Dallas Art Fair Cancels, But There Is a Silver Lining for Texas Dealers

When Dallas Art Fair director Kelly Cornell emailed late this week with big news, it was an announcement we’d sensed was coming, a decision that could only be summed up as sage. 

As Texas continues to lead the nightly news and serve as a coronavirus cover story for The New York Times Magazine, the wisdom of going ahead with a multi-day, multi-venue cultural happening that draws a throng of nearly 20,000 from diverse cities, countries and continents was questionable. 

The planned Fall edition of the 2020 Dallas Art Fair, originally postponed from the spring, is now a victim of our time’s global pandemic — and will officially not happen at all this year. 

Fair director Kelly Cornell said it all succinctly in an official announcement. “We regret that we must cancel this year’s Dallas Art Fair, which had been rescheduled from April to October,” it reads. “This has been an extremely difficult decision to make, but with the high number of COVID-19 cases in Texas and global travel restrictions, we have to put the safety of our dealers and collectors first.”

The next edition of the Dallas Art Fair is slated for eight months from now, scheduled for April 15 through April 18, 2021. It is once again returning to its long-time venue, Fashion Industry Gallery, in the heart of downtown Dallas’ arts district.  

A collective sigh came forth from the fair’s dealers, collectors and the thousands of art fanatics who bask in the programming, buzz, dish, connectivity and camaraderie that the fair has engendered since it first debuted in 2009 in a more abbreviated form, with about 30-some exhibiting dealers. The Dallas Art Fair has since then swelled to nearly 100 participating galleries, with a glittering Opening Night Gala that benefits the trifecta of Dallas’ most important art spaces: the Dallas Contemporary, Dallas Museum of Art and Nasher Sculpture Center. (Read PaperCity‘s coverage of past editions of Dallas Art Fair here and here.) 

Silver Linings Playbook

However, there is a silver lining here — one that benefits the hometown team. Dallas dealers and fellow Texas exhibitors are flocking to a promising new website developed by Dallas Art Fair to reach its collector audience and produce sales, all in a virtual space.  

Cue Culture Place, which debuted in July. This is Dallas Art Fair’s salvo to the big-box arts e-commerce sites of Artsy and Artnet. (Read PaperCity‘s full story on the launch of Culture Place here.) 

This shining silver lining promises to be huge and transformative, providing a lift for a group of galleries that Dallas Art Fair has always cultivated and valued, and presented on an equal playing field, alongside global brands like Perrotin, Lehmann Maupin and Gagosian (which famously participated in the 2017 edition of DAF). That would be its roster of stellar Texas dealers.

The result to date has produced a fair flavored with a unique, indie-spirit dialogue, an open-ended, egalitarian vibe, and maverick aesthetic that successfully propelled the Dallas Art Fair into respect and renown as one of the best boutique art fairs in America.

Now with the physical fair gone until April 2021, Culture Place’s team, led by Dallas Art Fair co-founder John Sughrue and fair director Kelly Cornell, are challenged to create a commercial paradigm that works for the inaugural 19 Texas dealers — stalwart Dallas Art Fair exhibitors — who eagerly signed up for Culture Place once it was announced. The art fair’s pre-Culture Place digital tryout, this spring’s online selling platform of the fair, was an unexpected hit, producing $3 million in sales, which sparked John Sughrue to think in the direction of creating Culture Place, an acquisitions opportunity spun around the mission of supporting Texas dealers. 

The  new Texas-focused model is rich with programming, bringing together some of the state’s premier galleries including Dallas notables Conduit, Erin Cluley, Liliana Bloch, Valley House, Cris Worley, Holly Johnson, Galleri Urbane, and recently minted 12.26 and Sean Horton. Significantly, Houston dealers with decades of expertise and exhibition experiences that embrace Art Basel Miami Beach and the ADAA Show and/or repping artists in the Whitney Biennial or the Venice Biennale beginning with Moody Gallery, Inman Gallery, McClain Gallery, and David Shelton Gallery, joined by dual-city gallerist Laura Rathe (Houston and Dallas) and recent exciting additions to the scene Nancy Littlejohn and Bill Arning, are also represented. Fort Worth is represented by iconic William Campbell. From San Antonio, Ruiz-Healy Art brings a museum-level focus on mostly Texas talents.

Then there is an emerging dealer who bears watching. Austin-based Dark Dirty Place bring a refreshing grass-roots edge that interjects humor into the ethos of Texas collecting. 

Come fall, expect the initial group of 19 to swell to 25, Cornell tells PaperCity. (In this direction, PaperCity has just learned that Houston’s Barbara Davis Gallery will join Culture Place in September.)  

We checked in with one of Culture Place’s inaugural dealers, Liliana Bloch. (The Dallas Art Fair Foundation shopped her booth in 2018, and she was the first Dallas gallery whose artist, Alicia Henry, was acquire by the DAF Foundation for the Dallas Museum of Art.)

“Culture Place is a great opportunity to support Texas galleries from home,” Bloch says. “We are moving towards digital platforms more and more, and I hope that post COVID-19 people will value the importance of a visually engaging living space.” Bloch adds about the role of paintings and sculpture in home interiors, which we are increasingly bound to during this time, “Art does cure the soul.”