliage, where hat meets sky t hese are the places where Renoir’s magic happens. Critics call them imprecise, but I see them as brilliant painted time.

Nothing in nature is permanent nor has the hard edge our rational minds want to impose. It is always moving. Renoir understood this viscerally. His brushwork creates transitions rather than boundaries, relationships rather than separations.

This masterpiece reveals everything that makes Renoir revolutionary, even as contemporary viewers continue to overlook his genius. The dappled light filtering through leaves creates a moment suspended in time not frozen, but alive and breathing before our eyes.

Right Ann Craven, Portrait of Two Birds (After Picabia) 2006. Courtesy: the artist, Karma, New York/ Los Angeles, and Phillida Reid, London

Below Pierre-Auguste Renoir, La Promenade, 1875–76.

Courtesy: The Frick Collection, New York; photograph: Michael Bodycomb

Ann Craven is an artist. She is represented by Karma (Stand B2). Her work is included in the group show “A Rose Is” at FLAG Art Foundation, New York, USA, until June 21. She lives in New York and Maine, USA.

Matthew Lutz-Kinoy on Boucher There she is, sitting in my mind, her sakura-pink face greeting NYC’s teenage art students visiting the Frick with their art history professor: François Boucher’s A Lady on Her Daybed (1743). It is always a welcome distraction from Bronzino’s painting of Lodovico Capponi (1550–55), with his Funny Games pouty face and bulbous white codpiece. Boucher’s model was MarieJeanne Buzeau, his collaborator and wife. In this painting, she is so 18th century, with her trendy little shoe and all that blusher; this messy queen, an ADHD creative, her sewing projects thrown on the floor, feeling cute on this Louis XV méridienne. According to historians, many of Boucher’s figures were based on his wife. Her curvy nude form is a blueprint for his image she is everywoman. “What makes a rococo girl?” People are obsessed with Boucher’s painting of his patron Madame de Pompadour (1759), myself included. What a great pairing: the most famous French royal mistress depicted by the man who would go on to become

official painter to the king. Two court functionaries creating the lasting image of rococo royalty. But, here, we sit in a more humble, yet decadent, Parisian apartment, in Madame Boucher’s boudoir. The humd rum girlie, posing for her man, giving us a PG version of one of his more risqué bottoms-up nudes, all cheeks pink. Also on display is his collection of Chinese objets: a folding screen, a porcelain tea set and a ceramic figurine placed on a hanging shelf. They emphasize transcont inental interests bridging art and design. His collection reminds us of art’s new replacement for religion: capitalism. Paintings are collectors’ items belonging to networks outside the church. By folding layers of domestic pleasure into their universe, the Bouchers’ creative intimacy shows us bodies no longer framed by the blue robe of Mary or billowing clouds of Apollo, but by the trappings of contemporary life.

Matthew Lutz-Kinoy is an artist. He is represented by Mendes Wood DM (Stand B7). His solo show “Princess Pom Pom: Medicine Blue” is on view at Kamel Mennour, Paris, France, until May 28. He lives in Paris.

Above François Boucher, A Lady on Her Daybed 1743. Courtesy: The Frick Collection, New York; photograph: Michael Bodycomb

Right Matthew Lutz-Kinoy, New New Brooklyn York York where crazy crazy I city city was I I born love love you you , 2024. Courtesy: the artist and Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo/Brussels/Paris/ New York; photograph: Kunning Huang

Collectors Sacha Janke and Andrew McCormack talk to Phillip Edward Spradley about their shared love of watching artists develop, “fantastical paintings” and the joy of discovery. Photography by Ryan Lowry

“IT’S ONLY GOING TO GET MORE FUN …”

PHILLIP EDWARD SPRADLEY

How do you navigate collecting as a couple? Do you both tend to agree on acquisitions, or is there more of a negotiation when it comes to how and where to display works?

SACHA JANKE

I think we are usually aligned in terms of what to acquire but, when it comes to installing, there is a bit more of a dance. Drew will have these awesome ideas that come to him in the shower! He’ll come out and say …

ANDREW MCCORMACK

… “What if we just cover up the fireplace?” Sometimes, they don’t work out! You’ve also pulled me more toward appreciating abstraction and textile works.

