Artsy Specialist Picks: 10 Standout Lots at the SPRING/BREAK Benefit Auction

Every Armory Week, the SPRING/BREAK Art Show hosts a benefit auction—giving you the opportunity to buy great artworks and support a great cause. This year, your bids will help fund the 475 Kent Tenants Association, which advocates for affordable artist spaces in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Whether you’re at the show or bidding online, you can take home art that’s playful, irreverent, emerging, and iconic—and many of the lots have starting bids as low as $100. Below, you’ll find 10 standout pieces from this one-of-a-kind auction, which closes on March 12th.

To buy any of these artworks, click on the image below and place your bid. If you would like more information about the lots, you can always reach out to [email protected]

“Both Ward Shelley and Beth Campbell are having special moments this year,” explains Artsy Specialist Irina Zdrafcovici. “They were both commissioned to present monumental installations at The Armory Show, and each had prominent exhibitions at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum.”

At the SPRING/BREAK auction, you can bid to win Shelley’s circulatory map, which graphs the migration of the Jewish people over the past 3,000 years. Or, if you’d like a playful sculpture that will fool your guests, take a closer look at Campbell’s porcelain socks.

Fantastical and irreverent, the cartoon-style drawings of Christine Rebet and Jim Torok are great conversation starters. Grounded in her love of theater, Rebet fills her watercolors with a bizarre cast of characters, from a Coney Island tiger who leads therapy sessions to a group of 19th-century aristocrats who try to contact the dead.

Torok’s drawings are also beloved for their offbeat humor. Created in 2018, this recent piece features a beheaded man, comically shouting “Everything is great!” as his final words.

“Shepard Fairey’s Hope poster for the Obama campaign in 2008 launched the street artist’s career into superstardom,” explains Zdrafcovici. “And he continued to influence culture by designing posters for the Women’s March on Washington in 2017.” This recent work—one of eight pieces by Fairey in the SPRING/BREAK auction— portrays the Alabama-based writer and activist William C. Anderson in the artist’s signature red, white, and blue style.

Or, look to Swoon’s silkscreen painting of a construction worker, which she’s plastered on a wooden window pane. The Brooklyn-based talent has been pasting her images around New York for over 15 years—and had a standout solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in 2014.

SPRING/BREAK is also known for highlighting today’s emerging artists—and its benefit auction offers you the rare opportunity to bid on works by up-and-coming talents.

The auction features two paintings by Ariel Mitchell, including this intimate portrait of a retainer. After a decade of creating sculptures and installations, Mitchell was inspired to return to her painting practice after working for the contemporary Pop icon Jeff Koons. Meanwhile, the scientifically-minded artist Meridith Pingree presents an abstract web of red, green, and blue lines, which plays with the viewer’s visual perception.

The benefit auction also features standout photographs by Laurie Simmons and Eve Sussman, which are perfect for art history lovers. Simmons—a prominent member of The Pictures Generation movement in the 1970s and ’80s—is famous for using dolls to critique the status of women in society.

Sussman is celebrated for her video reenactments of art historical masterpieces. This photographic still is taken from her seminal film 89 Seconds at Alcázar (2004), which gives viewers a 360° view of Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656) and can be found in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.