Everything is bigger in Texas, so it’s no surprise that the city’s gallery owners and collectors are recovering from a downturn in the Covid-19 pandemic with an eye on expansion. The Dallas Art Fair, the city’s flagship art market event for 14 years, plans to serve Texas collectors’ larger-than-life appetite for art as the city’s population grows.
This year’s edition of the show (April 21-23) will feature 90 exhibitors, approaching the number of booths that participated before the pandemic put the event on hiatus for more than two years. Last year’s event, the first since 2019, hosted 88 exhibitors. In the years leading up to Covid-19, the fair had almost 100 stands.
Fair director Kelly Cornell, a Dallas native who began working with the event as a college intern during its early years, says the Dallas art market is “similar to how Dallas does everything else – we do it our way.”
A new generation of collectors
While Dallas is home to an “old guard” of established collectors who Cornell says “essentially sparked this growth and energy” for art through their continued support, the city’s population explosion has helped guide a new generation of “interested and dedicated” collectors from places like New York and California. With a population of 1.3 million, Dallas is one of the fastest growing metropolises in the United States, while Texas as a whole saw the largest increase people move to the state in 2021 and 2022 than any other, according to US Census data.
“There’s such a great energy that comes from people moving to Dallas who are interested in continuing their collecting journey wherever they come from,” Cornell says. “They bring their ways of collecting and their perspectives on the culture to Dallas, and that only helps our scene.”
The growth and strength of the local art scene also set the stage for the fair first satellite event, the Dallas Invitational Art Fair. Organized by James Cope of Dallas’ And Now Gallery, the event will be held at a hotel across from the Dallas Art Fair and will bring together a dozen galleries from New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Vienna and London, all of which have existing customer ties to Dallas, says Cope.
“One thing I’ve noticed about Dallas collectors is that they’re very international,” Cope says. “They go to Frieze London and Art Basel and Paris, travel to all the fairs and are drawn from galleries in New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris and Berlin… but there is also a strong regional scene.
in Dallas.
Dallas’ art market is supported by a strong economy that largely weathered the 2008 recessions and amid the Covid-19 pandemic, thanks in part to the city’s strong ties to industries like technology, defence, finance, oil and gas. “There’s only money coming out of the ground in Dallas,” Cope says. Dallas and other major cities in Texas, including Houston, also have major art schools that bring artists to the area.
Cope, a UK native who moved to Dallas more than 20 years ago after working in the art world in New York, says the art scene has “grown exponentially” since his arrival.
“When I moved to Dallas in the early 2000s, you had the openings once a month and the crowds were kind of less, but now there’s something going on every night of the week regarding the galleries, museums, artist-run galleries, spaces and project spaces,” he says. “You could do something every night, if you wanted to.
Cornell and Cope say Dallas is definitely big enough for two concurrent art fairs. Cope notes that he hasn’t “poached” any of the Dallas Art Fair booths and has observed demand for an even larger Dallas Invitational Art Fair.
“From the feedback I get, the number of galleries could easily double or triple,” he says.
