Artnet News

DOWNTOWN IS HIP AGAIN AT
DEPENDENT, SPRING/BREAK

Mark your history books -- 2012 is the year that downtown became hip in the art world again. The 2012 Whitney Biennial mines the below-Houston art treasures at galleries like Feature and Bureau, and “The Ungovernables” makes the New Museum a global art center on the Bowery.

Now, a pair of edgy art fairs joins the ADAA Art Show, the Armory Show and eight other art fairs in New York this week (see “March Art Fair Madness in New York,” Mar. 2, 2012). After you visit these two events, stop in for refreshment at the historic Max Fish bar on Ludlow. The bar’s current show features mixed media works by tattoo star Luke Wessmann.

* The Dependent art fair, Mar. 10, 2012 (one day only), returns for its second go-round, this time at the Comfort Inn at 136 Ludlow Street. The fair features 22 exhibitors, up from last year’s 16, and including many avant-garde spaces located in Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn. Taking part are CANADA, Callicoon Fine Arts and James Fuentes from the Lower East Side, Soloway from Williamsburg, and the popular Regina Rex from Ridgewood in Queens. Also on hard are Foxy Production from Chelsea and even a gallery from Richmond, Va., Reference. Admission is free.

*Spring/Break Art Show, Mar. 6-11, 2012, abandons the traditional gallery model to focus on a single curatorial theme. This year it’s “Apocalist: A Brief History of the End,” with works spread through more than 20 classrooms and hallways across four floors of the old school building at 233 Mott Street (which Performa also used as home base last November). Founded by creative consultants Andrew Gori and Ambre Kelly, the selection was made by no less than 23 different curators.

Among the curators are Lower East Side dealer Helen Toomer-Labzda, who is presenting work by painter Anne-Lise Coste; Bushwick gallery owner Tom Weinrich is showing Jesse Mclean’s video installation Relations; Maureen Sullivan curated film installations by Eve Sussman and Simon Lee and Algis Kizys. Plus, the show also has works by Joe Brittain, Violet Dennison, Noam Gonick, Takako Oishi, Desi Santiago, Jennifer Sullivan and Pete Voelker.

Sound exhausting? Try the special guided Segway tour from Dora + Maja. General admission is $5, with proceeds supporting future programming at the venue.

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