May's Must-See Art Shows in NYC and Beyond

A common misconception about “the art world” is that it maps in any way onto the art market. The more accurate thing would be to say that it’s a multiverse, with the traditional system of museums, galleries, and auction houses hovering somewhere just north of the worst of all worlds. The alternatives are surprising. A friend who’d returned from New Mexico told me she’d discovered a thriving scene of galleries specializing in turquoise, cow skulls and gorgeous Native American embroidery, never mind at prices that would make most dealers’ heads spin. Design is another foreign country. A gay guy I know recently posted some bizarre material from his family’s workshop: stingray skin to be buffed into beautiful finishes for tables and drawers. No one could ever deny the immaculate detail or wild material innovations of craftsmen like them, they just also happen to commit the cardinal sin of making work that’s fully functional.

May is the month where the commercial art world puts on its best face. It is the time where galleries and auction houses proudly showcase their hottest artists, hoping that like pigs at a fair or toddlers in tiaras, they might use their little darlings to win an enormous cash prize. But it’s also an opportunity for younger artists to make their own splash. So while big-budget spectacles like Frieze or the opening of the Met are as glamorous as ever, the most exciting openings are smaller, scrappier, but just as worthy of stealing the spotlight.

On Tuesday, the collective Falcon opened its inaugural exhibition R U Still Painting??? in a gutted-out office space in Midtown; a 40-artist show that, by its own description, is “an arbitrary, non-national, non-rational, unofficial, and incomplete painting survey.” It’s a disclaimer that also works as a mission statement: fuck a gallery text — let’s have some art! A stone’s throw away in Murray Hill, Margot Samel and Olga Temnikova launched the second edition of Esther at Estonia House. It’s a much more polished art fair that does double duty by spotlighting Eastern European art and connecting the dots to an international network of cool galleries from Tokyo to Tallinn to Maspeth, Queens. It’s also amusing to wander the halls of this cultural center and see where the cutting-edge avant-garde brushes up against the traces of old-world, Baltic traditional. Slip House (which opens tomorrow) pulls a similar trick, taking the bones of an old carriage house on the Lower East Side and building them into probably the most beautiful gallery space outside of a major museum.

It’s impossible to truly stop, see and seriously take in everything New York currently has to offer.The glut of art week is similar to the frenzy of fashion week, a spectacle that seems glamorous and easily digestible online but is exhausting to experience all at once. The frame of commerce is ever-present, but until they extend congestion pricing to your eyeballs, the pleasure of looking is still basically free. And yet there’s a static in the air every time May comes around, a tinge of possibility that you really could unravel the thread, experience the most of everything and find yourself somewhere truly exciting by the end of the night. Between an artist’s vision and New York City itself, there are many worlds in the art world worth exploring. Here’s a small sense of where to start.