NEW YORK, NY.- VOLTA NY named Wendy Vogel as the curator for the second iteration of the fair's Curated Section. Vogel's project is a major feature of VOLTA NY's decade edition, opening at PIER 90 from March 1–5, 2017.

“I'm excited to work with VOLTA on the curated section of their tenth anniversary fair in New York,” says Vogel. “As a writer and independent curator, I know that art fairs are an essential aspect of the art ecosystem. They attract a broad but self-selecting audience, from sophisticated connoisseurs to the newly art-curious. What is often lacking, however, is a sense of context for the dazzling work on display. VOLTA has carved out a niche as a fair that is interested in experimental practices and depth. They upped the ante last year by selecting the artist Derrick Adams as the first organizer of the curated section. Adams's Something I Can Feel resonated with me in its global purview and its centralizing of the body.”

Vogel will assemble Your Body Is a Battleground across a 2,600-square-foot space in the heart of PIER 90, an array of freestanding museum-style walls that afford and encourage dialogue between artists, as well as a specific focus in contrast to the traditional booth-style architecture and solo projects surrounding it. Barbara Kruger's 1989 work Untitled (Your body is a battleground), produced for the Women's March on Washington in support of reproductive freedom nearly 30 years ago — yet stunningly timely and powerful today — acts as reference point to the section's proposed artists shortlist. “They mobilize a keen understanding of media representation, the power of the archive, and an investment in the strategies of Conceptual art,” notes Vogel. “Some, but not all, consider their work activist and interventionist.” Participating artists, as well as related programming, will be announced later in January.

“Realizing this Curated Section in 2016 was a major achievement for us, as it reiterated the inherent curatorial energy of VOLTA NY as a fair from our debut ten years ago,” says Amanda Coulson, VOLTA Artistic Director, reflecting on the fair's approaching decade edition. “Derrick hit it out of the park with his deeply nuanced group exhibition around the fragile human body. And I have full confidence and unabashed enthusiasm for Wendy's project, which even somehow continues some of those thought processes articulated by Derrick with regard to our bodies and how they shape our experience of the world, or how the world experiences us. She is definitely tapped into some very vital concerns that ― considering recent political moves in the United States and abroad ― are all the more relevant and prescient."

Wendy Vogel is a writer and curator based in Brooklyn, New York. She received her Master’s degree from Bard’s Center for Curatorial Studies. A former editor at Flash Art International, Modern Painters and Art in America, she has also contributed to Artforum.com, art-agenda, Art Lies, Brooklyn Rail, frieze, and The New York Times, among other publications. Vogel's research interests include legacies of feminist and identity-based practice, as well as the performative and ethical questions around contemporary art production and criticism. She worked closely with Peter Halley, the former publisher of index magazine, to edit a history of the downtown alternative-arts publication. index A to Z: art, design, fashion, film and music in the indie era was published by Rizzoli in April 2014. Vogel has organized or co-organized curatorial projects at venues including the Hessel Museum at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; Künstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral, Bad Ems, Germany; The Kitchen, New York; and Abrons Arts Center, New York.