While last spring Chicago hosted two art fairs the same weekend, this year there are five at once–three of them new. The same amount of contemporary art will be shown, but it will be scattered among the two large fairs near the lake and two smaller ones, each with about 35 exhibitors, featuring younger, edgier artists from alternative spaces.
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Tom Blackman’s Art Chicago, now in its 13th year, reached a peak of more than 200 dealers a few years ago but more recently has suffered from increased competition worldwide. “Now there’s an international art fair–or two or three–every month,” Blackman says. Last year Art Chicago’s roster had dropped to about 160 dealers, with fewer of them top-ranked international galleries. This year Blackman’s usual venue, Navy Pier, was awarded to a new fair, Chicago Contemporary & Classic. Art Chicago is still the best bet for seeing art that reflects current trends–it has 94 dealers to Chicago Contemporary & Classic’s 70 or so–but neither fair has the best-known New York and European galleries. Chicago is home to only three galleries of truly international stature (Richard Gray, Rhona Hoffman, and Donald Young), two of which exhibited at Art Chicago last year, and none of which is at any Chicago fair this year.
The new Nova Young Art Fair, put on by Bridge magazine, has a “marketing partnership” with Chicago Contemporary & Classic. Including some venerable nonprofit spaces like the Hyde Park Art Center and the Contemporary Art Workshop, Nova is organized by Michael Workman, who ran the Artboat, a cruising exhibit, the last two years as an alternative to Art Chicago. For this fair, he says, “we were looking for work that didn’t have an established market value, maybe not even a significant audience yet.” (That sounds something like Blackman’s Stray Show, which last year included an excellent array from 50 alternative galleries, most local or midwestern and a few international. This year the Stray Show is much smaller and has been absorbed by Art Chicago.) Like the NFO Expo, part of the Version>05 festival, Nova includes performances, among them one by Industry of the Ordinary, a collective consisting of Adam Brooks and Mathew Wilson. They’ll offer a pancake brunch at noon in response to the trend of branding grilled food with logos purchased online. Brooks and Wilson will brand their pancakes with a logo of their own design. They won’t say what it is.
Art Chicago in the Park
Info: 312-447 0430
Price: $5
