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~ Posted by Olivia Weinberg, March 2nd 2012

Over the last ten years the Frieze Art Fair has become a major fixture in London. This May it makes its debut in Manhattan, but not in a part of Manhattan that many contemporary art lovers will know. The fair will be on Randall's Island, an area along the East River between uptown Manhattan and Queens that’s less than a square mile in size. Once a quarantine spot for smallpox victims, it was transformed into a park and sports area in the 1930s and has been the site for some legendary moments in sprinting—from Jesse Owens in 1936 to Usain Bolt in 2008. Over tea at The Delaunay, one of Frieze’s founders, Matthew Slotover, told a small group of journalists, "We want to show people something new.”

For those more accustomed to smart commercial galleries on Madison Avenue, it will be a new-ish experience to take either the ferry from 35th Street or the Frieze bus service from 125th Street/Lexington Avenue. Unless they're tennis fans, of course, in which case they’ll already know Randall’s Island as the home of the John McEnroe Tennis Academy (ten DecoTurf hard courts, ten Har-Tru clay courts) which nurtures rising stars, including two young New Yorkers, Noah Rubin and Jamie Loeb.  read more »

~ Posted by Hazel Sheffield, March 1st 2012

Though Kraftwerk has long been celebrated for its formative influence on black electronic music in America—from Detroit techno to New York electro—their albums were slow to chart in the America on release. How times change. When tickets went online last week for a retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in April, the eight-night run sold out in an hour.

Only one original member of the band remains. Despite the departure of his founding partner, Florian Schneider, in 2008, Ralf Hütter (now 65) has shown considerable dedication to touring with three new members. Recently, Kraftwerk supported Radiohead in Latin America, performed with robots and four gold-winning British cyclists in the Velodrome at the Manchester International Festival in 2009, and opened an exhibition of some of their visual work in Munich last October.  read more »

Visitors to Picasso’s new studio on rue Schoelcher in 1913 were greeted with quite a sight. “The whole studio seemed to be bristling with Picassos. All the bits of wood and frame had become like his pictures,” wrote Vanessa Bell in a letter to Duncan Grant, a fellow member of the Bloomsbury group. In the jumble of works on view, it was hard to tell what was art and what was soon to be art. Collage clippings were scattered on the desk and paintings were stacked against the walls. The room also held a still-life construction: a cardboard guitar, placed upon semi-circular cardboard tabletop, with some faux bois (fake wood) wallpaper behind.

This guitar, along with another one made of sheet metal in 1914 (which Picasso himself gave to the museum in the 1970s), are the inspiration for "Picasso: Guitars 1912-1914", a new show at New York's Museum of Modern Art (it opens on February 13th). In 2005 the aforementioned cardboard tabletop that belongs with the cardboard guitar was rediscovered in the MoMA basement, this exhibition marks the first time they are shown together, and also includes a variety of collages, ‘constructions’, drawings, photographs and paintings that follow similar themes.   read more »

New York City’s 125^th Street, Harlem’s unofficial “Main Street”, once served as a de facto showcase of African-American culture, lined with iconic institutions such as the Apollo Theatre. The city’s construction craze has edged out most of these haunts, rendering Harlem's Studio Museum a rarity. In the last four decades, the museum has become known for offering one of the city's most coveted artist-in-residence programmes.

Designed for emerging artists of African or Latin descent, this programme awards a $20,000 fellowship to three emerging artists, a materials budget of approximately $1,000 and, most precious of all, a spacious, centrally located studio for one year. The curators, who look for artists at a critical turning point in their careers, seem to have a knack for spotting talent. Previous grantees include Chakaia Booker, David Hammons, Kerry James Marshall, Wangechi Mutu, Nadine Robinson and Kehinde Wiley, many of whom have gone on to make names for themselves in the art world.   read more »

I FINALLY made my way to MoMA to catch the Richard Serra retrospective (which has been extended for another two weeks until September 24th). There is something remarkable about his grand, steel undulations. These enormous, rusty, whirly tributes to the beauties of industry fold over and in on themselves, creating wonderfully unexpected spaces to walk around and through.

But it is depressing to take in works as staggering as "Sequence", "Band" and "Torqued Torus Inversion" (all made in 2006) in a space as sterile as a museum gallery.  read more »