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Arts / Galleries

Dallas Art Fair and New Online Marketplace Innovate with In-Person/Virtual Fair Combo

A Small-Batch Fair and Culture Place

BY // 10.28.20

Dateline Dallas: An end-of-day email from Dallas Art Fair and Culture Place director Kelly Cornell caught our attention and brought innovative news about a fresh, promising platform whose launch is just weeks away.

Best of all, it’s a new way to acquire art — and Texas-founded Dallas Art Fair/Culture Place is ahead of the game. It is combining an in-person, small-batch art fair with a highly curated boutique ecommerce experience.

Four x Five arrives Wednesday, November 11, and runs through November 25, with four galleries coming to the physical space of Dallas Art Fair Projects with a focused presentation spun around solo shows.

But there’s more. The Five component involves a virtual edition rolled out by Culture Place, Dallas Art Fair’s ecommerce pendant.

First, a little background. Culture Place came into being this past April when Dallas Art Fair wisely pivoted from an in-person fair to an online selling site to great success, generating hundreds of art-sales transactions (including a $700,ooo Alice Neel work), with the bottom line an incredible $3 million in a manner of days.

Fair co-founder John Sughrue and Fair director Kelly Cornell paid attention. Three months later, Culture Place officially launched, with an emphasis on giving a “bear hug” — in the words of Sughrue — to Texas art galleries. To date, 20 Texas dealers from Houston, Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio are part of the inaugural year of cultureplace.com. Participating galleries curate exhibitions that change out monthly.

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Jimmy Baker’s “Double Walker,” 2019, at Keijsers Koning wins us over with its lush imagery, a find at Four x Five’s physical fair at Dallas Art Fair Projects November 11-25, 2020.
Jimmy Baker’s “Double Walker,” 2019, at Keijsers Koning wins us over with its lush imagery — a find at Four x Five’s physical fair at Dallas Art Fair Projects, November 11 – 25, 2020.

Who’s Participating: A Noteworthy Nine

For Four x Five, Dallas Art Fair and Culture Place broaden their view to fold in national and international dealers — the calling card of the Fair (as well as its Texas roster of gallerists) — to serve additional platforms for commerce and art acquisitions.

Kelly Cornell, via email, tells PaperCity:

The hybrid model of using our physical space, Dallas Art Fair Projects, and digital space, Culture Place, to interact with out audience seemed like a winning opportunity. We are so excited to produce a physical show and safely interact with the community and galleries.

The physical component, which opens at Dallas Art Fair Projects, 150 Manufacturing Street, Suite 214, on Wednesday, November 11 (Tuesday through Saturday, 11 am to 6 pm, with all social-distancing and mask protocols in place), presents four important gallerists, all Dallas Art Fair veterans.

Drum roll, please: Keijsers Koning (New York), home gallery to former Dallas talent William Burton Binnie, co-founder of Beefhaus collective; Magenta Plains (New York), helmed by SMU alum Olivia Smith; crowd fave Night Gallery (Los Angeles); and global powerhouse Perrotin (Paris, New York, Tokyo, Seoul, Hong Kong, and Shanghai).

William Burton Binnie’s installation at Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, Nebraska, 2019, represented by Keijsers Koning. Known in Texas art circles for his role as a co-founder of the Beefhaus collective, Binnie bears watching in the booth of Keijsers Koning, during Four x Five at Dallas Art Fair Projects.
William Burton Binnie’s installation at Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, Nebraska, 2019. Known in Texas art circles for his role as a co-founder of the Beefhaus collective, Binnie bears watching in the booth of Keijsers Koning during Four x Five at Dallas Art Fair Projects.

Cornell tells PaperCity the four dealers that will travel to Dallas to present art fare may also be offering works via cultureplace.com. Stay tuned.

Those exclusively curating works for Culture Place lean to the international — Beatriz Esguerra Art (Bogotá, Miami), Galerie Droste (Wuppertal and Paris), Kerlin Gallery (Dublin), and Taubert Contemporary (Berlin) — with one Southerner, SOCO Gallery (Charlotte, North Carolina), owned and directed by Chandra Johnson, who has a NASCAR-champion spouse, Jimmie Johnson, alongside impressive art-world credentials (the couple have been DAF regular fair-goers for years).

For the future, Cornell reveals Dallas Art Fair hopes to roll out more iterations of the Four x Five concept. Meanwhile, edition one encompasses  a broad swath of dealers, Bogotá to Berlin, who serve up diverse media and messages, and refreshingly represent artists worthy of investigation working in conceptual, installation, representation/figuration, and abstraction, arrayed across a variety of collecting price points.

For those hungry for a real-life viewing experience, that’s available as well, via the virtual component selected specially for the Culture Place audience. And, due to the concise, focused size, visitors have time to thoughtfully engage with each artist and his or her practice.

Dallas Art Fair + Culture Place Present Four x Five

Wednesday, November 11, through Wednesday, November 25. Physical fair on view at Dallas Art Fair Projects, 150 Manufacturing Street, Suite 214, Dallas.

Tuesday through Saturday hours: 11 am to 6 pm. Virtual exhibition 24/7 from November 11 to 25 at cultureplace.com.

Scroll through the photo slideshow above and below this story to see Four x Five gallerists and artworks. All images courtesy the artists and their respective galleries:

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