Expo Chicago’s Smaller Footprint Still Drew Strong Early Sales
At the thirteenth edition of Expo Chicago, one of the fair’s most memorable moments had little to do with scale and everything to do with emotion. Tennessee artist Annie Brito Hodgin, showing with Red Arrow Gallery, was exhibiting outside Nashville for the first time and making her art fair debut when one of her paintings was acquired by the Bennett Collection. The news moved her to tears, according to gallery director Ashley Layendecker.
Hodgin’s paintings take Biblical passages and recast them in surreal, contemporary terms, with the artist appearing in each scene as a version of herself. Layendecker said Hodgin works from her kitchen while raising three children, a detail that gave the sale an added charge for the booth’s visitors.
By midday on day one, Red Arrow had sold about half the works it brought to Chicago, with prices between $4,500 and $5,800. The Bennett Collection, founded by Steven Alan Bennett and Elaine Melotti Schmidt, supports acquisitions of works by women-identifying artists painting women in a realist style; the works it acquires are slated to go on view at the Muskegon Museum of Art in Michigan.
The fair itself arrived in a leaner format this year. Expo Chicago reduced its exhibitor count to about 130 from roughly 170 in past years, and part of Navy Pier was walled off to create a smaller sales floor. Dealers said the adjustment made the fair easier to navigate and, in some cases, more focused.
That sense of concentration extended beyond Red Arrow. New York’s Half Gallery had already sold six of the eight paintings it brought by the day before the VIP preview, with works by Chinese-born Wenhui Hao priced from $6,000 to $18,500. Corbett vs. Dempsey, meanwhile, reported sales of a painting and several drawings by Gabrielle Garland, whose skewed suburban houses and saturated colors suggest lives just out of view.
Other booths also saw early movement. Night Gallery sold several paintings by Robert Nava at prices as high as $200,000. Karma placed sculptures from Kathleen Ryan’s “Bad Fruit” series, including “Bad Lemon (Adrift)” (2026) for $150,000 and “Bad Orange (Deep Blue)” (2026) for $135,000. Jonathan Carver Moore offered works by Demond Melancon at $8,000 and had sold a number of them by midday Thursday.
The VIP preview also drew a dense crowd of collectors, advisors, curators, and museum leaders, underscoring Expo Chicago’s role as both a market event and a meeting point for institutional attention. In a slower art market, the fair’s early results suggested that a more compact format may be helping dealers focus the conversation — and, in some cases, close the sale.
