Arriving at Basketball City, the Lower East Side athletic facility that houses the second NADA New York art fair (which was open through May 12), Dan Byers was thinking about work in all its forms. “Art fairs are really for seeing people, for re-connecting with dealers, curators, artists and writers,” he told A.i.A. “I’m interested in how everyone is performing a certain kind of labor in those roles,” he continued, “and part of my job as a curator is being socially present in these contexts.”

Byers is curator of modern and contemporary art at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art. Together with Daniel Baumann and Tina Kukielski, Byers is co-curating the 2013 Carnegie International (Oct. 5, 2013-March 16, 2014). Earlier in the day, during a public talk at the Frieze art fair, the trio had wrestled with the question of how to mount an exhibition of international contemporary art in a way that engages with the city of Pittsburgh. During the audience questions that followed, Carnegie director Lynn Zelevansky chimed in, describing the curators’ work as a “civic duty” and stressing the exhibition’s public function. Read More