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Frieze Los Angeles opened its fifth edition to VIPs on Thursday at the Santa Monica Airport. While the fair was slightly smaller than usual—going from 120 exhibitors to about 95—it was full of action on VIP day and its first day open to the public on Friday.

There were plenty of major figures in attendance from celebrities to collectors to dealers, and there was strong artwork on display in the booths and healthy sales to boot.

“Today has been our most successful first day at Frieze LA since the first year of the fair,” Hauser & Wirth president Marc Payot said in a statement emailed to ARTnews.

We spent some time going around the fair, camera in tow, to get a feel for the scene and the energy at LA’s most important fair.

This year’s edition of the Outsider Art Fair, held at the Metropolitan Pavilion in Chelsea, brought back to New York a group of dealers whose artists sometimes find themselves on the margins of the commercial art world.

These artists don’t typically have the MFA degrees that are required for representation at blue-chip galleries. They are more likely to have members of the clergy, or to have been firefighters or houseless. But as this fair shows, these artists who are just worthy of study as the ones that pass through the nation’s top art schools.

Those who show at this fair have spent decades working to bring to light these makers, who historically have not made into museums. Their work is now paying off.

During the fair’s VIP preview day on Thursday, ARTnews spoke with several exhibitors about the artists they brought to the fair this year.

A beloved 60-foot-tall steel sculpture by Mark di Suvero will officially depart Venice Beach, California, after the artist’s Californian gallery failed to raise enough money to keep it there.

The work, titled Declaration, has become an iconic part of the Venice Beach landscape. Weighing in at 25 tons, it is composed of I-beams that are delicately balanced against one another in V-shaped arrangements.

Declaration was initially installed more than 20 years ago, in 2001, as a loan made in tandem with a Venice Family Clinic benefit, so it was never intended to be permanently sited where it is today. But because it has been located for so long near the boardwalk, between a skate park and a police station, it has been integrated into the Venice Beach landscape.

Word that the sculpture may leave Venice Beach was first heard in 2019, when di Suvero and his gallery L.A. Louver failed multiple times to get the City of Los Angeles to acquire the piece. The two were charged with raising the funds needed to keep the work there.

Local outlets in Venice Beach reported this week that Declaration was officially slated for removal, an exact date for which has not yet been determined. The sculpture, now worth $7 million, according to L.A. Louver director Kimberly Davis, is set to be returned to di Suvero himself.

Doreen St. Félix and Nikki Giovanni, two well-regarded writers, said on Friday that they would no longer take part in a talk at the Brooklyn Museum tomorrow, criticizing the institution for its stance on Palestine.

St. Félix, a staff writer at the New Yorker, and Giovanni, an acclaimed poet, were set to appear at the museum following a screening of Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project, a recent documentary about that writer that won an award when it debuted last year at the Sundance Film Festival. The event is co-hosted by PEN America, an advocacy organization that aims to support freedom of expression in the US and elsewhere.

In their statement, posted to Instagram on Friday, St. Félix and Giovanni said they had “withdrawn from the program in response to the refusal of both PEN America and Brooklyn Museum to stand in solidarity with people of Palestine and against genocide.”

A spokesperson for the Brooklyn Museum did not respond to requests for comment.

“We very much regret that the event with the Brooklyn Museum was cancelled,” PEN America said in a statement to ARTnews. “As a free expression organization of course we respect every individual’s right to voice their own perspective on the conflict and to respond as their conscience dictates. We mourn the immense loss of Palestinian lives, and the destruction of museums, libraries, and mosques that contribute to a vibrant cultural community.  We have also voiced our shared anguish for the Israelis whose families were killed or taken hostage.”

Fathi Ghaben, a renowned painter and a pillar of Palestine’s artistic community, died on February 25.

Palestine’s Ministry of Culture said this week that Ghaben died after appeals from his family to Israeli authorities that would have allowed Ghaben to leave the Gaza Strip to seek medical aid.

