“Who sounds like they’re somewhere fun?,” Loring Randolph asked me and her colleague Rebecca Ann Siegel over the phone last week. It was the latter, who was at SoHo’s longtime art-world haunt, Fanelli, with the editors of Frieze art fair’s magazine, resisting the urge to throw back a martini. It wasn’t 5:00 p.m. just yet, but Siegel and Randolph had more than earned a break. The pair managed to make the 2021 edition of Frieze New York a reality, even right on time in May. (The fair’s L.A. counterpart, which they also head up, was canceled earlier this year.)
Meanwhile, Randolph was at work at New Lab in the Brooklyn Navy Yard—a brief reprieve from her “fucking family.” “Loring has three kids and I have a bunch of editors and it’s basically the same amount of work—just a different form of babysitting and raising people to be well-rounded individuals,” Siegel said as the pair laughed. Randolph, the former director of Casey Kaplan Gallery and Frieze New York who runs the fair’s programming, just gave birth to her third child. She also headed up the fair’s first Vision & Justice Project, an exploration of art’s role and contributions to understanding the relationship between race, citizenship, and society in the U.S. (This year saw one other major change: Fair favorite Leonardo DiCaprio was a no-show, though David Byrne, Christy Turlington, Agnes Fund, and Roxane Gay did come through.)
Frieze L.A. is up next, but first, it’s time for some…