SJ I t hink that’s true.

AM We have some awesome works by Sheila Hicks and Igshaan Adams that would not have been something I was immediately drawn to but, now that we live with them, I appreciate them more and more each day.

SJ I occasionally have to mull something over I ’m not as decisive as Drew.

AM I love Florian Krewer, Ding Shilun, Allison Katz and, if we could afford his

works, Walton Ford. This genre of fantastical painting is the most appealing to me, but I do appreciate all these different types of work that we’re branching out into.

PES How has your approach to collecting evolved over the years?

SJ Collecting in-depth is something that matters to us. There are artists that we have gotten to know and admire, like Caroline Walker. We love her as an artist and we like having different works by her. In addition to collecting her pieces, we also support exhibitions and institutions in acquiring her works.

I recently went to Scotland for the opening of a group show at Ingleby Gallery. I’d never been to Edinburgh, and this seemed like as good a reason as any to go. We love the gallery’s program and collect a number of their artists. We had the chance to go to Caroline’s studio and now I feel more committed to her work than ever.

PES K nowing artists on a personal level certainly brings you closer to their work, allowing the ideas to transcend the space and invite you to step inside.

SJ Going to the studio is incredibly intimate and such a bonus. It’s one thing

, 2023

Photography Ryan Lowry

to live with the art, but to see where the art comes from i f the artist is willing to share that has been incredible. The learning has been amazing and fun.

AM I t hink that’s probably the guiding principle. We are having fun together and it’s only going to get more fun as time goes on. Also, since most of these artists are quite young, we hope that we’ll be able to continue doing this alongside them for a long time and see how things develop.

PES W hat first sparked your passion for art? Was it an experience you had early on, perhaps through your family?

SJ We both traveled a lot at a young age and were surrounded by art in various forms. For me, it was my grandmother’s embroideries and paintings of the Lebanese landscape where my mom grew up. There were always things adorning the home with color and stories that made a lasting impression on me. Then, when my family relocated to New York, we happened to live right around the corner from the Guggenheim, so I remember going there or to the Metropolitan Museum of Art or Museum of Modern Art as often as possible.

I have a powerful memory from when the Guggenheim was installing Matthew Barney’s “The Cremaster Cycle” exhibit ion in 2003, and they had to do it at night because it was such a big production. That show was absolutely wild.

AM My family moved around a lot when I was a child and my parents liked to collect items from the different places we lived, like rugs and paintings, so I grew up with these things in the home. My parents didn’t necessarily take us to museums or shows, but I think they had a keen aesthetic sense wherever they made homes, and I always appreciated that.

SJ Drew and I are visually oriented and care about creating a home and spaces that we love to live in with our family and where we can host friends. We align very easily with our aesthetics.

AM We got more into buying art because we moved out to Connecticut in 2018 and had far more space with a lot of walls to fill. One of Sacha’s best friends from college grew up with Rachel Goulding from the advisory firm Ruth Catone Goulding. We met years back as young people in the city. Over time, we gradually began to talk about art more and more.

Opposite Sacha Janke and Andrew McCormack with Allison Katz, Contre-jour (Westward)

As is probably common, our desires moved into a cycle of wanting to focus on art rather than interior decoration. I read somewhere that the definition of a collector is someone who cannot not buy paintings or whatever kind of art they are into.

PES It becomes an obsession. What has been the most rewarding aspect of your experience? How has your involvement evolved over time and how important has building relationships with artists, gallerists and the community been in that process?

AM It snowballed into that for us. Collecting gives us something beyond work and raising a family. It’s something that’s ours, that we’re building for ourselves to do for the rest of our lives. Being involved in this community and world is intellectually and viscerally satisfying for us both as a shared endeavor.

What’s most satisfying for us is learning about artists who are pretty early on in their careers and being able to see how things unfold. We also collect work by more established figures who have inspired the younger generation, like Charles Gaines and Milton Avery. We love to have their works side by side. You get to know gallerists, you get to know artists, and they get to know you. They feel more comfortable with our point of view. I think the quality of works that we are able to look at has improved over time as we have built relationships, and our comfort in saying “yes” has made it easier to be good collectors be good partners i n that whole system, from artists to galleries to everyone else.