In a statement, the Palestinian Ministry of Culture said that Ghaben was suffering from chronic chest and lung illness, and had been unable to find help in Gaza’s healthcare system, which has collapsed amid repeated Israeli airstrikes in the region.

In a video uploaded to Facebook on February 19 by a relative of Ghaben, the ailing artist makes a desperate appeal for aid, saying, “I am suffocating. I want to breathe, I want to breathe.” He repeats those words until he is overcome by violent coughing.

Gaza’s health ministry reported on Thursday that the number of Palestinians killed since October 7 has exceeded 30,000. Among the dead are artist Heba Zagout and scholar and poet Refaat Alareer. ARTnews has contacted the IDF for comment on the death of Ghaben.

At the opening of Frieze Los Angeles on Thursday, works valued as highly as $2 million were sold, with several galleries’ sales reports noting that solo presentations did particularly well.

“Today has been our most successful first day at Frieze LA since the first year of the fair,” Hauser & Wirth president Marc Payot said in a statement emailed to ARTnews.

David Zwirner’s first-day sales included works by Joe Bradley, John McCracken, Steven Shearer, Lisa Yuskavage, Huma Bhabha, Dana Schutz and Suzan Frecon for values between $250,000 and $650,000.

Along with the mega-dealers who sold works in the early hours of the celebrity-filled fair, Casey Kaplan, Vielmetter, Roberts Projects, and Tina Kim Gallery also reported sales of works priced at $250,000 or higher.

Dominique Gallery said it placed all works in its solo presentation by Mustafa Ali Clayton, including sculptures ranging from $12,000 to $100,000. New York’s Kasmin Gallery reported ten works by vanessa german sold on opening day, each priced between $25,000 and $65,000. The artist won the Heinz Award for the Arts in 2022. pt.2 gallery from Oakland, California, said it placed all of their works by Muzae Sesay, but did not disclose sales amounts.

Vito Schnabel, a New York art dealer and the son of painter Julian Schnabel, is among the stars of the latest episode of Feud: Capote vs. the Swans, the FX TV series that chronicles Truman Capote’s volatile friendships with several female members of his era’s Manhattan elite.

It starts with a blow job. Schnabel, playing a repairperson named Rick, comes to Capote’s place to fix a garbage disposal. A dejected Capote, feeling as though he has aged out of relevancy in New York, strikes up a conversation, finding himself fascinated by this younger, less wealthy man from Illinois who rides a Harley-Davidson to work.

“I wonder if you’d be at all interested in having your cock sucked,” Capote suggests. Rick, who typically goes for women, accepts the offer, and later admits that it was the best fellatio he received. The two embark on a month-long relationship that eventually comes to an end when Rick admits he is engaged to a woman.

Schnabel has acted before, but only rarely, and never in such a mainstream role as this one. He’s better known for his self-titled gallery, which has spaces in New York and St. Moritz, Switzerland, and represents trendy artists such as Trey Abdella and Robert Nava. His gallery has also shown paintings by Gus Van Sant, the director of famed films such as Good Will Hunting and Milk. Van Sant helmed the majority of Feud: Capote vs. the Swans, including this week’s episode.

That Schnabel had been cast in Feud had been previously reported in the tabloids, which fixated on him performing alongside Warren Beatty’s daughter, Ella Beatty, who plays a young protégée of Capote in this episode.

On an Astroturf field, just outside the tent where Frieze Los Angeles is currently hosting its fifth edition at the Santa Monica Airport, is a literal rat race. The project, courtesy of LA-based artist Sharif Farrag, is part of a curated section titled “Set Seen” organized by the Art Production Fund.

For the work, Farrag has affixed ceramic sculptures, via zipties, onto several R/C cars that resemble large rats. Each is adorned with several iron-on patches meant to match the personality of each ceramic sculpture, including car numbers, license plates, and other decal-like symbols.

“I made the ceramics first and when I was picking out patches for each one I was thinking, how do I create a personality for each head,” Farrag told ARTnews as a race was going on.

