Lara Schnitger’s Suffragette City is a protest/procession in which volunteers carry hand-crafted banners and ornate textiles fastened to wooden sticks. This stylized political event moves around Frieze in four timed performances, with the last one scheduled for Saturday at 3pm. Thursday’s, photographed her, included around a dozen individuals, most of them women, either clothed in navy-blue mechanics’ jumpsuits or black floor length gowns with lace decolletages and stripes extending from shoulder to hip like a sash. One participant brandished, rather like a placard, bondage-inspired lingerie stretched taught over an oval disk and attached to an armature with a long handle. Another wore a sculpture on her back made of plaid ribbon that had been woven into a sort of oversized basket and fitted to the arm straps of a baby-carrier. Bringing up the rear was a large pink and black illustrated banner held up high, the words “love your boob” stenciled over an image of three women dressed as sexy cats. The imagery referenced the hand-knit pussy hats of the Women’s March on Washington in January 2017. Anton Kern Gallery has a booth with Schnitger’s artworks rested against walls where they look less like ornamentation and more like the sculptures they are.

Frieze continues at Randall’s Island through Sunday, May 6

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What singles out the best from the rest of contemporary art fairs is the space given over to thematic subsections that offer revisionist, sometimes even revelatory, curating. Frieze abounds with generically titled zones like “Focus,” “Frame,” and “Spotlight” that aspire to this condition.

To some fanfare, another was added this year: “FYI” honored the vision of still much lamented dealer Hudson with solo booths of artists he had championed. (“For Your Infotainment” was a catch phrase of his.) In vindication of Hudson’s eye, many of these artists are now with blue chip galleries, as demonstrated by curator Matthew Higgs’s invitations, landing us with Raymond Pettibon courtesy of David Zwirner, Takashi Murakami (Gagosian), Andrew Masullo (Nicelle Beauchene ), Tom of Finland (David Kordansky), and another 15 artists at a booth of the Hudson Foundation.

Inspiring for some as this tribute may have been, I must say that there were as many gains to be had in the less vaunted “Spotlight” quadrant in the southern end of the marquee, especially in the way it chalked up strong historic presentations of women artists: Merrill Wagner from the 1970s, for instance, at Zürcher; breakthrough works by Mira Schor (surely the most epic representations of limp penises in art history) at Lyles & King; plucky, vibrant Emma Amos at Ryan Lee; riveting vintage assemblages by Betye Saar at Roberts Projects; and, from another fearless Angelino, in a joint presentation by Nicole Klagsbrun and Marc Selwyn, the spookily mesmerizing Cameron, known equally as a painter, actress and witch.

Besides a spellbinding intersection of collaborators (Wallace Berman, pre-Scientology L. Ron Hubbard, Kenneth Anger and Dennis Hopper, to name a few) she was the creator of exquisitely weird visionary images, some resulting from acid trips taken with her nine-year-old daughter. The image here, on a torn off book cover, redolent of trecento Sienese primitives via Leonora Carrington and painted with the impetus of a dark faith, is delectably creepy.

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Superfine is a mélange of amateur and professional artists hawking their wares in an environment more akin to an arts and crafts fair than anything resembling Frieze. One artist whose work stands out is Yanjun Cheng: In her haunting four-foot square painting, A Child (2018), a partial head emerges from the darkness to stare through visitors behind mismatched opalescent eyes that fail to return the viewer’s gaze.

Superfine: 459 West 14th Street, east of 10th Avenue, May 2-6, superfine.world

Art New York, on Pier 94, is packed with blue chip art, much of it bought by mega-collectors before the public was even allowed in. Aside from these predictable offerings, there were booths showing selections of less conventional art fair fare. Large blurred paintings by the Miaz Brothers (born Milan, living and working in Valencia) stand out in Miami’s Fabien Castanier Gallery’s booth: While these works resemble out-of-focus Gainsborough or Ingres portraits, the compositions are apparently original and, unexpectedly, not lifted from art history.

Art New York at Pier 94 through May 6

 

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