PES A rt is a form of cultural diplomacy. As your collection grows, so does your understanding of history, context and the artists’ peers and heroes. You connect with them in more personal settings and travel to different parts of the world to deepen your appreciation of their work ...

AM … a nd we start falling in love with groups of people who influence each other. A contemporary group could be Doron Langberg, Louis Fratino and Salman Toor. But you can see how they live in a pretty small world socially and have a lot to do with each other’s ways of thinking and working.

PES A re there any upcoming shows that you’re particularly excited to see?

SJ It just so happens that they’re both going to be at Grimm Gallery: Caroline Walker at the end of March, then Louise Giovanelli right after.

AM A lso, the Guggenheim has a program we’re helping to support called the “Collection in Focus” series, where they are trying to make what’s in storage accessible to the public and share more than just what can be shown in the rotunda.

SJ The a im is to mine their collection: all the curators get to pick an artist and focus on their work. It’s awesome. As I was saying, we lived just around the corner from the Guggenheim when we moved to New York, and it’s home to some of my first encounters with art. It’s funny how things come full circle.

Opposite Clockwise from top left: Salman Toor, Family Photo, 2023; Hugo McCloud, Untitled 2024

Louise Giovanelli, Mise en scène, 2023; Louise Giovanelli, Cipher, 2024; Simone Fattal, Young Warrior (The Trophy), 2017

Takuro Kuwata, Large Peach 2024

Balinese door; Charles Gaines, Numbers and Trees, Tiergarten Series 3: Tree #1, April 2019, 2019; Charles Gaines, Numbers and Trees, Tiergarten Series 3: Tree #2, May 2019, 2019; Takuro Kuwata, Small Peach with Leaf, 2024

Top right

Caroline Walker, Watering, Late Evening, June, 2022; Paul Sietsema, Vertical Newspaper (Post-War and Contemporary Art), 2022; Milton Avery, Trees and Fields, 1943

Bottom right

Andrew Cranston, When we were two little boys, 2024; Clare Woods, Twilight Sleep 2023; Clare Woods, Immovable Feast Days 2023

Phillip Edward Spradley is a cultural producer. He lives in New York, USA. Sacha Janke and Andrew McCormack are collectors

The Met’s Vanguard Council isn’t your usual patron group but a body of cultural trailblazers who are taking a hands-on role in guiding the institution into its future

SOFT POWER

The winds of change are blowing through New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. This bastion of cultural tradition has recently embarked on multiple paths of transformation: the last few years’ crowd-pleasing shows with cutting-edge contemporary artists have energized its roof garden and facade; the brand new Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, designed by Thai architect Kulapat Yantrasast, creates greater visibility for holdings of African, ancient American and Oceanian art; and Mexican architect Frida Escobedo has been tapped to design another new wing, which will double the size of the museum’s modern and contemporary galleries.

Public-facing ambitions aside, the Met has signaled this new chapter with an initiative to address the future of philant hropy. The freshly formed Vanguard Council consists of 37 members between the ages of 25 and 45, each personally invited by the museum to have an input on programming. “This is really an experiment for the museum,” explains Hannah Howe, the museum’s deputy

chief development officer. “This is not your grandmother’s Met anymore.” The committee, she thinks, “reflects the spirit of the current period of transformation and the support for dynamic emerging talent.” Co-chaired by tennis legend Venus Williams, financiers Arielle Patrick and Ben Black, and art advisor Sophia Cohen, the Vanguard Council includes prominent names in tech, finance, health and entertainment as well as the art world.

Membership is not exclusive to art collectors and, although a large portion of the list resides in New York, this is not a prerequisite. The in-person experience, however, is the initiative’s main promise. Private events in and outside the Met bring the group together a few times a month and help them contextualize the museum’s programming. Besides private collection visits and early viewings of upcoming shows, benefits include access to VIP experiences at global art fairs and invitations to institutional blockbusters such as the Venice Biennale. Meetings with leaders from various

Opposite Curator Akili Tommasino guiding Vanguard Council co-chair Arielle Patrick through the Met’s Levine Court for Modern and Contemporary Art and Court for Greek and Roman Art

