"There are very few spaces that I go into where I like the mix - often it's the same brands and a regurgitation of things. There are so many people out there doing amazing projects but they aren't necessarily given a formal space. This was a fun excuse to bring people together."
The dream is the confusion machine I didn't have to build, a space where perception slips beyond authorship. Within Communal Dreams, influence operates as a subtle signal rather than a directive force.
"It's a really special spot. When you start at the top and move down the gently sloped ramp, you almost feel like a marble tumbling down, looking at art as you roll by. The slight slant plays with your sense of perspective and grounding."
Mara Naaman's academic career includes serving as Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Arabic at Williams College from 2007 to 2014, and she has held teaching positions at Columbia University, New York University, Hofstra University, and Hunter College.
Carter Shocket stated, 'They kind of felt like they happened and then they were over, like it wasn't a long-lasting kind of project. It was just a flash-in-the-pan kind of thing.'
In the midst of the fabulous The Winter Show last weekwhere connoisseurship, collecting, and cultivated taste converge under one vaulted roofthere was a moment of pause, exhale, and recalibration at the heart of the fair: the VIP Collectors Lounge. This year, not as sponsorship, but as philosophy made spatial. It was titled The Modern Salon. Conceived and designed by frenchCALIFORNIA, The Modern Salon rejected the trade-fair instinct toward visual noise and brand fragmentation.
The exhibition will reflect the loops and the reiterations, the false starts and loose ends of a singular career. It will do so through an apparently simple idea: chronology.
The new New Museum is many things: contemporary, perhaps, but also a science, history, anthropology, and many other museums in one. It echoes the desire of its patron class to own the world and its affiliated courtier class to deliver it to them on a silver platter, or encased in perforated metal, in this case.
Dealers like artists with established sales records because it lowers their already considerable financial exposure. Renting a gallery space in Tribeca costs anywhere between $8,000-30,000 a month on top of staff, marketing, and daily operations. With that kind of overhead, very few business owners can afford to take on the financial risk of untested artists.
On Franklin Street in Brooklyn's Greenpoint neighborhood, one non-commercial gallery fosters 'a small, stubbornly human space for friction.' Friction—the ubiquitous buzzword that captures the simultaneous delight and discomfort of doing things the slow way—is at the heart of artists Pap Souleye Fall and Char Jeré's current show at Subtitled NYC. It also reflects the overall spirit of this little exhibition space and of a burgeoning movement to reject our culture of optimization in favor of a bumpier, more intimate, less alienating experience.
In 2024, I made a vow to never base my art criticism on wall labels. My decision came after reading reactions to that year's Whitney Biennial. "If every label in 'Even Better Than the Real Thing,' the 81st installment of the Whitney Biennial, were peeled off the walls and tossed into the Hudson, what would happen?" asked Jackson Arn in the New Yorker. (He went on to suggest that the overall show would have been much better.)
