New York
Art Fairs to See in New York City and Jersey City in May
Art lovers of all kinds — from seasoned curators and collectors to newcomers — flock to New York City in May to experience the area’s vibrant art scene.
“May in New York is a special moment on the cultural calendar — the city is in full bloom,” said Amy Hau, director of the Noguchi Museum in Queens. Art fairs such as TEFAF and Frieze bring together artists and galleries from around the world, but the scope and volume can be overwhelming.
“For anyone just starting to collect, I always say — don’t be intimidated by the big fairs, even if they can feel like a bit of a visual overload,” Hau said. “Just go, look around, and see what resonates with you. Even if you’re not buying, these fairs are an inspiring, low-pressure way to learn, explore and connect with artists and gallerists.”
Here is a selection of some of the May fairs that will introduce visitors to works and experiences, including 18th-century portraits, new voices in contemporary art and an interactive art scavenger hunt. Venues range from an elegant Beaux-Arts building on Manhattan’s East Side to a former warehouse in the Powerhouse Arts District in downtown Jersey City, N.J. Some offer free admission.
May 1-4 and 8-11 at 528-532 West 28th Street
More than 70 self-represented contemporary and emerging artists are displaying about 250 works, including paintings, sculptures, photographs, mixed media works and installations, at Clio Art Fair, named for the Greek Muse of history and the poetry she inspired. The artists have their own exhibition spaces to encourage relaxed and direct interaction with visitors, and prices range from $250 to $25,000. “Behave as if God Exists,” an immersive performance project, explores spiritual, social and existential themes through live actions and interventions by artists.
May 6-10 at New York Estonian House, 243 East 34th Street
Twenty-five galleries from 18 cities around the world will fill the elegant New York Estonian House for Esther’s second year. Founders Margot Samel and Olga Temnikova, gallerists with strong connections to Tallinn, Estonia, discarded the traditional art fair booth concept in favor of shared gallery spaces. Artworks, site-specific installations, performances and events will be presented — and experienced — throughout the four-story Beaux-Arts building, once a gathering spot for Estonian refugees after World War II. “Return to Innocence,” a series of sculptural candle holders by the Tallinn artist Edith Karlson, will guide visitors, and the basement will be transformed into a showroom that will include custom-made products by the Estonian designer Laivi.
May 6-12 at 75 Varick Street
Nontraditional exhibition venues, free spaces for independent curators and reduced-cost spaces for galleries and nonprofits — strategies designed to reduce upfront risk and encourage experimental work — are a few of the hallmarks of SPRING/BREAK Art Show. More than 350 midcareer and emerging artists will be showcased at a landmark building that was once home to many firms in printing and related trades. Among them is the actor Alia Shawkat, whose paintings chart her Assyrian lineage and family migration, reflecting the immigrant story motif that recurs in this year’s theme of “PARADISE LOST + FOUND.”
May 7-10 at Chelsea Industrial, 535 West 28th Street
Future Fair’s fifth anniversary edition will feature nearly 70 local, national and international exhibitors. A quarter are minority-owned, a quarter are global and over half are led by women. Since its founding in 2020, the fair has embraced a cooperative business model, initially profit sharing with founding galleries. Starting this year, the fair will commit 15 percent of its profits toward a pay-it-forward fund that allocates grants to rising art dealers. Visitors can swing by a culinary pop-up by the Brooklyn restaurant Stowaway and grab some Southern-inspired fare and limited-edition anniversary beers crafted by Grimm Artisanal Ales.
May 8-11 at 157B First Street, Jersey City
“Our name (14C) is a wink to the ‘What exit?’ joke about New Jersey,” Robinson Holloway, Art Fair 14C’s chief executive, wrote in an email, “and we embrace our Jersey roots and celebrate the art of our native state.” But exhibitors are wide ranging and include the International Sculpture Center, an artists collective from Brooklyn and a small New Jersey nonprofit that works with artists with disabilities. The Pompidou Center in Paris, which plans a North American outpost in Jersey City, she said, will provide programming, including a workshop for children based on masterpieces from their permanent collection in cooperation with the Jersey City Free Public Library. The venue is a former warehouse for the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company (A&P) in the Powerhouse Arts District. Tours will be available before regular hours for visitors who are visually impaired or need low sensory environments.