For the performance, Farrag and his team, dressed in custom-designed white jumpsuits, line up six ceramic rats at the starting line and count down for the race. After three laps, a winner is declared. Oftentimes, the cars crash into each other and, by Thursday afternoon, a few of the rat sculptures had lost their ears. The first-place winner receives a trophy, topped with an orange ceramic cone made by Farrag, who presents it and takes a photo with the winner, just as if they had won a Formula One race.

“I wanted to build up energy by creating an incentive, so people actually wanted to win,” he said. “I’m learning that it actually makes a difference.”

In 2007, Ohio-based artist Ann Hamilton was in Los Angeles working on a sculpture, titled shell, in which she suspended a woman’s peacoat made from printer felt on a black wire hanger. She had been invited to the city by local print shop Gemini G.E.L. and its publisher Sidney Felsen. Hamilton, a MacArthur “Genius” fellow best-known for warping a range of materials from fleece to stone, attributes the unique origins and final form of shell to her time with Gemini.

Resembling armor without a body underneath, shell is made from felt etching blankets from the shop, and, amid a writer’s strike in Los Angeles, she collaborated with a film industry designer in need of work, who was enlisted through Felsen’s connections. The work came to be almost serendipitously “because this is Hollywood, and because of Sidney Felsen,” Hamilton told writer Joan Simon in a 2008 interview.

Enlisting established artists, like Hamilton, to create new work is perhaps what Felsen, now 99, is most widely known for. Having founded Gemini in 1966 with his fraternity brother and art collector Stanley Grinstein, Felsen is now the subject of a monographic exhibition, on view through July 7 at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, that mines 50-years-worth of his photographic archive. The exhibition’s title puts it more succinctly: “First Came a Friendship: Sidney B. Felsen and the Artists at Gemini G.E.L.” The exhibition’s curator Naoko Takahatake selected images that Felsen took over more than five decades, culled from more than 70,000 images, donated to the GRI in 2019 by Jack Shear, the partner of Ellsworth Kelly, another frequent Gemini collaborator.

Alongside Tamarind Lithography Workshop and Cirrus Editions (both in Los Angeles) and Universal Limited Art Editions (in New York), Gemini G.E.L. was a part of a budding wave of art printers established in the 1960s and ’70s that attracted top artists as collaborators. Among them were Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Serra, David Hockney, Claes Oldenburg, and Roy Lichtenstein who could work through some of their most heady ideas in a different medium than they became famous for. In 1999, Claudine Ise wrote for the Los Angeles Times, that Felsen molded Gemini into “an arterial channel between the Los Angeles and New York art worlds.”

“When he really started getting serious about photography, he switched to a Leica and he preferred the rangefinder because of the quiet shutter,” Takahatake told ARTnews in a recent interview.

This essay originally appeared in Reframed, the Art in America newsletter about art that surprises us and works that get us worked up. Sign up here to receive it every Thursday.

In 1952, the New York–based critic Harold Rosenberg famously described a seismic shift taking place in American painting. No longer, he wrote, were artists coming to a canvas with a predetermined composition that they’d already worked out in a sketch. Now, a painter slathered on strokes and dribbled paint directly. 

A few years later, halfway around the world, two Japanese artists, Kazuo Shiraga and Akira Kanayama, took Rosenberg’s idea a step further—eliminating not just the sketch, but also the brush and the human hand. 

Shiraga and Kanayama, who are being showcased right now at New York’s Fergus McCaffrey gallery, both found canny ways to produce abstract paintings without lifting a finger during the mid-1950s. Both were associated with the avant-garde Gutai movement of the era. In their paintings, they subverted a notion that was common among the New York–based Abstract Expressionists: that gestural abstraction was deeply human, that it tapped into raw emotions via the artist’s hand. 

Kanayama’s paintings eliminate the human touch altogether. To craft his dense drizzles, the artist outfitted a toy car with cans of paint that leaked their contents, dispersing webs of black, red, green, and more across his medium-sized canvases. Kanayama steered his little vehicle around and around, left and right; overlaid swirls were the end result. Using this process, he touched the buttons on the remote control more than he did his own canvases. 

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