When Frieze Los Angeles first opened in 2019, one might have dismissed it as just another art fair. But for gallerists, collectors and artists, the fair’s arrival has signaled an important development in the West Coast art world.
Los Angeles has long attracted artists, given the presence of strong local art schools, as well as attractive space and light. Over the years, the city has continued to build on its vital gallery scene, with the recent addition of several major dealers like David Zwirner, and expansions by galleries like Hauser & Wirth and François Ghebaly. Moreover, the museum offerings have been growing, with the expansion of the Broad Museum, the renovation of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and plans for the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art.
“What it was missing was an international level art fair,” said the dealer Jeffrey Deitch, who has a gallery in the city, helped bring Frieze there, and will be showing at this year’s edition. “I knew that bringing a major art fair like Frieze would be transformative and it has been.
“The whole sector of the art world that travels from Asia, Europe and over America, they come to Los Angeles in February for Frieze Week,” Deitch continued. “It’s a remarkable community celebration.”
Indeed, despite perennial griping over fair fatigue in the art world and the fact that Frieze Los Angeles comes just two months after the palm trees and parties of Art Basel Miami Beach, “Frieze Week” has become, for many, its own must-attend cultural event, with panel discussions, performances and dinners.
Ancillary local fairs include Spring/Break Art Show and Felix Art Fair, which presents more affordable art in poolside cabanas at the Hollywood Roosevelt hotel. According to Frieze organizers, from 2019, when the fair debuted, to 2024, the number of visitors has increased, to 32,000 from 30,000. And the number of participating galleries has increased to 101 from 70.
“Six years ago, people were skeptical about whether a fair like this could work in L.A.,” said Ari Emanuel, the chief executive of the sports and entertainment conglomerate Endeavor, which owns Frieze, in a statement to The Times. “But we knew the incredible creativity and community was already there. It just needed the right spotlight.” (Endeavor in October announced that it was exploring a potential sale of the fair after a deal with the Bay Area private equity firm Silver Lake to take the company private.)
Frieze will hold its sixth edition from Feb. 21 to 23 at the Santa Monica Airport, featuring about 100 galleries from more than 20 countries, including Taka Ishii from Tokyo, Xavier Hufkens from Brussels and Kukje from Seoul.
Fair attendees come from around the world. Compared with last year, 45 percent more Latin Americans are expected to attend Frieze in February, as well as 25 percent more Asians and double the Europeans. “That’s just an indicator of the kind of transformation of Los Angeles and the transformation that Frieze has brought to Los Angeles,” said Christine Messineo, the director of Americas at Frieze. “It is a not-to-be-missed international moment in L.A.”
Museums in Los Angeles also use Frieze week to present some of their most important exhibitions. LACMA, for example, will have on view “Imagining Black Diasporas: 21st-Century Art and Poetics” (through Aug. 3) and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles will have “Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art since 1968” (through May 4). The Frieze fair also holds its opening party at the Getty Villa.
Alongside the fair’s regulars, like Gagosian, Gladstone, Marian Goodman and White Cube, 14 galleries are expected to show at Frieze Los Angeles for the first time, including Southern Guild, Mariane Ibrahim, Linseed, Monique Meloche, Galleria Lorcan O’Neill and Timothy Taylor, according to the fair’s recent program announcement.
“We would like to have a seat at the bigger party, so we’re happy to be a first-time participant,” said Meloche, whose booth will feature the artist Candida Alvarez. “We have some clients in L.A., but we would always like to have more.”
The fair will highlight the Los Angeles scene, with nearly half of the participants operating in the city, including key local galleries such as Blum (formerly Blum & Poe) and David Kordansky.
This year’s lineup also features a number of former participants from the fair’s Focus section, which highlights emerging galleries and their artists, who have advanced to the main galleries of the fair, including Matthew Brown and Charlie James.
“There was never really a reason for the entire art world to come to Los Angeles at one time,” said Brown, the dealer. “The foot traffic in the gallery that week is beyond what we experience the rest of the year. Everybody’s putting on their best exhibition possible.”
Focus will be organized for the second year in a row by the curator Essence Harden, who served as the art curator at the California African American Museum in Exposition Park, and who is also an organizer of the Hammer Museum’s “Made in L.A.” 2025 biennial.
For galleries outside Los Angeles, the fair provides an opportunity to connect with art buyers based in the city. And for Los Angeles galleries, the event enables them to connect with collectors from outside the city.
Given how geographically diffuse and far-flung the city’s galleries are — which makes serendipitous visits of passers-by rare, and collectors often loath to brave traffic — the fair is an especially important opportunity for one-stop shopping. Visitors can park in a single location and see it all.
“There are collectors from L.A. who have been in my gallery in New York, but not my gallery in L.A.,” said the dealer Anat Egbi, adding that the fair — where she regularly has a booth — has helped make Los Angeles “more of a destination and a contender.”
The city’s artists have also welcomed the fair as a chance to show their work to a broader audience and to participate in a market ecosystem that can otherwise seem difficult to penetrate. “It gives me opportunity,” said the artist Fulton Leroy Washington (known as Mr. Wash), who has shown his work at Frieze L.A. “I knew nothing about the art world.”
The fair started out in a New York streetscape on the backlot of Paramount Studios, which branded the event as quintessentially Hollywood. “The timing was right on target,” said the longtime Los Angeles dealer Tim Blum, the co-founder of Blum, adding that the movie set venue was “super charming, super L.A.”
In 2023, the fair moved to the Santa Monica Airport, selected for its additional space and flexibility, the organizers said then.
Some bemoan the new location as less interesting and far from the city’s east side, where many in the art world live. But others see it as more convenient for wealthy collectors, most of whom live on the west side.
The success of Frieze has been important for the city, given previous short-lived attempts to establish a fair there, such as a West Coast version of New York’s Armory Show and a spinoff of Paris Photo, also at Paramount.
“It’s a convocation,” said James, the dealer. “Do we inherit energy from that? Absolutely.”
Many in Los Angeles hope the Frieze fair is a staple they can count on in the future. But for some longtime denizens of the city’s art world, such market enterprises don’t make a meaningful difference. “Although my work has been shown at these events,” said the artist Barbara Kruger, “I’ve never been to an art fair.”
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