Photography Alec Vierra

museum depart ments, including conservation, audience engagement, curation and the board of trustees, offer behind-the-scenes insight on operations, enabling council members to better grasp the manifold efforts required to keep the doors open. The most influential huddle, however, is April’s Vanguard Council Awards meeting and dinner, during which members vote on where to funnel their financial support. Different departments present their ideas, which can range from new exhibition concepts to programming for planned shows. Around ten projects receive funding a nything from a modern dance series tied to a Met Facade commission to a children’s workshop during an exhibition on ancient China. Howe has spearheaded the group’s formation and followed an “intentionally slow and steady” process to perfect its line-up. “They have each demonstrated an investment in the spirit of the Met,” she says of those selected through her organic recruitment strategy, which has

involved consulting internal and external colleagues as well as philanthropists. “You can bring a lot to the table even if you are not buying art every day.” Cohen and Williams, for example, both participated in the museum’s “Women and the Critical Eye” panel last April in celebration of female patronage. “We spoke to around 400 people, which was a great experience and started our relationship with the Met,” says Cohen. She believes the time is ripe for institutions to diversify ways to provide greater involvement for the next generation of board members. “With everything going on in the world, it is so important to find places where you can learn about different cultures and commun ities,” she says. For Cohen, the first step is to educate young patrons about all aspects of an institutional collection’s maintenance. Patrick agrees and adds that an in-depth understanding of the museum’s program helps members pass the knowledge on to their networks. “We are a diverse group and each of us can be an additional mouthpiece

for what the Met has on view,” she says. Growing up next door to the museum with two collector parents, Patrick often found herself wandering the ancient Greek and Roman galleries. “As a Black woman, I was not always under the most diverse roof,” she admits. She jumped at Howe’s invitation to join the Vanguard Council and work to “increase global audience outreach and also build closer relationships with people within our own city.” As an antiquity major, Patrick looks forward to furthering “cross-pollination” between different historical departments and contemporary art, citing as an example the museum’s recent exhibition “Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now.” “The council is not about ownership but stewardship and opening up to inclusive audiences,” she says.

What sets the Vanguard Council apart from other museums’ similar patron groups is its emphasis on young patronage and a genuine role in the museum’s dayto-day operation. While the group does not

have a say in acquisitions, it does have a direct influence on programming. Howe distinguishes the council from the Met’s Apollo Circle and, having seen some Circle members transfer to other institutions in search of more active participation, she is aware that one of her goals is to cement new young patronage by offering “deeper engagement” with program budgeting for “gutsy projects in the museum’s new chapter.” For Howe, the Vanguard Council is much more than a hobby for monied philanthropists. It is “home for those who are serious about the Met.” During Frieze New York 2025, the Metropolitan Museum of Art will be showing “The Roof Garden Commission: Jennie C. Jones, Ensemble ” (until October 19), “Sargent and Paris” (until August 3), “The Genesis Facade Commission: Lee Bul, Long Tail Halo” (until May 27) and “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style” (May 10–October 26). Osman Can Yerebakan is a writer. He lives in New York, USA.

What’s New York without its bar culture? From stalwart Bemelmans to the exquisite Clemente Bar, a guide to five of the best. Text by Matthew McLean. Photography by Oskar Proctor

THE PERFECT MANHATTAN

Oskar Proctor is a photographer. He lives in London, UK.

Time Again, 105 Canal Street The vibe No frills, all edge. On a corner, a few blocks up Canal from the Bacaro-Cervo’s-Clandestino hub, this bar draws the people for whom the original Dimes Square

has become an over-analyzed tourist attraction. Channeling the anarchic spirit into a new corner, it offers affordable drinks, a field of plastic stools and regular takeovers to keep things fresh. The place to meet the next big thing? After a few $9 wines, you’ll definitely think so. The drink Specials, like the briny Gilda Martini served at the recent Rita’s takeover. Or, when in doubt: an orange natural wine. Perfect for Increasing your Instagram ‘following’ list. Look out for Collector and Ghetto Gastro-cofounder Jon Gray, Naomi Fry, Joe Jonas, Issy Wood. @ timeagainbar

