A Peek Inside Miu Miu’s Exclusive NYC Installation

Tales and Tellers explored the state of modern femininity for Frieze New York 2025.

Image courtesy of Daniel Salemi/Miu Miu


text by Karly Quadros


Last Friday during Frieze, New York, Miu Miu convened a who’s who of the international fashion and art worlds for the second edition of Tales and Tellers, an immersive performance and installation exploring modern femininity through style, performance, and film. 

Partygoers ducked out of the rain and bluster into Chelsea’s Terminal Warehouse, a cavernous late-19th-century industrial space teeming with New York City history. It was once home to the infamous Tunnel Nightclub, founded by Peter Gatien who also owned the Limelight and Palladium, and was a beloved haunt of the Club Kids as well as New York’s iconic 90’s hip hop scene. Back in the day, the side rooms of the hangar were lavishly decorated according to theme – a Victorian library in one, an S&M dungeon in another – so it was fitting that Tales and Tellers, which brought Miu Miu’s fashion to life through staged tableauxs, found its home here.

Drawing on her longstanding collaboration with Miu Miu, Polish-born interdisciplinary artist Goshka Macuga used Miu Miu’s archive of short films by female directors as inspiration for the piece. Since 2011, the films – which have included the work of Janicza Bravo, Miranda July, Ava Duvernay, and Mati Diop, and have sometimes accompanied Miu Miu’s runway shows – have explored the authentic lives of women worldwide; mothers, daughters, performers, dreamers, lovers, skaters, and rebels buck social convention in their searches for identity. Miuccia Prada and Macuga first united all the films for Art Basel Paris in October 2024. The show was an unexpected hit, drawing 11,000 visitors over just five days. 

This second edition, convened by Elvira Dyangani Ose, director of the MACBA in Barcelona, was indebted to Miu Miu’s rich archive of fashion and curatorial efforts. The dim tunnel-like space was outfitted with screens from tiny mounted smartphones to hefty LED plinths, all playing one of the three dozen female-directed films commissioned by the fashion house. Guests trickled in, sipping champagne and leafing through the Truthless Times newspaper, a remnant from Macuga’s last installation with Miu Miu, Salt Looks like Sugar, which served as the backdrop for their Spring/Summer 2025 runway show. Notable attendees included Alexa Chung, Sara Paulson, Chase Sui Wonders, Paloma Elsesser, Ella Emhoff, Kiki Layne, Pauline Chalamet, and Cazzie David.

One by one, performers outfitted in archival Miu Miu began to roam the space as well. One performer shadow boxed in bejeweled tap shorts. Another in a red dress haltingly performed a standup comedy routine about, what else, but failed love, Plan B, and thoughts of death (one waiter carrying a tray of empty champagne flutes giggled, despite himself.) Several performers sang and danced, while yet another sculpted with Play-Doh in front of a stop motion animation, yet not every tableaux felt so joyous. One woman in a bell-shaped yellow coat, crept along the sidelines, a gas mask strapped to her face. Another in a grey wool skirt suit stared longingly at her screen from a cage. The entire performance culminated in an ecstatic dance party in the center of the room: women, moving and playing freely in a space once known as a haven for self-expression.

The dark, moody atmosphere of surveillance, punctuated by roving spotlights, evoked the troubled times we live in. After all, what feels more true to 2025 then trying to just go about your daily life – putting on makeup, working at the office, playing dress up – while something more sinister presses in? As one performer brandished newspapers and called out, fruitlessly, about “disrupting reality” and “digital malfunction,” the others continued their rituals of self, care, and creativity. This is the state of modern womanhood, after all. What else is there to do?

