NEW YORK — The Lower East Side is getting its first art fair. This spring, the downtown neighborhood will host the first stateside edition of Cutlog, a French fair specializing in emerging art. The event, which runs from May 10 to 13, coincides with the second annual Frieze New York, making it the sixth satellite fair — alongside Pulse, NADA, Seven, and others — to cluster around the British import.

“Frieze has become a very important moment in the New York calendar,” said architect Guy Reziciner, who is joining Cutlog founder Bruno Hadjadj as co-director of the New York fair. “We wanted to create a place where people visiting the Lower East Side during that time could go to see emerging art from around the world.”

The setting is a far cry from Frieze New York’s airy, sterile-white tent on Randall’s Island. Cutlog is setting up shop at the Clemente Soto Vélez Center, a converted 19th-century school on Suffolk Street. With its stained glass windows, windy stairwells, linoleum floors, and black box theaters, it’s a quirky, unglamorous space that now functions as a flexible cultural center. (While this reporter was getting a tour, the building was overrun with young people in ‘80s costumes; it was being used as a set for the CW’s new “Sex and the City” prequel “The Carrie Diaries.”)

Reziciner is no stranger to retrofitting old schools into high-end arty establishments. Last year, he designed the new M. Wells restaurant at MoMA PS1. “We care a lot about making the artwork the center of every room,” he said. “There will be partitions and booths, but they won’t be typical.”

Like its sister fair in Paris, which began four years ago as a satellite of FIAC, Cutlog New York plans to host approximately 40 galleries that specialize in art in the $1,000 to $50,000 range. Dealers pay for space by square foot, so a gallery may conceivably reserve 1,000-square-foot studio all to itself. The extra space — and there is a lot of it — will be taken up by independent curatorial projects and a hefty performance and video program. (A Lower East Side gallery that may not want to pay for a full space, for example, might stage a performance in one of the school’s studios.)

This emphasis on multidisciplinary work reflects “the spirit of the neighborhood,” says Reziciner. Performances may spill out into the building’s 13,000-square-foot parking lot, where videos will also be screened onto a massive, street-facing brick wall. The German TV station ARTE, a sponsor, will give a cash prize for the best video featured as part of the program. A handful of local vendors will provide the food.

Cutlog is accepting applications through February 28, and has sent scouts to areas as far-flung as Russia, Taiwan, Turkey, and Brazil to invite promising talent. “Our goal is not to be the fair of the Lower East Side galleries, but to be a fair in the Lower East Side,” Reziciner said.

Still, isn’t it risky to launch a fair in a region as art-saturated as New York City? We'll find out for sure in May. But Reziciner thinks the abundance of local art commerce can only help his cause. “There are more than 100 galleries here, and a lot of artists and young collectors live here,” he said. “I think the Lower East Side is new art center of New York.”