9 Events, Shows, and Booths You Can’t Miss

The New York art spring season is in full swing, with five coinciding art fairs—Frieze, Esther, Independent, Spring/Break and TEFAF—announcing the crescendo this week. Frieze New York, the main attraction and anchor, is more walkable than ever. After a meager year in the market, some galleries are understandably sitting out and refocusing on tailored opportunities for their artists. The silver lining being this self-editing makes fair-going much more pleasurable because everyone exhibiting tends to have a very good reason to be there. In this climate of hidden abundance, rewards lurk in historical presentations and solo booths. Stay away from anything resembling a Dutch tulip. Here is where we would start.

Indoor gardens are having a moment, thanks in large part to Rashid Johnson’s mammoth new Guggenheim retrospective and its hanging greenery. But Johnson is not alone this week: Asad Raza’s contribution to Frieze New York is an indoor nursery made in partnership with the High Line’s horticultural team. It greets you as you enter the fair, serving as a kind of bridgeway between the green passageway outside and the industrial plasticity of The Shed. On Saturday, this teeming garden of seedlings and clippings will be marched down the High Line in the hands of volunteers as a procession scored by Kelsey Lu plays. In walking together down this main thoroughfare with these new beginnings between their palms, participants will pay homage to the many migrations that came before and laid these tracks for the beauty and abundance we enjoy now.

Hannah Levy’s glass era is upon us. The accomplished New York-based sculptor—who forever altered our way of looking at asparagus with her oversize, floppy silicone spears—is evolving. Casey Kaplan celebrates this material revolution with an entire booth devoted Levy’s latest sculptures. These new pieces build upon the sculptor’s fascination with design and the sinister twists the functional can take in very few moves. This time, Levy seem to be zooming in on Art Nouveau and architect Victor Horta’s desire to approximate nature with industrial materials—a pursuit that spans across Levy’s work to date. Stripped of its silicone parts, the new work pushes back against the futuristic descriptions usually prescribed to her practice. Levy knows we are more anachronistic than we like to think.

Rose Salane won over New York at the 2022 Whitney Biennial with her presentation of all the ingenious tokens that subway riders illegally fed MTA machines. The New York-based artist remains a hometown darling, as evidenced in the buzz around her appointment-only show at The Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Look for her latest work at a joint booth between Chapter and Carlos Ishikawa. Last year, the latter came to Frieze with a romantic body of Salane’s work that made use of another accumulation, the confetti left behind by City Hall wedding revelers. We won’t spoil this year’s surprise.

Chapter’s contribution to the booth is a paring of two architecturally minded artists from their program: Mary Stephenson and Milano Chow. The former is known for the constructions and rooms she builds from floods of unadulterated color; the latter, the careful linework that form her facades. Sometimes the obvious pairings are the most satisfying to see.

The London-based gallery Emalin knows how to set a scene: charred roofs, rotting fruit, heads on spikes, garish circus paintings. If that doesn’t capture what it feels like to be American this spring, what does? None of the participating artists—Karol Palczak, Stanislava Kovalčíková, and Augustas Serapinas—are American, though. They come from abroad, and for some, it’s their first time showing in New York. That’s the joy of art fairs: international studios delivered to your doorstep. And if bellwethers like Emalin are any indication—well, the bad mood is global. But let’s not call it a trend.

The legacy of Jenni Crain lives on through downtown It girls, influential curators, and the artists within her wide circle of influence—if that gives any indication of the kind of artist, curator, and person she was. Revered in life for her thoughtful and complicated way of looking at the world, Crain remains a cipher for the New York art community. At Frieze New York, Gordon Robichaux—known for drawing out the canonical importance of legends, living and gone—pays homage to Crain and her circle with an unprecedented presentation of her work. The booth extends the two-part exhibition currently on view at the gallery’s New York space, offering another entry point into her rigorous, quietly radical vision. This is for the real fans—and for those just beginning to understand what made her so essential.

Like the Gordon Robichaux crew, Marc Selwyn and Ales Ortuzar have the touch for reawakening the potential of sleeping giants—whether they are still with us or not. The former have joined forces for what is set to be a truly iconic booth at TEFAF, the Upper East Side’s favorite fair. Their collaborative subject? The late Lee Bontecou, whose impossibly stylish, steampunk-ready abstractions have been experiencing a renaissance of desirability among a new generation of fans. In these apocalyptic times, it’s hard for Bontecou’s patchwork mobiles and hollows, with their sutured sides, to not resonate. The presentation does newcomers the service of showcasing one of everything from hanging numbers to charcoal drawing.