Bemelmans Bar, The Carlyle, 35 East 76th Street The vibe The grand old man of New York hotel bars, known for its casual refinement, perfect acoustics (there are regular piano performances) and the elegant murals painted by Ludwig Bemelmans, creator of the “Madeline” series of children’s books. A staple for generations of Upper East Side habitués, the bar gained a new fanbase post-pandemic, when a young crowd started to flock here for Espresso Martinis and “old-money aesthetics.” The d rink If you’re going to do one very Dirty Martini in Manhattan, this is the place. Perfect for Toasting a successful Frieze Week or an int imate drink after a late-night visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (which is open until 9pm on Fridays and Saturdays). Look out for Diehard fans and Nota Bene hosts Nate Freeman and Benjamin Godsill, while insiders will spot veteran in-house pianist Earl Rose. @bemelmansbar

Clemente Bar, Eleven Madison Park, 11 Madison Avenue The vibe Bohemian, but elevated. Carsten Höller-designed lamps set the tone for the main draw: the dreamlike paintings by the bar’s namesake, Italian artist Francesco Clemente. Inspired by the artist’s and chef Daniel Humm’s mutual affection for the legendary Kronenhalle in Zurich, it’s an effortlessly stylish love affair between art and hospitality.

The drink The Negroni Colada combines coconut rum, vermouth and fresh pineapple juice for a herby, surprising marriage of two classics. Perfect for An entirely plant-based menu is ideal for hosting any vegans or visiting Angelenos. Look out for The new power set: Artnet’s Annie Armstrong, Clemente-fanboy Nicolas Party, dealers Bill Powers and Vito Schnabel (who introduced Clemente and Humm). @theclementebar

The Blue Room at Corner Bar, Nine Orchard, 10 Allen Street The vibe As if a breeze has blown in from the Amalfi Coast, carrying salt air and the smell of ripening lemons. In the more formal dining area of the all-day bistro Corner Bar, mirrors, mosaics and a swirling scallop of a light fitting make the Blue Room feel like a playful marine environment in which to enjoy a great Chardonnay with a plate of trout carpaccio, or something from the compelling list of recherché digestifs. (Cherry eau de vie, anyone?) The drink With carrot, lemon and espelette peppers, the Golden Hour Sour is a zingy happy hour pick-me-up. Perfect for An indulgent finale to a visit of the Chinatown and Lower East Side galleries. Look out for María Berrío (whose commissioned work hangs in the hotel lounge) and Zendaya (fiancé Tom Holland launched his zero-alcohol beer here last year). @cornerbarnyc Nine Orchard is a Frieze New York Partner Hotel. Discover the full list at: frieze.com

Bar,

226 West

Street The vibe When the iconic one-time home of everyone from Leonard Cohen to Robert Mapplethorpe to Edie Sedgwick reopened as a full-service hotel and dining destination in 2022, refreshing its gothic architecture and maintaining its offbeat chic were key. Though not part of the hotel’s original offerings, the Lobby Bar feels like it’s always been there: a comfortably ornate confection of red velvet, gilt inlay and potted plants. Like an eccentric great aunt, it feels louche and stately a nd simply demands gossip. The drink Part of a list paying tribute to creations from the world’s most iconic bars, Arnaud’s French 75 is an electrifying blend of cognac and Champagne. Perfect for Comparing notes on the Chelsea galleries with your spikiest friend (knowing that the dealers will be safely out of earshot at Cookshop). Look out for Zak Kitnick, Natasha Lyonne and closet Swifties (the hotel was besieged by fans after a namecheck on “The Tortured Poets Department”). @hotelchelsea

Lobby

Hotel Chelsea,

23rd

INNOVATIVE TECHNOLOGY MEETS TIMELESS DESIGN.

LG OLED presents an immersive collaboration with Steven Harrington that channels the vibrant energy of spring at Frieze New York 2025. Reinterpreted through LG OLED technology, Harrington’s art is reborn so vividly that you can almost breathe in the floral breeze at Frieze. This exhibition offers a fresh way to experience art as Harrington’s surreal playground transcends traditional boundaries. Each brushstroke finds new life as it blooms into vivid color and motion on LG OLED digital canvas, transforming the realm so it is no longer confined to the canvas. It moves, evolves, and interacts, delivering a deeper emotional resonance with every self-lit pixel. At the heart of this exhibition is Mello, the artist’s ever-evolving companion, weaving through the blossom-filled landscapes. Step into the scene with Mello and immerse yourself in the moment. This is an invitation for you to take your time in this space, and truly “stop to smell the flowers.”

A

frank and fictional interview with Margeaux Goldrich: style icon, “emotional terror” and made-up muse

“MY TURBAN IS THE END OF THIS SENTENCE”

FRIEZE WEEK

Ms. Goldrich, you look magnificent today. Tell us what you’re wearing.

MARGEAUX GOLDRICH Vintage couture from my archive, my Alexis Bittar Lucite bangles and new earrings.

FW W hat are your fundamental rules for personal style?

MG Be true to yourself. Don’t fall prey to “The Trends.” My turban is the end of this sentence, my style’s full stop.

FW We see that your assistant Hazel is with you today. What’s the secret to keeping good relationships with staff?

MG Well, it’s all in the arm’s length don’t get too close, and then you’ve created all the boundaries you need.

FW How did she come into your orbit?

MG She chose me. She came to me with her tail between her legs needed a job outside the strip club. For her, I was a chance to clean up her act.

FW A nd how did you come to be Alexis Bittar’s muse?

MG Honey, it was all about the money my money, to be exact. I’ve been support i ng Alexis since the early days of the brand, through the successes, the pause while he built a little family t hose gays with their kids, the two ­ d ad house hold, right? And then we met again on the streets of New York, and I joined his stable of kooky ladies: though I seem to be wearing it better than any of those other dames.

FW Let’s talk about art. What’s your perception of the New York art scene?

MG It’s the Wild West these days. I love the bold moves of some of the upa nd­ comers, but I love my old masters, love the traditional places. Seems everybody’s gotta have a piece of culture these days. Who are these nobodies buying their way into the art scene with a piece of couch art? What happened to authority?

To passion?

FW Well, what about your passions? Who are the artists you admire?

MG I on ly have passion for the artists I love. Why admire anyone from afar, when I can be right up close in the mix with them? So, I love Mickalene Thomas, Kara Walker, Kehinde Wiley. I’m trying to stay current and ahead of the game but, at the same time, I reach through history and talk to Cy Twombly and Germans from the Weimar period Dix, Kirchner, Grosz, Beckmann. They keep me company.

FW F*ck, marry, kill: Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, David Salle?

MG Well, I already f*cked Jackson. Andy and I were not on speaking terms at the

end. As for dear David, I think we missed our moment, honey.

FW You seem to live such a taxing life of self-sacrifice. What does a typical day look like for you?

MG Finally, someone understands it is such a very taxing time for me. You know, I took on this kid, so I have to get up, get him to school, make sure he’s doing well. I need his situation to reflect well on me, that’s the most important thing. I have to oversee everything. I mean, I’m making lunches! He won’t eat the school lunch it’s practically gotta be catered. He can’t eat nuts; he’s glucose intolerant. What happened to peanut butter and jelly? Not to mention my other kid: Mike, my husband, who refuses to grow up.

FW W hat’s one thing you think there can never be too much of?

MG Ugh. People probably want me to say there can never be too much money. But I’m not gonna go there. Of course, there can never be too many accessory options. But I’m going with love. It sounds better, right? Let’s say love.

FW Could you share one treasured memory of your life in New York?

MG I have too many treasured memories of my beloved ballet and opera, the moments of beauty and grace that are such a part of New York City life. But I suppose the day that Mike brought me Winston t hat terrible day, which is a little cloudy as I was recovering at the St Regis Hotel, under the care of so many doctors and their prescriptions was a miracle.

FW W hat’s one thing in the city that should never change?

MG The hot dog stands. I ate one once, in front of The Plaza, and I’ll never forget it. I’ll never do it again, either. But don’t go changing those.

FW If you could exile one person per manently from New York, who would it be?

MG Well, the co ­ op boards are tricky in this city; you have to tread lightly and, if you want to get rid of a pesky neighbor, keep your cards close. I do find some residents are treating the whole city like they own it t he police barriers, the motorcades and the eyesore of a certain gold­paneled building down the block from my beloved Bergdorf’s are more vexing than ever these days

Above Margeaux Goldrich at Kehinde Wiley’s studio, 2025. Courtesy: Alexis Bittar