May 8-11 at ZeroSpace, 337-345 Butler Street
The 15th edition of the Other Art Fair Brooklyn, presented by Saatchi Art, continues its mission to support artists and make the art world more accessible and inclusive in unexpected and fun ways. A wide variety of works, in forms including documentary photography and embroidery, by 125 New York-area artists, will be shown along with immersive installations, performances and artist-led activities. Highlights include a fantasy drawing experience by the portrait painter Ben Lenovitz, an interactive art scavenger hunt led by the multimedia artist Joe Kraft and machine-free tattoo pop-ups. Special Mother’s Day weekend events feature photographic portrait sessions with the artist and author Anna Marie Tendler and hands-on workshops for making paper flowers.
May 10-13 at Bohemian National Hall, 321 East 73rd Street
The American Art Fair, now in its 18th year, exclusively celebrates 18th- to 21st-century American works. More than 400 landscapes, portraits, still lifes and sculptures — from folk Art and the Hudson River School through the modernist movements — will be on view. The fair offers a series of lectures, such as one tied to the “Sargent and Paris” exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that looks at the early years of the American painter John Singer Sargent’s career, from his arrival in Paris in 1874 as a young art student through the mid-1880s.
More Art Events
There are plenty of art goings-on in New York City beyond the fairs.
MoMA PS1 in Queens will present the first U.S. museum exhibition of the Angolan-born artist Sandra Poulson. Her sculptures, made from furniture and influenced by daily life and customs in her hometown, Luanda, examine how intimate spaces become spheres for political consciousness.
Nature lovers may enjoy the photo-based work inspired by the gardens of the poet Emily Dickinson at Rick Wester Fine Art in Chelsea, or a respite at the Davis Center in Central Park, which opened last week and has a series of special events planned.
NYC Tourism + Conventions’ Spring 2025 Arts Guide provides a raft of art exhibitions, live performances, festivals and outdoor public art programs, including museums, memorials, monuments and attractions that are always free or are free on specific days and times. A special website this year lists places and events that commemorate 400 years of New York City history.
“Don’t miss some of the great museum exhibitions that will be on view,” Hau of the Noguchi Museum said. “This season’s highlight is definitely the Amy Sherald show at the Whitney.”
She also recommends visiting the newly renovated Frick Museum, checking out the public art along the High Line, stopping by the nearby Chelsea galleries and taking a ferry to Queens to visit the institution she leads, which is dedicated to the work of the Japanese American sculptor Isamu Noguchi. Special exhibits, art-making activities, musical performances, and dance and culinary programs are among the events planned at the museum in May, many to celebrate its 40th anniversary.
“And visitors shouldn’t forget the garden,” she added. “It’s one of the most beautiful times to experience our outdoor space, offering a quiet, contemplative escape from the energy and pace of the city.”
How can people possibly afford to live in one of the most expensive cities on the planet? It’s a question New Yorkers hear a lot, often delivered with a mix of awe, pity and confusion.
We surveyed hundreds of New Yorkers about how they spend, splurge and save. We found that many people — rich, poor or somewhere in between — live life as a series of small calculations that add up to one big question: What makes living in New York worth it?
By the time their son was diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum when he was 18 months old, Angela Donadelle and her child’s father, Michael Jones, were no longer together.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, at the height of the crack epidemic, the pair had fallen into drug addiction. They both went into recovery after they discovered Ms. Donadelle was pregnant.
“He saved my life,” Ms. Donadelle, 66, said of her son. “My life wasn’t in order, and then God sent me him and changed everything.”
Together, Ms. Donadelle and Mr. Jones forged what would become a three decade commitment to carefully and jointly parenting their son, Christopher Jones, now 32, so that he could be independent when they were gone. Ms. Donadelle, who grew up in Harlem, considered moving to find more affordable housing, but believed that Christopher, who is highly functioning, would have access to better therapeutic and educational services in New York City.
Randi Levine, the policy director for Advocates for Children of New York, said New York has high quality programs for autistic children. Medicaid also pays for more services for children and families here than in other states, said Brigit Hurley, the chief program officer for The Children’s Agenda. Both agree that access to services can sometimes be limited.
“I could have taken my degree and moved down south and made more money,” said Ms. Donadelle, who graduated from Boston College with a degree in marketing and business management. She now works as a housing organizer at Good Old Lower East Side, a housing preservation organization in Lower Manhattan. “I had friends that moved to other places, but would I be able to accommodate the needs of Christopher?”
Staying in New York City meant that she had to come up with a plan. Even though they were no longer romantically involved, Mr. Jones sometimes lived with Ms. Donadelle and their son at the Lakeview Apartments, a four-building, 446-unit complex in a prime location at East 107th Street and Fifth Avenue in East Harlem.
From her terrace on one of the building’s highest floors, Ms. Donadelle has a view of the Empire State Building and Central Park, including the Conservatory Garden and reservoir. She pays $1,950 per month for her 750-square-foot two-bedroom apartment.
“I knew that if I was short on the rent, I could ask him for money, and he would give it to me,” Ms. Donadelle said of Mr. Jones, adding that they split the $250 per month they spent on food and the $350 per month for cable, internet and phone service.
“We were real good friends,” she said. “He had girlfriends and I had boyfriends. They just never came to our house.”
The End of a Partnership
That help ended in January 2024 when Mr. Jones, a security guard at a building for older adults, died of a heart attack. Pictures of Mr. Jones, who was known for his love of fashion, adorn the apartment.
Ms. Donadelle tears up when talking about Mr. Jones and their joint effort to raise their son. “We were a team,” she said. “If I was at work, he took care of Chris, got him to the therapies. And that’s why it got harder when he died.”
But their plan paid off. Years ago, specialists told Ms. Donadelle that Christopher would not be capable of graduating high school. He went on to graduate high school with honors and then earned an associate degree from Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn with honors before completing his bachelor’s degree at Hunter College in Manhattan.
Christopher works part-time as a package handler for FedEx where he earns $24,000 per year. Ms. Donadelle earns $60,000 per year from her job as a housing organizer and about $5,000 per year from teaching a course about the social determinants of health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
A few years ago, the Lakeview Apartments converted from the 1970s era Mitchell-Llama affordability program to Project-Based Rental Assistance, meaning that residents would still be allowed to continue paying 30 percent of their income for rent. Ms. Donadelle and her son qualify for a small discount because of his diagnosis and her age, but her rent increased by $400 after the conversion when the market rate value of her apartment and her income went up.
At the time, there was a fear that the complex would become market rate housing because of its desirable location. Ms. Donadelle, who first moved to the building with her family when she was 17, helped in the fight to keep the building affordable. She has pictures with local politicians who joined in the effort.
“Some people don’t think we deserve this view,” she said. “But we have a community here. Everybody knows us, everybody knows Chris.”
Bulk Buys for Home Cooking
Money, Ms. Donadelle said, can sometimes be tight, but she considers herself to be both resourceful and frugal. She cooks at home to save money. Some of her specialties are jerk chicken, lasagna, oxtails and peas and rice. The $40 she spends at the butcher on a batch of oxtails, once considered a cheap cut of meat that has now become expensive, is a treat for them.
Ms. Donadelle buys in bulk and shrink wraps cuts of meat to store in her freezer. Bins in the corner of the terrace hold toilet paper and other supplies bought in bulk to save money.
She also comparison shops, sometimes driving with friends to stores where the cost of fresh fruits and vegetables is cheaper than in her neighborhood. A food pantry that she helped connect with her building also provides about $50 per month worth of food.
Ms. Donadelle and Christopher share a family cellphone plan with a relative and pay about $150 per month. She recently gave up smoking for Lent, which was costing at least $120 per month, and plans not to return to smoking. Christopher saves $200 per month for an emergency fund. Transportation costs them about $60 per month and they budget about $80 per month for lunch at work.
The Rewards of City Life
For fun, they enjoy walks in Central Park with their dog, Milo, who originally belonged to Mr. Jones. They spend about $800 a year on shots, grooming and supplies. They spend about $125 per month eating out and going to the movies. Ms. Donadelle’s Spotify subscription costs $20 per month.
As she looks back on her decision to fight for her home, Ms. Donadelle has no regrets. Her son’s success, she believes, is linked to her decision to find a way to stay in the city.
Christopher is an artist whose sketchbooks dot the apartment. Every Friday, Christopher attends his social group at YAI, which provides services for people with developmental disabilities. He has even begun doing some speaking engagements about normalizing people with disabilities.
“I was literally raised here,” Christopher said while admiring the view from his terrace. “This building, like this city, is my home. It’s been good to me.”
We are talking to New Yorkers about how they spend, splurge and save.
Before Jesse Tyler Ferguson starred on “Modern Family,” he was a bartender at the Winter Garden Theater in Midtown Manhattan, when “Cats” was in performances there. It was 1995, and he had come to New York from Albuquerque. He was cast in the Off Broadway production of “On the Town,” which later moved to Broadway.
“These professional dancers and singers in ‘Cats’ were auditioning for the same role as me, and I got it,” he said. “It’s like my Shirley MacLaine story.”
After starring in the original Broadway production of “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” Mr. Ferguson was cast as the uptight lawyer Mitchell Pritchett on the ABC sitcom. After the show ended in 2020, he won a Tony Award for “Take Me Out.”
Now he is starring as Truman Capote in the play “Tru.” He recently spent his day off with The New York Times.
A jury on Friday convicted a man of the brutal 1993 killing of a woman outside Buffalo, closing the latest chapter in a winding, decades-long saga, with a swift guilty verdict on all counts.
The defendant, Brian Scott Lorenz, was facing his third trial for the murder of Deborah Meindl, a 33-year-old nursing student who walked into her Tonawanda, N.Y., home on a cold February afternoon and encountered a terror.
Ms. Meindl was murdered in her own dining room. She was strangled, stabbed and handcuffed, and her bloodied body was discovered by her young daughter returning home from school.
Mr. Lorenz, 56, was originally convicted of Ms. Meindl’s murder in 1994, alongside another man, James Pugh, though the two long denied any involvement in the killing. Their pleas of innocence eventually found the support of several legal advocates, defense lawyers from New York City, who lobbied for new DNA testing in the case.
That testing, performed in 2018, resulted in stunning findings: There was no genetic link to either Mr. Lorenz or Mr. Pugh at the crime scene. Nor was there any other physical evidence — like hair or fiber samples — or any eyewitnesses linking either man to Ms. Meindl’s murder.
Those DNA results, and evidence violations by prosecutors, led to the dismissal of the men’s convictions in 2023, though Erie County continued to pursue the prosecutions.
The case was a challenge: Many of the state’s witnesses from 1994, who said Mr. Lorenz had bragged about the crime, had died; others told investigators they did not remember details of their initial testimony. Still other witnesses had criminal records and, the defense said, were seeking deals for themselves.
A second trial of Mr. Lorenz last year ended in a mistrial after the jury deadlocked. And in December, Mr. Pugh, 63, who had been released on parole after serving more than 25 years in prison, saw his charges dropped. But on Friday, Mr. Lorenz was again found guilty, after less than a full day of deliberation, on two counts of murder and a burglary charge.
The verdict, after two weeks of testimony and arguments in Buffalo, is a defining moment in a case that has perplexed and fascinated residents of Western New York and beyond.
And it was vindication for the Meindl family, represented in court by the victim’s sister, Lynne MacGill, and Ms. Meindl’s younger daughter, Lisa Payne.
During closing arguments on Wednesday, Ms. Payne wore a blouse that belonged to her mother and sat in the front row of the courtroom clutching a Mickey Mouse pillow that her older sister, Jessica, had used as a comfort while testifying in 1994. (Jessica Meindl, who discovered her mother’s body, struggled with addiction and died in 2020, at 37.)
Ms. Payne also carried a small silver spoon that Jessica had used as a reminder to stay sober, and wore rings from her parents around her neck, including the wedding ring her mother had on when she was killed. As the verdict was read, Ms. Payne nodded slightly while Mr. Lorenz sat placidly, just a few feet away. He faces sentencing on July 13.
After the verdict, the two family members thanked the Erie County district attorney, Michael J. Keane.
“This outcome is not just a legal victory: It is a testament to the persistence of truth and the unwavering commitment of dedicated public servants tasked with the pursuit of justice,” Mr. Keane said in a statement.
Mr. Lorenz’s lawyers said they planned to appeal. They had spent years building a case for exoneration, citing the lack of DNA evidence connecting Mr. Lorenz to the crime and the possibility of other suspects.
“It’s very, very scary,” said Ilann M. Maazel, one of Mr. Lorenz’s lawyers. “I think innocence should matter. I think the truth should matter.”
One of the initial suspects in the case was Ms. Meindl’s husband, Donald Meindl, who had been having a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old girl he worked with at a Taco Bell at the time of his wife’s killing. Before the murder, he had mentioned to a friend that he wanted to have his wife killed, though he later said he was joking.
