School’s In Session at Spring/Break

Given its name, there was something a little funny about the fact that last night’s opening of the Spring/Break art fair was held in an abandoned Catholic school on Mott Street. “We actually used to be in an abandoned gymnasium on Mulberry street,” explained Andrew Gori, who co-founded the fair along with Ambre Kelly last year. “The cathedral that owns this building was interested in bringing a cultural presence back to the empty school,” he explained. Spring/Break is a curator-driven fair, and this year, the focus (and the title) was New Mysticism. Each classroom was dedicated to individual mini exhibitions that explored how ‘the future’ informs the human experience. Highlights include a room completely lined in mylar, a flailing robot which moves but doesn’t actually go anywhere, and digital vision-scapes superimposed by alphabetized keywords from the Catechism.

Proceeds from the show, which brought together over twenty curators and seventy artists, will benefit Arts In The Armed Forces, a non-profit organization founded by Adam Driver from Girls, who’s a longtime friend of Spring/Break’s founders. Little known fact: Driver was actually in the Marine Corps, and now travels to bases globally to perform for the troops. He credits his rigorous military experience for his acting skills, and says that using his craft to give back is pretty fulfilling. “You can’t ask for better training than being locked up with twenty other guys your age who are experiencing this heightened day-to-day life,” Driver said of his time in the Marine Corps. “It’s such interesting fuel, that life of discipline and structure. [It's] filled with discipline and drills and pains, but there’s also a human experience, which overrides everything.”