Less than six months ago, I was sustaining myself on dining-hall rice and beans and living in a dorm room decorated with a couple of Frida Kahlo prints on the walls. So when I visited Salon Zürcher and Clio this week, I felt nervous about attending an art fair for the first time, let alone covering one.
Salon Zürcher in the East Village was sparsely attended the night I went, on September 3, one day after it opened. While I could hear my shutter clicks echo, the one artist on site, Olivia Beens, transformed the experience into a comforting one.
Clio Art Fair, on the other hand, was anything but comfortable. My perusing was happily interrupted by performances that had nothing to do with the art on the walls, but were among the highlights of my night.
Neither of the two fairs I attended merited my anticipatory jitters. If anything, they reminded me that it’s okay to start anew.
Clio Art Fair
When I arrived at Clio, located on a gallery-saturated block in Soho, Manhattan, a woman immediately handed me a long PVC pipe to use in Kleida Spiro’s “Press and Sniff” performance, which helped take the edge off.
Patrons and artists danced with the pipe after smelling an installation on the wall, attracting a rowdy crowd inside the quaint first-floor space.
In its decade-long life, Clio has showcased independent contemporary artists biannually, in the fall and the spring. Branded as a more affordable option than larger art fairs, Clio is displaying 180 works by about 30 artists who do not have exclusive NYC gallery representation but are nevertheless “affirmed creative minds,” in the show’s own words. On its opening night, Clio held four performances: Spiro’s olfactory experience, a drag show by Viruscella Quinoa Salmonella, a word poetry segment by Holly Crawford, and Nicole Goodman’s “Tales from the Candy Lady.”
After two performances, I finally had a chance to look at the visual art. I spoke to Ashley Gringhuis, a Canadian artist who recently quit her job in landscaping to pursue art full-time. She said she’d only just started showing her artwork in January. Her self-portraits ring true to her previous career, and I appreciated the throughline.
Close by, I started talking to artist Kajal Zaveri. Immediately, we lied to each other about being from San Francisco — we are both from the suburbs of San Francisco — and I recognized what drew me to the paintings in the first place: their resemblance to Bay Area horizons.
As with Gringhuis, art is Zaveri’s second career: She recently moved to New York from California after quitting her finance job to become a full-time artist. Shows like Clio represent the expanded opportunities that self-represented artists like herself can find in the city as compared to her home state.
Just as I was leaving, drag artist Viruscella Quinoa Salmonella took the stage right outside the fair on the sidewalk. Patrons joined in dance for the most collective display of joy of the night.
Salon Zürcher
I met artist Olivia Beens at a much quieter Salon Zürcher — partly my fault, given that I didn’t attend the opening on Labor Day. (I was avoiding my labor!)
Salon Zürcher’s presentation this year, titled 100 Women of Spirit+ and held at the Zürcher Gallery on Bleecker Street, is described as an intimate and “distinguished” display of 11 women painters following the legacy of the 18th-century French term femmes d’esprit, referring to gutsy women artists and intellectuals. It’s the 10th iteration of the Women of Spirit+ exhibition series since it debuted during the Armory Show in 2020.
“I’m mostly a sculptor,” Beens told me. “But during COVID, I started painting and working with collage, image transfer, and just let things come to me.”
This is Beens’s first time showing in an art fair, where she chose to present a body of work that departs from her usual “sacred” and “profane” sculpture. Instead, she’s embracing her entrance into the 2D world with bright colors, celestial scenes, and resin.
While Beens was the only artist in the room, I also took note of Marykate O’Neil’s painting “Turkey Dinner” (2022), featuring a massive single-serving TV dinner and speaking to her aesthetic of solitude in the digital age.
Maybe it’s because I was thinking of my own college diet as a measure of where I was in my life before I started covering art fairs, but I stood for a moment at this painting and felt somehow represented.
At both Clio and Salon Zürcher, I spoke mostly with artists who’d just made changes to their lives, whether it was leaving their jobs to pursue art or picking up a new medium of expression in their practice. These fairs, it seemed, were a welcome platform where they could debut a change.
