Frieze New York 2012

Randall's Island, a small islet on New York City's East River, has historically been a place for outsiders - once home to an orphanage, asylum, and a reform school - however this weekend, the island was very much a destination for the inside. Boat-loads of art lovers descended on the island for the Frieze art fair's inaugural New York edition, where a 250,000 sq ft serpentine-shaped tent, designed by SO-IL (Solid Objectives - Idenburg Liu), held pop-up booths for 180 of the world's top galleries.

The expected blue chip gang were in attendance, and appropriately situated near one another: at London's Victoria Miro, generations of talented female artists were represented, including Alice Neel and Yayoi Kusama, and Sarah Sze; while White Cube gallery dominated in the British male lot, offering up a Hirst case filled with fish in formaldehyde; Antony Gormley's concrete Room II sculpture, and a glass paint-on-aluminium 'painting' by Gary Hume.

Across the corridor at Sprüth Magers, Barbara Kruger's 2012 work 'Too big to Fail' seemed to be a nod to the fair itself while a quartet of Astrid Klein collages from the 1980s recalled a freewheeling past. Meanwhile, New York's David Zwirner Gallery devoted the entire booth to Minimalism, with works by Fred Sandback, John McCracken, and Donald Judd, among others.

On the other end of the tent, big guns Hauser & Wirth and Lisson Gallery were on form: in Hauser & Wirth's immaculate booth (featuring works by Matthew Day Jackson, Subodh Gupta, Roni Horn, and more) a bright blue dwarf by Paul McCarthy giggled at passer-bys, while across the corridor, a beguiling and monumental yellow Anish Kapoor disc at the Lisson Gallery stand kept the uplifting colour scheme going.

While big galleries brought out their best, it was some of the smaller galleries that stole the spotlight: works by Gillian Wearing, Dirk Stewen, and David Salle made Maureen Paley gallery a draw; cow-hide loveseats by Richard Artschwager and intricate drawings by recent Guerlain Drawing Prize-winner Jorinde Voigt had Mayor Bloomberg lingering at David Nolan Gallery's booth; and a space-station like geometric sculpture by Buster Graybill at Jack Hanley Gallery had adults and children alike enthralled.