FRIEZE NEW YORK

Frieze New York is an art fair of some sixty-five galleries, held for five days in May at the Shed, the arts centre at Hudson Yards on the far West Side.

It is little more than a third of the size it was when it began, and it can be seen properly in a morning.

Randall’s Island

Frieze began as a magazine, founded in London in 1991 by Amanda Sharp, Matthew Slotover and the artist Tom Gidley. The fair followed in Regent’s Park in 2003, and came to New York in 2012.

The New York fair opened on Randall’s Island in the East River, in a tent that wound through a quarter of a million square feet and held some 180 galleries. Visitors came by ferry or by bus, and the fair had room for anything. In 2016 Maurizio Cattelan put a live donkey in a booth, beneath a chandelier.

After eight editions on the island and a year online, the fair moved to Manhattan in 2021.

The Shed

The Shed opened in 2019 on the High Line at Hudson Yards: an eight-storey building of galleries, a theatre and studios, with a steel shell that rolls out on rails over the plaza.

The fair came with about sixty galleries, against the nearly two hundred that had filled the tent, and it has stayed near that size.

The smaller fair is chosen harder. Its Focus section gives young galleries, none more than twelve years old, a stand each for a single artist.

Since 2023 Frieze has also owned the Armory Show, the city’s older fair, which it holds in September.

What to Know

The first two days are previews for collectors and invited guests. The public has the last three.

Tickets are sold online, in advance.

A lounge suit, and shoes for standing in.

The Shed stands on the High Line, and walking down it is the right way to arrive.

The fair falls in the same fortnight as TEFAF at the Park Avenue Armory and the spring sales at Christie’s and Sotheby’s. New York’s art May is best taken as a whole.

The mistake is to come on the last afternoon meaning to buy. What sells, sells in the first hours of the preview.

The Court

Frieze New York is not the Court’s own. Preview passes, introductions to galleries and visits to collections around the city are sought on a member’s behalf, and the Court arranges the whole of it: getting there, where to stay, and the table afterward. TEFAF and the spring sales fall in the same fortnight, and a member may take all three as one.

How one becomes a member is set out under Admission.