Image courtesy of Daniel Salemni/Miu Miu

Highlights from Frieze New York Celebrate Politically & Historically Centered Artworks

NAN GOLDIN Gold, 2016 Archival pigment print, in frame60 1/4 x 116 1/4 x 2 1/2 inches (153 x 295.3 x 6.4 cm)Ed. 1/3© Nan Goldin Courtesy the artist and Gagosian

NAN GOLDIN
Gold, 2016
Archival pigment print, in frame
60 1/4 x 116 1/4 x 2 1/2 inches (153 x 295.3 x 6.4 cm)
Ed. 1/3
© Nan Goldin
Courtesy the artist and Gagosian

text by Jennifer Pjieko

“It’s a lot of work, but I’m free now. I’m free!” Artist ektor garcia gestures to the logo on the T-shirt he’s wearing—a black staffer shirt with FRIEZE spelled out in white letters across the middle. garcia had taken some artistic liberty with the art fair-and magazine-branded top, blacking out the letters I and Z with marker, leaving only FREE legible. 

 
ektor garcia, cadenas perpetuas, 2023 (detail)Welded steel, hand bent, handmade steel hooks, found metal, glazed ceramic with copper wire, horseshoe nails, and crochet leather. Dimensions variable.

ektor garcia, cadenas perpetuas, 2023 (detail)
Welded steel, hand bent, handmade steel hooks, found metal, glazed ceramic with copper wire, horseshoe nails, and crochet leather.
Dimensions variable.

 

We were standing around inside Cedric’s, the top-floor café of Frieze New York, underneath garcia’s installation la llorona, a hanging mobile of mixed-metal woven teardrops that illustrated the indigenous Mexican mythical figure of La Llorona: The “weeping woman” drowned her hungry children after their father, a wealthy Spanish man, abandoned the family, and she sheds tears of mourning for them for eternity. Here, as part of Frieze’s curated program, her shimmering, coppery chains gathered into teardrops evade the heavy, matte black net that is there to catch them and float over us as we get together for cocktail hour (we’re not sure which one we are part of at that moment; the restaurant, like Day 1 of any VIP preview day of an art fair, hosts a cluster of many overlapping celebrations at once, bringing cheers and the pop of champagne bottles to crowds from opening to closing hours. 

garcia’s literal self-expressive wardrobe let everyone know his state of mind: After opening three concurrent presentations across New York City (here at Frieze; at the nearby NADA art fair, at the San Francisco gallery Rebecca Camacho Presents’s booth, and at Artists Space in Tribeca, as part of the group exhibition Clocking Out: Time Beyond Management in addition to the recently closed solo exhibition esfuerzo at James Fuentes on the Lower East Side, the artist was finally free to rest for a little bit. la llorona also comes into the fair along with a wave of other politically and historically centered artworks featured—and celebrated—in the commercial context of having lots of very expensive work on offer (or, even more likely, no longer available). While the past several years of global art fairs have been characterized by glossy abstraction and mirrorlike installations, the booths on view inside The Shed on the West Side’s High Line made space for more nuanced, sensitive forms of art. Company Gallery presented a trio of abstract paintings by Tosh Basco, which could have been an element of the artist’s poetic, fragile movement performance at the new Water Street Projects, a curatorial initiative in the Financial District, a few nights earlier; Michael Rosenfeld dedicated his gallery’s entire booth to works made in 1973, the seminal year when Roe v. Wade made its way through the U.S. Supreme Court; we are now living through the devastating consequences of its reversal. At Alexander Gray’s booth, Bethany Collins’s Antigone: 1998 / 2015 (2023), is a diptych of works on paper, which looks at race and language through handwritten parts of Sophocles’s ancient play. Tehran’s Dastan Gallery presents a survey of the past century of Iranian women artists, across a variety of challenging mediums and forms; Gagosian devotes its entire booth to Nan Goldin, who recently signed with the mega gallery; her heartbreaking images recall pain and loss as much as the golden sunlight that bathes her figures. Playful works, such as Jean-Michel Othoniel’s lustrous strands of pearls of every color at Perrotin offer moments of flirtation and light. 

