The VIP preview of the Spring Break Art Show marked the unofficial kickoff for the 2024 New York Armory Week on Wednesday, bringing together some 100 curated presentations in an empty office space on Varick Street, built in the 1920s and originally home to book-printing companies such as Macmillan.

If you’re new to the New York art scene, I would implore you to make Spring Break part of your itinerary.

Even if you haven’t been to the Armory Show before, there is little, if anything, to set it apart from other high-end Modern and contemporary art fairs around the world. It’s great, but it follows the same model as its main competitors. Spring Break is in a class of its own, offering a showcase for emerging artists and ambitious curators unrestrained by the niceties of the white box.

Here are just a few of the wild presentations you can catch at this year’s edition, which explores the loose theme of “‘INT./EXT’ (interior/exterior)” amid abandoned cubicles, hallways, and even a corporate bathroom.

Danielle Klebes with her installation “Just Passing Through,” curated by Emily McElwreath, at Spring Break Art Show, New York, 2024. Photo by Sarah Cascone.

You enter into a bar and living room by Danielle Klebes, “Just Passing Through” curated by Emily McElwreath. There are freestanding paintings of beers and red Solo cups (starting at $100) as well as vibrant paintings of the various strange places that the artist has called home over the years (up to $7,000).

It’s a followup to the “Queer Man Cave” Klebes presented at Wassaic Project in Upstate New York in 2023, and a companion piece to “A Dyke Cabin of One’s Own,” on view through September 21 at Mother in Law’s House in Germantown, New York.

Will Kurtz with his Coney Island sculptures at Spring Break Art Show New York 2024. Photo by Sarah Cascone.

You can visit the Coney Island Boardwalk, with life-sized beachgoers and a Zoltar fortune-telling machine curated by Frances Sinkowitsch. The surprisingly lightweight sculptures are crafted from plaster bandages, masking tape, and newsprint by veteran artist Will Kurtz.

There’s also a beach, replete with real sand, a campfire, and tents that you can sit inside to watch video art from Yoshi Sakai on vintage televisions in “Grandma Is Cool AF,” curated by Lauren Wolchik.

Yoshi Sakai, “Grandma Is Cool AF” curated by Lauren Wolchik at Spring Break Art Show New York 2024. Photo by Sarah Cascone.

There’s a giant chess set with nearly human-scale pieces crafted from antique piano parts by Ryan Bock, curated by Ki Smith Gallery with Spring Break founders Andrew Gori and Ambre Kelly.

The artist told me the $40,000 installation was “a Readymade-esque Duchampian amalgamation of parts” that came together after someone called him up asking if he wanted to salvage anything from an old piano factory.

Ryan Bock with his giant chess set made of piano legs, curated by Ki Smith Gallery with Spring Break founders Andrew Gori and Ambre Kelly. Photo by Sarah Cascone.

I also loved the plush purple carpeting and shiny metallic walls serving as a beautiful backdrop for colorful relief sculptures and mixed media textile canvases in “Interplay,” a three-woman show curated by Rachel Gisela Cohen and Abby Cheney featuring their work and that of Yen Yen.

One of the joys of Spring Break is seeing what crazy ideas returning artists and curators come up with, and seeing practices evolve from year to year. That made it especially sad to learn, belatedly, of the passing of Bobby Anspach, who drowned in 2022 at the age of just 34.

One of the late Bobby Anspach’s Continuous Eye Contact works at Spring Break Art Show New York 2024. Photo by Sarah Cascone.

Now, the Bobby Anspach Studios Foundation is presenting one of his series of Continuous Eye Contact works at this year’s fair—and at Spring Break’s upcoming “Secret Show,” which will be on view at Little West 12th Street on weekends September 29 through November 10. The work, meant to induce a deep, meditative state, involves lying down on a hospital bed and staring up at reflection of your eye amid a curtain of LED lights and pom-poms.

The fair also has decidedly more traditional and practically scaled work, including pieces that can be yours for as little as $100.

Charles Clary’s horror VHS tape art at Spring Break Art Show New York 2024. Photo by Sarah Cascone.

Michele Jaslow and Jac Lahav have curated a booth called “Monster,” which includes 150 vintage horror VHS tapes transformed into unique, $100 artworks by Charles Clary. He’s inserted intricate cross-sections of his signature layers of cut paper into each box, creating an eye-catching 3-D effect.

Another standout at that supremely affordable price point are Stuart Landry’s handcrafted steel Post-It Notes in “Note to Self.” The artist has shown large-scale kinetic work at other recent Spring Break fairs (all curated by his wife, artist Shona McAndrew), including a $10,000 Ferris wheel that found a home with Long Island collectors last fall. But he liked the idea of making something his friends could buy.

Stuart Landry with his handcrafted steel Post-It Note series, “Note to Self” at Spring Break Art Show New York 2024. Photo by Sarah Cascone.

He cut, shaped, and spray painted 1,000 pieces over the month of August, inscribing each in Sharpie with random ideas like “let’s all take all our money out of all the banks all at once” and “does expecting the unexpected make the unexpected the expected?” (Landry told me it’s part of “an ongoing project doomed to fail where I’m trying to document every thought I’ve ever had.”)

If you can spend a grand or two, check out Jeff Bliumis’s “PPP,” or “portable pocket paintings” series, of tiny oil on bronze works painted directly into his hand-forged bronze frames. The 65-year-old artist, who was born in Moldova, told me he wanted to incorporate historic techniques for painting on copper plates into new works that would bridge the divide between painting and sculpture. Each piece is a jewel.

Jeff Bliumis, In the Garden. Photo courtesy of Spring Break Art Show New York 2024.

Though the fair is known for its outlandish installations, there is no shortage of great painting in this year’s event.

With curator Nina Kong-Surtees, Los Angeles artist Mary Lai is showing texturally dense paintings made with paste and acrylic—though she did also create an interactive archway installation for viewers to walk through.

Mary Lai with her presentation “Threshold of Transformation: Unveiling the Unseen,” curated by Nina Kong-Surtees at Spring Break Art Show New York 2024. Photo by Sarah Cascone.

The idea is to live out the narrative that inspired the works, that what you could perceive as a cage could actually act as a gateway or a portal.

“It’s about creating your own doors of opportunity,” Lai told me. The canvases are priced from $500 to $6,500, with a gold-plated stainless sculpture for $8,000.

Returning artist Amy Hill, known for putting her own modern spin on historic painting styles, is debuting a new series, “Hybirds.” Each piece is a portrait of a pigeon clad in ostentatious Renaissance garb, as if to make up for its drab natural plumage. At $9,000 each, the paintings are delightfully strange and full of personality.

Amy Hill with her “Hybirds” paintings at Spring Break Art Show New York 2024. Photo by Sarah Cascone.

Continuing the animal theme is Stephen Morrison’s “Dog Show #3: I Love Aging and Dying,” curated by Marina Molarsky-Beck. The artist had a booth of his life-sized anthropomorphic dog sculptures at last year’s Armory Show, but this body of work, priced between $1,500 and $8,500, is more subtle.

At first glance, his trompe l’oeil paintings of bouquets of flowers mounted on the back of canvases recall the Pliny the Elder myth about two artists competing to create the most realistic still life. Then, as you look closer, you see that the center of each flower actually contains the face of a tiny dog, the wilting blooms representing the cycle of death and decay.

“I don’t want to have to grab people and say ‘there’s dogs in there,’ but I want them to know!” Morrison told me.

Stephen Morrison, Sunset II (2024). Photo courtesy of Spring Break Art Show New York 2024.

Though it’s known for spotlighting young talent, Spring Break creates some delightful intergenerational moments. Kat Ryals, one half of the team behind Brooklyn gallery and curatorial platform Paradice Palase, is serving double duty as both curator and artist. Next to a display of her fantastical neon plant sculptures, she is presenting the work of LaThoriel Badenhausen, the oldest artist in the show at 83.

Ryals met Badenhausen while working for an artist who had an adjacent studio, and was immediately drawn in by her literally sparkling workspace, the walls adorned with thousands of hand-sewn Swarovski crystals. Completely self-taught, Badenhausen was showing embroidered textiles and tiny, intricate sculptures crafted from found objects and knickknacks picked up at thrift stores and garage sales.

LaThoriel Badenhausen with her work at Spring Break Art Show New York 2024. Photo by Sarah Cascone.

“The reason I make art is to tell my story,” Badenhausen told me. “The problem is, who wants to know about me? So, I hope that my work will speak so that people will want to know my story.”

And then there is 69-year-old Peter Dayton, who is showing his surfboard-inspired painted sculptures with curator Julia Willett, who just graduated from Cornell. She worked at Gagosian for the summer, and is excited to be curating a presentation of Dayton’s work, including $1,800 to $4,000 “rocket” sculptures made from medium density fiber board coated in resin.

Work by Peter Dayton at Spring Break Art Show New York 2024. Photo by Sarah Cascone.

Another young curator making her art fair debut is Etta Harshaw, who launched her pop-up gallery Harsh Collective upon graduating from USC in 2022. For her first fair, she curated a three-artist booth titled “All’s Fair in Love and Lore.”

She is featuring drawings and paintings by Laura Benson, Lucinda Gold, and Gabriela Kramer against a busy wall, scrawled with annotations and other notes pointing out different elements of the works.

Etta Harshaw, founder of Harsh Collective, with the booth she curated, “All’s Fair in Love and Lore,” for Spring Break New York 2024. Photo by Sarah Cascone.

The “conspiracy theory wall,” as she dubs it, is Harshaw’s way of offering a glimpse into the artists’ thought process. “People think of art viewing as a very solitary activity, but I wanted to show that it could be more creative.”

“More creative” could be the motto of the entire Spring Break show. You may not love everything you see there, but in an art world obsessed with money and status, it remains a breath of fresh air—and a reminder of the quirky, unbridled artistic genius that truly drives the engine of the art market.

Spring Break Art Show is on view at 75 Varick Street, New York, September 4–9, 2024. The Secret Show will be on view at 38 Little West 12th Street, Fridays–Sundays, September 29–November 10, 2024.