Y’all, it’s been a week! On Monday we started load-in for SPRING/BREAK Art Show 2018 (as you may have seen on our Instagram story), on Thursday we closed Hair Paintings and Other Stories… and today we’re putting the final touches on our rooms at SPRING/BREAK Art Show. You read that right, room$$$. Plural. We’ve got two entire rooms this year and we’re so excited to share the work with you this week. We can’t wait to introduce you to our featured artists.

First, we thought we’d start by talking about SPRING/BREAK Art Show. What is it? Who is it? What’s the deal? SPRING/BREAK Art Show was first produced in 2012 by curators, Andrew Gori and Ambre Kelly who together make up The They Co. Over the last seven years SPRING/BREAK Art Show has become an internationally recognized exhibition platform using underused, atypical and historic New York City exhibition spaces to activate and challenge the traditional cultural landscape of the art market, during Armory Arts Week. In exchange for no-cost exhibition space, visionary perspectives both established and unknown are charged with engaging these areas under a unifying theme and pushed to extend the boundaries of typical market week practices, low overhead and shifting curatorial themes their assets to this end.

This year’s theme is “Stranger Comes to Town.” In their call for submissions, Gori and Kelly proposed, “Even in a land looming with a copper Goddess, one practically begging for the whole world’s Strangers, America’s symbolic territories have consistently mobilized against the Outsider—even, as if obeying vampiric protocol, after inviting them straight in the front door. Yet more than any other country, we are an entire nation of Strangers. This Stranger-ness compounds in its particular foreign associations, but also evaporates under a fairly quick makeover by naturalization, from each territories’ particular Laws of the Land. What is this transformation process—and once you become ‘one of Them’ is there a full moon that can ever turn you back? What the hell alchemy makes us ‘Us’ anyway? And just what kind of Tod Browning-style freak-show of assimilation have we put together here among the accepted and desirable of every part of our world?... A Cultural Trend is also a stranger, new in town. As is Youth, forever evicting the Young before them from the relevancy of trends prior. What becomes Timeless, how does our shit turn gold and when do Golden Years make it gold-er? And what other aspects of everyday life construe the dichotomy of Local/Out-Of-Towner? … SPRING/BREAK Art Show 2018 seeks works about foreignness, migration, assimilation, and the alchemy of two or more dissolving into each other—or story, as the adage suggests—its limitations, arcs, and disassembling in the realm of formal art practice as a further articulation of Them and Us, narrator and audience; two strangers to one another, caught in an exchange.” For a full synopsis of the curatorial statement, visit SPRING/BREAK Art Show’s website!

In response, we got to work on the two proposals that were selected, OUR GREAT LEADER WILL NUKE YOU and UNTILL. Come back tomorrow for more information on each of our rooms and to find out more about the artists that will be featured this year!