May is when the art world flocks to Manhattan’s Randall’s Island for Frieze New York. Since its 2012 debut as an outpost of the original London event, Frieze has become New York’s leading art fair, drawing around 40,000 visitors last year.
This year’s fifth edition marks the first New York iteration without the founding directors Matthew Slotover and Amanda Sharp at the helm. It will be led in their place by Victoria Siddall, who has worked closely with the two since 2004. “It’s a different experience from Frieze London and Frieze Masters,” Siddall says. “It has its specific charms. By that I mean Randall’s Island.”
The East River islet—actually home to not much, besides the defunct headquarters of Robert Moses’s Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, and a psychiatric hospital—will be more accessible this year, thanks to a new ferry service from the Upper East Side that will bring visitors to the island in just five minutes.
More than 200 galleries, from countries as far-flung as the Czech Republic, Lebanon, Taiwan and Brazil, will be making the trip to participate. The location means the fair works harder than most to draw visitors for a full day, Siddall says. “Galleries always make a really special effort, and I think that’s because of the curatorial involvement.” Siddall is working with five curators—Cecilia Alemani, Clara Kim, Fabian Schöneich, Jacob Proctor and Tom Eccles—to put together a suitably hefty programme.
Alemani is returning to organise the non-profit Projects section, which will feature six artists’ commissions inside and outside the fair, including Eduardo Navarro’s “cloud followers” clad with circular mirrors to reflect the sky, and David Horvitz’s hired pickpocket, who will slip miniature sculptures into visitors’ bags. Despite having officially retired from making art, Maurizio Cattelan is working on a special project paying tribute to the Daniel Newburg Gallery, where he made his US debut in 1994.
Kim, who was recently appointed as the senior curator for international art at Tate Modern in London, joins the fair as this year's curator of Spotlight, the section dedicated to solo presentations of lesser-known 20th-century artists. Schöneich and Proctor are organising Frame, which features 18 young galleries that are less than eight years old, while Eccles, the executive director of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, in New York state, has arranged the Talks programme.
• Frieze New York, Randall’s Island Park, 5-8 May
Correction: This article has been updated to clarify that Clara Kim is the curator for this year's edition of Spotlight, not as the section's permanent curator.
