After a slightly-off, brink-of-lockdown run in 2020, and a postponement earlier this year, the entire Armory Arts Week circus is finally back in town. And it is led, as has become custom, by the inimitable Spring/Break Art Show, which is open to the public this weekend on the 10th and 11th floors of a Madison Avenue office building.
Unlike the glitzier art fairs you might stumble upon this week, Spring/Break is an artist- and curator-driven affair, and most of the more the 120 exhibition spaces here—by which I mean the abandoned offices, conference rooms, cubicles, and hallways of the one-time Ralph Lauren corporate headquarters—are given over to the teams and individuals for free. And they can do whatever they want with their "gallery," which, this year more than ever, often means creating an elaborate installation in which to display the art.
This is Spring/Break's tenth iteration (it started in an old school, which was actually called Old School before it became luxury housing, down in Nolita), and the theme this COVID-addled year is Hearsay:Heresy, which according to a press release was "inspired by a very different era of public pyres and plagues—we're tackling everything in the realm of the NEO-MEDIEVAL, from feasts to flat perspectives; from art heresies to altered views of religious transcendence."
As is always the case, some curators are showing work that more obviously follows the theme than others, but above all else I was in awe at the energy and creativity that went into transforming these drab, dingy environs into such a wild journey through today's independent contemporary art scene. It's that sense of discovery that makes Spring/Break so much fun; you never know what awaits you through each doorway, and around each corner.
