“It all started with my band breaking up,” artist Taraka Larson began. We’re sitting on a marble-patterned bedspread draped over a blow-up mattress placed on faux grass mats at New York’s Spring Break Art Show. A vaguely Rolling Stones-esque tune wafts in the background.
“I was in this band with my sister for 10 years, and when it ended I was homeless, broke, didn’t know what the fuck I was gonna do with my life,” she continued. “I didn’t really feel like I could go on creating as a jaded, heartbroken adult. So I thought — where did I first find that inspiration, that lost innocence, that joie de vivre? And it was in high school, when I discovered my first power chord and I was so excited about music.”
That’s how Larson found herself in this “alternate-reality version of my teenage bedroom fused with the Garden of Eden,” as she described her durational performance and installation at Spring Break, born out of an album she wrote exploring her inner adolescent. Donning a studded bracelet in the aesthetic lineage of Hot Topic, posing languidly with a copy of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, she explained that her goal wasn’t to sugarcoat the drama and trauma of those early years, but rather to lean into the ego death that accompanied them — with a little help from Green Day and Fred Durst.
It’s a fitting analogy for the spirit of this year’s Spring Break, whose 14th edition is on view through Sunday, May 10, with the theme “PARADISE LOST + FOUND.” It’s also a resonant image for our current political moment, as many of us root around our memories for a reason to feel hopeful and energized.
For the second year in a row, the fair is taking up residence in the 10th-floor former offices at 75 Varick Street in Hudson Square — having previously occupied St. Patrick’s Old School, a post office, the Condé Nast headquarters, and Ralph Lauren’s abandoned Madison Avenue bureaus, among other unlikely homes. Spring Break has a reputation for being scrappy, DIY, experimental, and a little chaotic, kind of like your fun, childless aunt who splashes champagne at every family reunion. But in a bouncy sea of 120 projects by independent curators and artists, a good chunk of the works were less slapdash and more put-together, proving that Spring Break can clean up nicely — and is a worthwhile stop on a collector’s jam-packed spring fair itinerary.
I’m thinking of, for example, Kyoto-based artist Yuka Nishihisamatsu’s mesmerizing glazed porcelain vessels inspired by the Buddhism and lotus flowers, which visitors admired obsessively on opening night, gushing as they pointed out the elegantly stacked forms and Swarovski crystal details. Or the paintings of Costa Rican artist Enio Arroyo Gomez in a lush wallpapered room curated by Viljon Caka; this exhibition’s title, The Burden Which We Carry, is a reference to the way in which Gomez works through violent generational histories. Evocative of folkloric children’s stories filled with mythic beasts and charming characters, the canvases elicit a strange sense of the familiar.
If you’re expecting a neat row of perfectly square and contained fair booths, forget it. Artist Kesh, for instance, wore a giant billowing skirt covered in her quasi-abstract prints and drawings in a presentation co-curated by Celine Cunha and MooncalfNYC’s Ryan Bock. Part of what makes such an unconventional display possible is the rebellious ethos that’s part of the Spring Break Art Show’s DNA, Bock told me — and he’s seeing the strategy replicated elsewhere.
“It’s not as risk-adverse here — people are encouraged to be immersive,” Bock said. “Over the last five or so years, you go to the Armory and other fairs that are traditionally very white cube, and they’re implementing the language of Spring Break and other smaller shows. They’re peepin’ what’s happening here, and they’re emulating it.”
Another draw for more exploratory work is the fair’s financial model, whereby participants pay a refundable $500 deposit and share a portion of artwork sales with the organizers — no up-front booth fee, explained artist Victoria Martinotti. Her hyperrealistic oil on linen paintings, curated in a solo presentation by Zachary Lank, were born out of a creative rut, echoing Larson’s teenage dreamscape.
“I was in an art block, so I decided to sketch my biggest fantasy — I’m lactose- and gluten-intolerant, so I started drawing, like, bread having a fun time,” Martinotti stated. These early tributes to prohibitive indulgences, such as brioche or baguette, gave way to eerily religious portraits of whipped cream. Martinotti was inspired. In “Virgin Tempted” (2025), a woman wearing a black lace chapel veil prays longingly to the gods of dessert, her eyes gazing upward in a mid-fantasy expression of candid desire.
“I love that feeling of really wanting something and not getting it, I like painting that — it’s a feeling I love to work with,” the artist said.
Artist Aiza Ahmed, a recent Rhode Island School of Design MFA graduate, collaborated with independent curator Indira A. Abiskaroon to present Border Play, an intricate theatrical installation examining the daily ceremony at the Attari-Wagah border between Pakistan and India. The rite, which has taken place every afternoon since 1959, involves dance-like marching, flag-lowering, and handshakes in a mix of nationalistic pageantry and military show of force. Against the backdrop of heightened tensions between the two countries in the wake of a deadly attack in Indian-administered Kashmir, Ahmed tackles the dark absurdity of the tradition with wooden cutouts of stomping soldiers kicking their legs high in the air, rows of mustached militants painted on fabric, and a video projection in a fort-like room flanked by plush, silky curtains. The installation responds to Spring Break’s “maximalist, site-specific” approach, Abiskaroon told me, but it is also purposely ambiguous: “You don’t know which side of the border you’re on — you don’t know if there’s a border at all,” she said.
It may be true that the Spring Break Art Show is getting more “normie,” like one artist told me at the fair. That might draw potential buyers looking for something to put on their walls and translate to sales for an emerging class of artists — and that doesn’t sound so terrible, now, does it? From what I’ve seen this year, Spring Break is able to scale up its game without sacrificing its founding principles of oddity and artistic liberty. It remains a show delightfully unconfined, where it’s unclear where one display of artworks ends and the next begins.
