The Best From Frieze New York 2021

Launching today, 5 May, and running until 9 May 2021, this week Frieze New York brings together over 60 world-leading galleries at The Shed, alongside a programme of talks and special projects. A dedicated edition of Frieze Viewing Room will run in parallel with the fair, from 5-14 May, with expanded online programming connecting galleries and audiences across the globe. Reimagined for its new location, the 2021 edition of the fair features a strong contingent of New York and US-based exhibitors including stalwarts like Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, Gagosian and Hauser & Wirth. Continuing to provide a platform for galleries that have been active for ten years or less, the fair’s Frame section, dedicated to solo artist presentations, has been advised by gallerists Olivia Barrett and Sophie Mörner. Notably, New York-based artist, Precious Okoyomon has been announced as the winner of the Frieze Artist Award. Highlighting the best from this year, Something Curated takes a closer look at the events and presentations not to miss at Frieze New York 2021.

This God Is A Slow Recovery, 2021 by Precious Okoyomon

For This God Is A Slow Recovery, Okoyomon focused their research on failures of communication, and instances where language collapses, breaks down, and arrives at an impasse. As an epitome of miscommunication, the legend of the Tower of Babel was taken as a point of departure to conceive, together with industrial designer Jonathan Olivares, a steel deck structure covered in camouflage netting that was placed at the centre of The McCourt. Throughout an afternoon, poets and performers took turns to read their own poetry as well as a poem Okoyomon wrote for the occasion, Sky Song, while accompanied by a trio of strings. The readers’ voices and the music organically and unexpectedly intertwined during the length of the performance, creating unpredictable consonances as well as nuanced cacophonies. Watch an exclusive recording at Frieze New York.

Otis Houston Jr. presented by Gordon Robichaux

Presented by Gordon Robichaux, the works of Otis Houston Jr. are primarily made with discarded objects he collects from the street and the dumpster at his job. Created in his Harlem apartment in the Taino Towers housing project, where he’s lived for the past thirty years, and in the basement of the office building where he works in Midtown Manhattan, these artworks are informed by his perennial practice: an on-going site-specific installation where he performs on the side of the FDR Drive. Over the years, he has come to occupy and claim this marginalised stretch of highway as gallery, studio, and forum. Since 1997, following a period of incarceration and his mother’s death, Houston Jr. has returned weekly to his self-anointed soapbox under the Triborough Bridge, where he stages impromptu performances and displays an arrangement of signage, drawings, and found-object assemblages that critique racism, poverty, and addiction, and celebrate health, education, happiness, and freedom.

Art:LIVE with Annabelle Selldorf, Delfina Delettrez, Nico Vascellari, Marina Abramovic & More

Art:LIVE is a new broadcast and video programme of expert insights into recent developments in contemporary art and culture. Devised for audiences in a more distanced world, the content opens doors to inspiring spaces and important conversations, and offers access to artists, collectors, curators, and creatives in diverse fields. Taking the theme of ‘Reflect, Refocus, Reset’, this edition responds to the cautious optimism of the present moment and lessons from the recent past, and includes an intimate talk with Marina Abramovic in her NYC loft; a tour with Jessica Morgan through the expanded Dia:Chelsea, re-opening after two years of renovation, and the new site-specific commission by Lucy Raven; as well as a conversation with jewellery designer Delfina Delettrez and artist Nico Vascellari at their home in Rome, amongst others.

Zeinab Saleh presented by Château Shatto

Presented by Los Angeles-based gallery Château Shatto, Kenya-born Zeinab Saleh is a London-based artist whose interdisciplinary practice takes the form of painting, drawing and video. The new paintings on canvas and paper by Saleh shown at Frieze are prompted by encounters with video, drawn both from her own recordings, widely circulated materials as well as an extensive family archive. Saleh works from stills to isolate details within a frame, extracting line, gesture and atmosphere. She translates not just the forms, but the frequencies and vibrational qualities from a moving format to a static one, lifting selected moments from their context and relocating their optical and emotional operations onto the surface of her paintings. In doing so, she takes advantage of the enigmatic potential of these floating forms. Alongside her independent practice, Saleh is a co-founder of Muslim Sisterhood, a collective working within photography, fashion and publishing. ​

Tribute to Vision & Justice with Carrie Mae Weems, Hank Willis Thomas, Mel Chin & More

A central strand of Frieze New York 2021 is the Tribute to the Vision & Justice Project and its founder, Sarah Elizabeth Lewis. Among those presenting work are critically acclaimed artists Carrie Mae Weems and Hank Willis Thomas, who have been commissioned to create their own considered homages to the Vision & Justice Project. Weems will newly present monumental images of unique book covers for the artists who were originally a part of the Vision & Justice Project. Thomas, following his campaign ‘2020 Awakening,’ launched by his initiative, For Freedoms, will recreate his billboard, Who Taught You To Love? (2020). Alongside this, Mel Chin will exhibit a new billboard marking solidarity with the Asian, Asian American and Pacific Islander communities, also realised in collaboration with For Freedoms.

Wilson Díaz presented by Instituto de Visión

Wilson Díaz was born in Pitalito, Colombia in 1963, and studied Fine Arts at the National University of Colombia, Bogotá. His work explores the complex socio-political situation in the country, touching on the historical and present-day issues facing the nation. From the appropriation of images from mass media and historical archives, Díaz utilises diverse source materials in various projects, where painting, drawing, video, performance, and writing, amongst other mediums, are involved. Since 1996, he has included live coca plants in his work, a highly politicised crop of Colombia, using it’s foliage, stems and even seeds of the plant in different ways, sometimes as pigment in drawings. Díaz is also a founding member of Helena Producciones, a collective of artists founded in 1998, which has held eight performance festivals in the Colombian city of Cali.



Feature image: Precious Okoyomon, Earthseed, Exhibition view at the Museum Für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, 2020. Courtesy of the artist, the Museum Für Moderne Kunst, and Quinn Harrelson / Current Projects. Photo by Axel Schneider