Every March the Armory Show brings artists, galleries, collectors, critics, and curators from all over the world to New York, and to the Hudson River piers specifically. But this year, the fair also launched Armory Arts Week, an effort to encourage its out-of-town attendees to journey away from the West Side and discover what else the city has to offer.

For each of several featured neighborhoods, organizers selected “anchor” events and then asked local organizations to contribute supplemental happenings. One of the furthest and perhaps least likely of the locations was Long Island City, in Queens.

On Friday, March 6, the Armory presented Queens Night, with a program of 17 events including openings, theater performances, open studios, an artist’s talk, and exhibitions at venues including P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Dorsky Gallery Curatorial Programs, SculptureCenter, Fisher Landau Center for Art, and Deitch Studios, an outpost of the downtown Manhattan mainstay.

Deitch offered the most anticipated event of the evening, Vanessa Beecrofts first performance in New York since 2000. Titled VB64, the three-hour experience featured 20 nude models painted white and sprawled on the floor or on low pedestals alongside gesso sculptures that had been cast from live models. Deitch’s cathedral-like space evoked the Renaissance Sicilian funerary sculpture on which the performance was based, and the eerie white figures contrasted starkly with an audience dressed mostly in black and seemingly as enthralled by its role as observer as the models were with being the objects of that gaze. It was an event of profound stillness, whose tranquility was broken only infrequently, by a twitch of a finger or switch of position from the models, or a shuffle or yawn from the audience.

Another popular event was Raúl Martínezs public tour, via his Artbus, which ended at Deitch Studios and included stops at Dorsky Gallery and P.S.1. A nonprofit founded in 2006, Artbus offers guided tours of museums, galleries, and art fairs and functions as a mobile exhibition space by presenting video screenings, interventions, and performances by international artists en route. For Armory Week, Martínez assembled "Specters: Video and Social Memory," which featured videos by artists whose work will be included in the Venice Biennial in June and the Havana Biennial later this month. When asked about attendance to Queens Night, Martínez, who also organized a tour before the kickoff of last year’s Armory Show, replied, “We had a very positive response, doubling last year’s number of passengers. We had to schedule an extra shuttle.”

Queens gallery Dean Project kept things going late into the night with its lively reception for "RoCoCoPoP," an exhibition that compares the overindulgent art of the 18th century with today’s consumerist, mass-produced, and celebrity-driven culture. A collaboration with Crossing Art in Flushing, Queens, "RoCoCoPoP" features paintings, performances, and installations from 17 New York–based artists. One standout work came from the Queens-based artist collective LazerHappy, who presented a series of crates, each containing four reproductions of a single original painting — a lavish still life. The crates could be purchased for $3,600 and individual reproductions for $900 each. The evening’s visitors included a good mix of locals and fair patrons, and everyone seemed to enjoy the excessive, playful exhibition.

As overwhelming as the sheer number of Armory Week offerings can be, and as psychologically difficult as a Friday night trip from Manhattan to Queens might seem, everyone ARTINFO spoke to in the outer borough reported good attendance numbers. Noah Dorsky, of Dorsky Gallery, said that he was “delighted” with the turnout for a talk by Ombretta Agrò Andruff, curator of the gallery's current exhibition, "Home Sweet Home." He added that he hoped the Armory Arts Week programming would encourage people to continue to make that “quick trip over the bridge” after the fairs packed up. Nickolas Roudane, SculptureCenter’s assistant director for communications, said that the programming drew “an informed audience that knew about contemporary art.”

“Fridays are usually pretty busy here,” said April Hunt, press officer at P.S.1. “But I definitely noticed an increase.”