The 2013 edition of Printed Matter’s New York Art Book Fair, held annually at MoMA PS1, featured a performance by MASKS, a Bruno Munari exhibition, a collage-making party, and the launch of multi-talented artist Tauba Auerbach’s new project, Diagonal Press, among other things. Unfortunately, we had to miss it in order to attend a hipster summer camp weekend upstate, but were we jealous? No! Because not only were we clever enough to ask noted bookworm and SU contributor Brian W. Ferry to document it for us, we’d also managed to trick ourselves into believing that attending would have been a terrible idea: It’s a hot, crowded, and sweaty affair, one that has the tantalizing potential each year to completely bankrupt us. So yeah, we totally dodged a bullet, right? Right? Well either way, we can all live vicariously through Brian by checking out his pictures and commentary in the slideshow at right.
Halfway through our ferry ride across Manhattan's East River to Randall's Island this weekend, thunder rang out, the skies opened up, and a torrential downpour enveloped our little boat, ruining our hair and prompting dozens of our fellow travelers to whip out their iPhone cameras with glee. But neither rain nor sleet nor snow was going to keep us away from this year's Frieze Art Fair, especially after we missed the 2012 show due to Noho Design District preparations and — through the reports of friends and critics — definitely lived to regret it. Once we were inside the giant white tent (designed by the local architecture firm SO-IL), snapping away on our own iPhones while drooling over the smell of Mission Chinese that hovered mercilessly over the central arc of the space, we didn't mind so much that our feet were sloshing around inside our shoes. We managed to see nearly everything — including an amazing performance piece by our favorite, Tino Sehgal — identified several strange recurring trends (art made on or from mirrors, references to outdated technologies), and had a major celeb spotting (Jared Leto) to boot. Check out some of the pieces we Instagrammed after the jump, then head over to our Facebook gallery to see even more photos.
In our fourth year of producing the Noho Design District, we’ve learned a few things. Namely: That while industrial, disused spaces have loads of charm, they also run the risk of leaking when those May showers hit. After two years of emergency sandbagging and climbing onto roofs in our galoshes, we decided it was time to go legit. So when we heard last fall that 45 Bleecker Street — which played host to Tom Dixon’s labyrinthine underground exhibition in 2012 — was about to undergo a gut renovation, to be reborn as a music events space, we knew we wanted in. We decided early on that the space would be filled with up-and-coming talents for our Noho Next exhibition, which in the past has proved a bellwether for design stardom, featuring the likes of Jonah Takagi, ROLU, Fort Standard, Iacoli & McAllister, and Brendan Ravenhill. We have a feeling this year’s edition will prove no different.
New York Design Week may already feel like a distant memory, but we couldn't move on to covering the upcoming Design Miami Basel fair — or start publishing all the amazing studio visits and house tours we've been saving up for the past few weeks — without doing one last post about all the offsite shows we saw (and didn't see) during this year's ICFF. From magnified eyeballs to garbage arches to our favorite watering can of all time, check out the official Sight Unseen roundup below.