As the sun started to give a little bit in the late afternoon-to-early evening hours, the multi-floored crowd began to contract up and down inside The Shed; soon it would be time for happy hour everywhere. ektor took a couple of Dobel-stamped poker chips (clever objects to be “cashed” as free-drink tickets) for his friends and collaborators outside the party. It was time to celebrate together. 

FRIEZE NEW YORK 2023, installation view Artwork © Nan GoldinPhoto: Sebastiano Pellion di Persano Courtesy Gagosian

FRIEZE NEW YORK
2023, installation view
Artwork © Nan Goldin
Photo: Sebastiano Pellion di Persano
Courtesy Gagosian

The Outsider Art Fair Presents "The Doors of Perception" @ Frieze New York

The Outsider Art Fair features over forty visionary artists from around the world, including works by Noviadi Angkasapura (b. 1979, Indonesia), Frédéric Bruly Bouabré (1923–2014, Ivory Coast), Henry Darger (1892-1973, USA), Janko Domsic (1915-1983, Croatia/France), Minnie Evans (1892-1987, USA), Guo Fengyi (1942–2010, China), Martín Ramírez (1895-1963, Mexico/USA), Judith Scott (1943-2005, USA), Melvin Way (b. 1954, USA), George Widener (b. 1962, USA), Adolf Wölfli (1864–1930, Switzerland), Anna Zemánkova (1908–1986, Czech Republic), and Unica Zürn (1916-1970, Germany) among many others.

The Doors of Perception focuses on the visionary nature of art commonly known as outsider art, art brut, or self-taught art. The exhibition presents a large constellation of works made by exceptionally gifted artists from five continents, offering a panorama of art created on the margins of society. Whether psychiatric patients, self-taught visionaries, or mediums, each of the artists in the exhibition felt at some point in their life the need to create an artistic language of their own in order to reveal what they understood to be the true nature of things. Often disenfranchised because of their mental condition or social status and without any previous artistic training, many of the artists exhibited here dedicated their lives obsessively to the creation of complex visual representations, often after experiencing a life-changing epiphany. A meeting with a supernatural power—whether an encounter with the divine, spirits of the dead, or extraterrestrial beings—might have triggered this impulse to create. These remarkable events produced strong centrifugal forces that drove the artists from chaos to order, opening for them “doors of perception” to a transcendental reality that, in many cases, helped them survive their otherwise unstable life. The Doors of Perception is on view through May 5 at Frieze, Metropolitan Pavillion 125 W. 18th Street, New York. photographs courtesy of The Outsider Fair


Part Two: Highlights from the Private Opening of Frieze Art Fair New York 2015

Autre made its way to Randall's Island Park to see the Private View opening of Frieze Art Fair New York 2015, situated on the chilly banks of the Harlem River and it was more than worth it. Some standouts from Part Two of our coverage include a few of the international booths, like Sultana Paris' solo exhibition of Swiss artist Walter Pfeiffer and São Paulo based gallery Casa Triangulo's solo presentation of works by Eduardo Berliner. Then there are the classics, like Cheim & Read, that had a brilliant large scale portrait on display of Little Richard by the artist Jack Pierson, who is known for his text based work using neon lettering from discarded signage. SEE PART ONE HERE. The Frieze Art Fair New York will run until May 17th, 2015. text and photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper 

Part One: Highlights from the Private Opening of Frieze Art Fair New York 2015

Autre made its way to Randall's Island Park to see the Private View opening of Frieze Art Fair New York 2015, situated on the chilly banks of the Harlem River and it was more than worth it. Some standouts from Part One of our coverage includes British Gallery Payne Shurvel's display of artist radical feminist artist Margaret Harrison and a slightly disturbing piece by artist Patrick Walsh, a.k.a JPW3, which involves a cluster of metal chains being dipped in wax over and over again - presented by Los Angeles based Night Gallery. SEE PART TWO HERE. The Frieze Art Fair New York will run until May 17th, 2015. text and photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper