Austin’s boutique art fair is getting bigger, but not louder. For its next edition, the event is expanding its roster of participating galleries while reserving two rooms for noncommercial programming — a move that signals both market ambition and a desire to keep space for experimentation.
Among the additions to the presenting lineup are Seven Sisters (Houston), Tyler Park Presents (Los Angeles), KDR (Miami), and Ruiz-Healy Art (San Antonio and New York). The fair’s organizers have framed the growth as measured rather than maximal, adding new cities and perspectives without dramatically changing the fair’s scale.
Two rooms will be dedicated to presentations that are not driven by sales. One will be taken over by Co-Lab Projects, an artist-run, itinerant nonprofit founded in Austin. The other will feature an exhibition of second-year MFA students from the University of Texas at Austin, curated by their professors — a format that places pedagogy and process in direct conversation with the fair’s commercial floor.
Jill McLennon, founder of McLennon Pen Co., said the fair’s cofounders have kept a clear priority in view: making sure visiting galleries do well and leave Austin wanting to return. “As cofounders, our priority was to ensure that the visiting galleries had strong sales and genuinely enjoyed their time in Austin,” McLennon said in an email. She added that the organizers were encouraged by the number of exhibitors interested in coming back, and described the expansion as “a natural next step,” bringing in more voices “without growing too quickly.”
The full exhibitor list underscores the fair’s mix of local anchors and out-of-town programs, with galleries traveling in from New York, Los Angeles, Miami, and beyond.
Exhibitors include: Andrew Rafacz (Chicago); Dutton (New York); Half Gallery (New York); Inman (Houston); Ivester Contemporary (Austin); KDR (Miami); Marinaro (New York); Martha’s (Austin); McLennon Pen Co. (Austin); Megan Mulrooney (Los Angeles); Nature of Things (Dallas); Northern-Southern (Austin); Ruiz-Healy Art (San Antonio and New York); Seven Sisters (Houston); The Valley (Taos); Tyler Park Presents (Los Angeles); and Wolfgang Gallery (Atlanta).
In a moment when many fairs compete by sheer volume, Austin’s approach suggests a different wager: that a carefully expanded exhibitor list, paired with nonprofit and academic presentations, can keep the experience intimate while widening the conversation — and, ideally, the collector base that sustains it.
