Spring Break Art Show Tackles Life's Crushing Burdens
Fair participants touch on politics and current events through their own lens and invite others to do the same.
The Spring Break Art Show returns to New York to do what it does best: host a labyrinthine art fair in a venue that was very evidently another business's heavily outfitted headquarters before being vacated. This time, visitors land up in the north side of Hell's Kitchen, weaving through the old CBS News offices where 60 Minutes, CBS Sports, and Inside Edition were hosted until earlier this year.
While fixtures of the news outlet's branding and functions are still found throughout the 9th floor of 555 West 57th Street, Spring Break's participants continue to touch on politics and current events through their own lens and invite others to do the same. So much so that Everything Is Political, the independent media project launched by the climate justice nonprofit Slow Factory, has actually taken over one of the old CBS recording studios to create The People's Newsroom, where visitors are encouraged to go on the record and broadcast their own news, political takes, and other pressing matters.
Though Slow Factory asks all of us to lay our thoughts out in the open, Spring Break's theme this year is “Hide 'n Seek” — an apt designation for the circuitous floor plan rife with dead-ends, hidden nooks, and other unusual places for artwork to nestle. “This is actually the perfect venue for the theme,” Andrew Gori, who co-founded Spring Break with Ambre Kelly, told Hyperallergic during a chance encounter on Thursday, September 24. “We had the chance to have the fair in TriBeCa again, but this felt better suited.”
Equally playful and provocative, “Hide 'n Seek” brought in conversations about labor and equity, intimacy and privacy, intentionally obfuscated histories and their domino-effect impact, and, as one would imagine, the politics of the body.
