The Other Stylish Week
Armory Arts Week Kicks Off in New York With a Pair of Big-Ticket Openings
One traveling circus leaves New York, another moves right in. Even with a significant portion of the city's fashion crowd in Europe, Armory Arts Week's kickoff openings were buzzy. At fordPROJECT, curator Neville Wakefield unveiled a group show, Involuntary, for a crowd that included Rachel Weisz, Chloë Sevigny, and Leelee Sobieski. Heavy on multimedia installations, the exhibition features a hyper-slow-motion video of Wakefield's girlfriend, Olympia Scarry, in mid-yawn, not to mention works by Ryan McGinley, Kaari Upson, and other youthful art-world stars.
At the show's after-party at the Surrey hotel, Wakefield explained that the shockingly checkered past of the gallery's building at 57 West 57th Street—"written in blood and sex and violence and haunting"—helped him, if not viewers, process the idea of emotions beyond control. (Socialite Edna Champion and her French lover famously met their deaths on the premises, which have since been considered haunted.) Not your typical white cube space, in other words? "Not at all," Wakefield said. (Not much of a yawn, either.)
Same goes for the Art Dealers Association of America's fair, which takes place annually at the grandiose Park Avenue Armory. Last night, a special preview of this year's booths (proceeds from which benefited Henry Street Settlement) drew the browsing likes of the Yurman family, Mary Alice Stephenson, and Kelly Rutherford. Picassos and de Koonings mingled with contemporary offerings on display from purveyors like the Pace Gallery, whose staff got busy introducing Phillip Lim to the work of Zhang Huan, the Chinese artist known for his paintings painstakingly assembled out of incense ash reclaimed from Buddhist temples. (Zhang will be doing a portrait of Diane von Furstenberg for the Beijing opening of the designer's world-traveling Journey of a Dress exhibition on April 2.) "Amazing," Lim concluded, then excused himself. "I'm going to go look at some more."
ERROR:
