May 10, 2025

This week, if you throw a stone in New York City, you'll hit some art fair or another. Frieze, NADA, Spring Break, TEFAF, Independent, and 1-54 are just a few of the fairs you can still visit this weekend. Check out our coverage below for a glimpse of the art for sale, and a sense of how the art market is doing in these unsteady times.

Meanwhile, we witnessed a lackluster Met Gala that failed to even generate funny memes. By contrast, the suspense that preceded the election of the world’s first-ever US Pope has produced some top-tier conclave memes, as you'll see below.

In Opinions, artist Damien Davis criticizes some media outlets’ framing of four major museum shows by Black artists this season — Amy Sherald at the Whitney, Rashid Johnson at the Guggenheim, Jack Whitten at MoMA, and Lorna Simpson at The Met — through the narrow lens of one gallery’s dominance. It’s a must-read. In another essay, religion scholar Emma Cieslik explains how the “Pope Trump” meme is a lot more dangerous than we thought.

In a new episode of the Hyperallergic Podcast, Editor-in-Chief Hrag Vartanian speaks with historian Sarah E. Bond about labor organizing and strikes in ancient Egypt and Rome. I recommend you buy Sarah’s new book, Strike: Labor, Unions, and Resistance in the Roman Empire.

Happy Mother's Day tomorrow, and enjoy your weekend!

— Hakim Bishara, Managing Editor

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NYC ART FAIRS

Frieze New York Is Back to Its Old Ways

The blue-chip art market inflates with anger and slams its fist if you keep pestering it with the nuisance of the outside world. | Hakim Bishara

Sculptures Steal the Spotlight at NADA New York

At the fair’s new and bigger Chelsea venue, I admired taxidermied crustaceans, homages to Puerto Rican life, and textures galore. | Maya Pontone

Esther Art Fair Returns to a Beaux Arts Architectural Gem

For its second edition, 25 galleries from 17 cities are showing works across the sumptuous interior of New York’s Estonian House. | Julie Baumgardner

Conversation Flows at 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair

In the heart of the financial district, over 70 artists from across the African diaspora showed works to an eager VIP audience. | Isa Farfan

The European Fine Art Fair Is a Cabinet of Curiosities

From lesser-known Meret Oppenheim works to Anna Weyant’s jewel-box paintings, this over-the-top New York fair is rich with gems waiting to be discovered. | Greta Rainbow

The Next Big Thing Is at Spring Break Art Show

It has a longstanding reputation for being scrappy and DIY, but the latest edition of the New York art fair proves it can also clean up quite nicely. | Valentina Di Liscia

Downtown New York Shines at the Independent Art Fair

The invite-only fair includes downtown stalwarts, as well as emerging Tribeca galleries. | Lisa Yin Zhang

Future Art Fair Enters Its Grown-Up Era

Having launched in the choppy waters of the pandemic, the show has since nestled comfortably into New York’s busiest fair week. | Rhea Nayyar

Who Says You Have to Leave Brooklyn to Go to an Art Fair?

Across the bridge, away from the perhaps buzzier Manhattan shows, The Other Art Fair and Conductor offer intimate opportunities to engage with artists. | Aaron Short

The National Museum of Mexican Art Touches Lives Beyond Chicago

The museum carries out its multifaceted mission to celebrate and cultivate the arts, all while keeping the Mexican-American community of Pilsen at its center.

Learn more

IN THE NEWS

A new outdoor sculpture by artist Molly Gochman is meant to honor and memorialize mothers and caregivers is on view at Prospect Park.
A federal judge halted the Trump administration’s efforts to cut grants and staff in order to dismantle the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
The US government opened applications for the Venice Biennale last week, featuring Trumpian new guidelines emphasizing “American values.”
Scores of NEA grant awardees received an email from an unmonitored NEA email address rescinding part or all of their funding.
SFMOMA laid off 29 full- and part-time staff members in a 7.5% reduction to the institution’s total employees.
The Trump administration has removed a photograph display honoring the victims of gun violence at the Washington, DC, headquarters of the ATF.

OPINIONS & FEATURES

Who’s Afraid of Successful Black Artists?

This spring, New York’s museums feature four Black artists in major solo exhibitions. Some in the media are not happy about it. | Damien Davis

New Research Shows Slavery’s Outsized Role in Pompeii’s Economy

It was the violent profitability of slavery as an exploitative labor system that allowed for the region to prosper, the study demonstrates. | Sarah E. Bond

At Home With the Last Heir of a Pissarro Painting Looted by Nazis

David Cassirer reflects on his family, their legacy, and the work at the center of a serpentine legal case that has wound up and down the US court system for the last 25 years. | Michelle Young

MET GALA RECAP

No, That Was Not Rosa Parks on K-Pop Star Lisa’s Met Gala Outfit

Amid wild online speculation, it was revealed that the portraits on the black-lace jacket and bodysuit were designed by painter Henry Taylor for Louis Vuitton. | Rhea Nayyar

This Year’s Met Gala Memes Prove We’re All Tired of This Shit

The lack of risk-taking and personal flair in this year’s outfits — particularly in celebrating Black dandyism — isn’t even worth our sass. | Rhea Nayyar

ANNOUNCEMENTS

REVIEWS

Nanette Carter’s Abstract Balancing Act

In this retrospective, the Montclair-raised artist gives the viewer a look at an artistic language that continues to evolve and shed layers to reveal its essence. | Hrag Vartanian

Nancy Elizabeth Prophet Never Backed Down to the Art World

The trailblazing Afro-Indigenous sculptor’s life and everlasting impact are the subject of a long-overdue retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum. | Alexandra M. Thomas

Weaving That Opens to the World and Heavens

Claudia Alarcón and the Wichí women weavers who compose the collective Silät create artworks that seem to channel land and celestial bodies. | Gregory Volk

PAPAL MEMES

Papal Conclave Yields a Holy Bounty of Memes

From comparisons to the US election to speculation about where the smoke really comes from, we’re turning to humor as we contend with a possibly frightening transfer of power. | Isa Farfan

The “Pope Trump” Meme Is More Dangerous Than You Think

With humor and AI, the meme appeals to the growing constituency of devout MAGA Catholics. | Emma Cieslik

BOOKS

Internet Misinformation Is the New Medieval Magical Thinking

Readers might enjoy the gross and gory fairy-tale quality of this new book — or its parallels to the Trumpian internet. | Claudia Hart

Eadweard Muybridge and the Making of the Motion Picture

A new comic book is as much a social history of photography and its relationship to culture during the 19th century as it is one man’s life story. | Dan Schindel

PODCAST

How Workers in Ancient Egypt and Rome Organized Strikes

Historian Sarah E. Bond joins Editor-in-Chief Hrag Vartanian to discuss the 3000-year-old legacy of workers rebelling against unjust wages and working conditions.

CROSSWORD

The Hyperallergic Art Crossword: May 2025

Celebrate the Frick’s reopening with clues on Fragonard, Romanticist painters, Renaissance masters, and more. | Natan Last