But the defense suggested that Mr. Meindl was serious about finding someone to kill his wife, at one point playing audio of Mr. Meindl laughing with a friend — who was wearing a wire for the police — about his wife’s death. Mr. Meindl died in 2023, though he attended hearings about the case in 2021 and 2022.
In his summation, Earl Ward, a defense attorney, emphasized the lack of hard evidence.
“You have to ask yourself why there was none of Scott’s DNA in that house,” Mr. Ward said. “Because he wasn’t there.”
Deepening the mystery, DNA from an unknown person was found on some items used in the murder, including a knife and a necktie that was used to strangle Ms. Meindl. (The authorities in Erie County say they have not done additional testing to determine who that DNA belongs to because “the genetic material is insufficient for comparison.”)
One of the case’s lead investigators in the early 1990s, David Bentley, a Tonawanda detective, also came under scrutiny for seemingly feeding details to some witnesses. Even current prosecutors called his actions sloppy and inappropriate.
And Mr. Bentley had a close relationship with Richard Matt, a convicted killer from the Buffalo area who rose to infamy in 2015 when he and another inmate, David Sweat, escaped from a maximum-security prison in upstate New York. Mr. Matt was killed by a federal agent after a three-week manhunt. Mr. Sweat was recaptured.
Then, during a re-investigation of the Meindl case brought on by the new DNA evidence, two Erie County prosecutors came to believe that Mr. Matt might have been involved in killing Ms. Meindl, a theory promoted by Mr. Sweat, himself a convicted killer who remains in prison. The judge in the case, Paul B. Wojtaszek, later discredited that theory, but nonetheless set aside Mr. Lorenz’s and Mr. Pugh’s convictions in 2023.
The dismissal of charges against Mr. Pugh in December and the lack of physical evidence seemed to lead to a shift in prosecutors’ strategy in the third trial; previously, they had argued that the two men had been burglarizing the Meindl home and killed Ms. Meindl to cover their tracks.
This time, prosecutors offered little in the way of motive, though a suggestion toward the end of their closing arguments that Mr. Lorenz might have killed Ms. Meindl for money drew an angry protest from the defense and a rebuke from Justice Wojtaszek. After the verdict on Friday, Mr. Lorenz’s lawyers suggested that those comments by the prosecutors could be part of their appeal.
The state’s case hinged on six associates of Mr. Lorenz who said he’d told them various details about the crime, and his involvement, back in the early 1990s. Several of those people have died, so their past testimony was read to the jury. Other witnesses for the prosecution had criminal records and troubled personal histories, including addiction and mental health issues.
The lead prosecutor in the case, Eugene T. Partridge III, conceded in his closing that “it would have been great had he confessed to a busload of nuns,” but argued that “those vulnerabilities is the reason the defendant chose them.”
Mr. Partridge also defended the long pursuit of a conviction in the case, saying “there is no expiration date on justice.”
The jury’s foreperson, Cindy Musacchio, 61, a retiree living in Tonawanda, said that prosecutors’ compilation of various statements attributed to Mr. Lorenz had swayed her.
“All the people he confessed to, all the similarities, I felt was compelling,” she said, after leaving the jury room.
For her part, Ms. Payne said in a statement that while “nothing in this world could ever justify the brutal death of my mother,” the verdict “shows that as flawed as our justice system is, it can still provide a little piece of comfort.”
“May she now finally be able to rest in peace,” she wrote.
Jonah E. Bromwich and Mark Sommer contributed reporting.
-
Alabama1 minute agoEx-Alabama tackle pleads guilty in $20M NFL player impersonation case
-
Alaska7 minutes agoBiologists forecast a reduced Alaska commercial salmon harvest
-
Arizona13 minutes agoArizona softball: Postseason inclusion, seeding up for grabs in final week of Big 12 play
-
Arkansas19 minutes ago
Herron and Johnson Selected to AUSL Reserve Pool
-
California25 minutes agoHere’s where and when it’s expected to rain in Southern California this week
-
Colorado31 minutes agoColorado landfill emission rules could force mountain counties to hike trash fees. Lawmakers are seeking a solution.
-
Connecticut37 minutes ago6 Little-Known Towns In Connecticut
-
Delaware43 minutes ago‘Great sign of things to come’: Major rooftop solar project launches in Delaware
