Every field gets its moment. College basketball has March Madness, Hollywood its winter awards season and the art world May in New York.
Auction houses stage big-ticket sales of modern and contemporary art, galleries and museums host high-profile exhibitions, and art fairs alight around town, competing for the attention of collectors from near and far.
This year, breaking with custom, the major fairs are all overlapping during one week, instead of spreading out over a longer stretch. “That’s the challenge for dealers,” said Augusto Arbizo, a senior director at Schwartzman&, a New York firm that advises collectors, artists and art institutions. “Everybody’s attention is a little more focused, but you may have somebody in your booth for like two seconds.”
There will be more than 360 exhibitors with booths across the four main events: Frieze New York (May 8-11) with 67 at the Shed; NADA New York (May 7-11) with 121, just a few blocks from Frieze, in the Starrett-Lehigh Building; Independent (May 9-11) with 85 at Spring Studios in TriBeCa; and TEFAF New York (May 9-13) with 91 at the Park Avenue Armory.
There are also smaller events in various locations, including the Spring/Break Art Show (May 8-12), the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair (May 9-11), the Future Fair (May 8-10) and Esther II (May 7-10).
They arrive at a fraught moment. “People are nervous,” Heather Hubbs, the executive director of the New Art Dealers Alliance, which runs NADA New York, said in a phone interview. “I think it’s hard not to be.”
Global art sales fell 12 percent last year, according to a report from Art Basel and UBS, following a 4 percent slide in 2023. Shipping and operating costs are up, and the economy is topsy-turvy. J.P. Morgan has forecast a 60 percent chance of a global recession this year.
The last big test of the American art market was in February, during Frieze Los Angeles, in the wake of the devastating wildfires. Leading up to its opening, many debated whether the fair should proceed, but Frieze ended up reporting 30,000 visitors, almost equal to its 2024 edition, and some dealers expressed relief.
“People flew in, and so there was this sense of support,” Arbizo said. “There was this energy, and that translated to business.”
Frieze’s events in Los Angeles, Seoul and London are larger, but its New York show is still a powerful draw, with all the mega-galleries and many key smaller ones. It’s “an amazing platform for sales, but also that first Wednesday, that’s the center,” the artist Sam Gordon, who co-owns the New York gallery Gordon Robichaux, said, referring to Frieze’s V.I.P. day. “It’s bringing everyone into that orbit.”
Gordon Robichaux is devoting its stand to the minimalist works of the artist and curator Jenni Crain, who died in 2021 of Covid-related complications, at 30. A site-specific piece by Crain will also be on view at its Union Square gallery, alongside a group show of artists that she supported. That two-front approach “amplifies her voice,” Gordon said.
Moving to the Starrett-Lehigh from an event space farther south, NADA will also open on Wednesday, rather than on the day after Frieze opens to V.I.P.s, as it did last year. Many of its exhibitors are emerging dealers, some participating in their first fair, and their prices skew toward the lower end, from around $500 to $50,000. “NADA has work that’s pretty accessible for people if they’re being a little conservative,” Hubbs said.
Some dealers spring for two fairs. At Frieze, Gagosian is presenting three polychromed bronze sculptures of the bright-green Incredible Hulk by the superstar Jeff Koons, who has been showing with the rival Pace Gallery since 2021. One features a playable organ. Across town at the Park Avenue Armory, Gagosian’s booth at TEFAF will be taken over by the artist Anna Weyant, who will show trompe l’oeil paintings of jewelry in a booth of her own design. The subject matter seems apt for the Dutch-run fair, where jewels themselves are on offer, alongside antiques, design objects and a nearly three-millennium-old Egyptian bronze of Osiris.
Will people buy? Fresh off a trip to Art Basel Hong Kong in March, Arbizo said that collectors “are taking their time” and that “dealers are having to work harder for each sale.”
These days, the art adviser Megan Fox Kelly said, after art fairs, “it may take not just weeks, but sometimes months of follow-up to get things sold, and that’s a change.”
After the phalanx of fairs, more than 1,500 artworks will await bidders the week of May 11 at the city’s big three auction houses. (The public can catch glimpses at short-run previews in the preceding days.) Last year, Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips totaled $1.4 billion at these marquee auctions, a 22 percent decrease from the same 2023 sales.
At tough economic moments, collectors are sometimes hesitant to consign prized works for public auctions, Fox Kelly said last month. “I think we may see more private sales, and I am already hearing about more private sales.”
Still, the houses have been promoting their consignments. Sotheby’s is offering a 1955 Alberto Giacometti sculpture with a $70 million estimate. Christie’s has secured 39 works owned by Leonard Riggio, the chairman of Barnes & Noble, who died last year, and his widow, Louise, valued at more than $250 million, including a 1922 Piet Mondrian grid painting estimated at around $50 million.
The highest end of the market has been quiet lately. Last May in New York, the top price at auction was $46.5 million, for a Jean-Michel Basquiat; in May 2022, when the market was stronger, a dozen works cleared that number, according to Artnet data. But this past November — the other marquee auction week in New York — three works managed to exceed it, including a $121.2 million René Magritte.
Bonnie Brennan, who started her tenure as Christie’s chief executive in February, said that “’25 has really started on a very positive note in a way that we didn’t see in ’24.” She added, “That really began starting in the fall, where we started to see more supply unlocked.”
People had been “sitting on their hands because of the U.S. elections,” Brennan said, adding that now “obviously we have new uncertainties with the tariffs.” (Artworks are exempt from the new U.S. import duties, and art dealers and auctioneers hope that will continue. However, everyone is worried about the destabilizing effects of a prolonged trade war.)
“When good things are offered, they always find homes, because people don’t get offered those things so often,” Peter M. Brant, a collector whose art foundation has spaces in Manhattan and Greenwich, Conn., said by phone.
But auction action is only one part of May’s allure. As collectors raise their paddles, galleries across the city open some of their biggest shows of the year. Hauser & Wirth is presenting the lesser-known late paintings of the Dadaist Francis Picabia at its space in Chelsea, beginning May 1. Gladstone Gallery and Sprüth Magers are showcasing the German artist Rosemarie Trockel, starting in early May.
The NYCxDesign Festival runs May 15-21 with events across many neighborhoods. And as May ends, the Metropolitan Museum of Art will reopen its galleries for African art, Oceanic art and art of the ancient Americas after a renovation by WHY Architecture, founded by Kulapat Yantrasast.
The Brant Foundation, for its part, will open a show at its East Village location of pieces by Glenn Ligon, whose work borrows from texts by figures like Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Pryor to address how Black life and history are represented in the United States. “I think it’s necessary to remind people of our history and its reverberations today, particularly during a time when so much is being erased,” Brant said in an email.
And down in TriBeCa, the week of Frieze, the dealer Matthew Brown will be toasting the first New York show in nine years by the British Dutch artist Nick Goss, who paints enigmatic interiors and cityscapes, just as Goss’s longtime friend, the Kenyan British artist Michael Armitage, inaugurates David Zwirner’s new building on West 19th Street.
After starting in Los Angeles in 2019, Brown expanded to New York last year, opening his first show in late April, just before Frieze. “It was so overwhelming,” Brown said. “There were so many people in the gallery.”
“I love Los Angeles,” the dealer said, “but I never experienced that in L.A. I’m hopefully looking forward to experiencing the same thing again this year.”
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