Big art fairs are mammoth gatherings where thousands of artworks are put on view for throngs of buyers. They often take place in sprawling convention centers and exhibition halls in big cities.
“A team comes in and puts up cheap fake walls and it’s very sterile,” said Sarah Galender Meyer, an art advisor and collections manager in San Francisco. ”There’s fluorescent lights, and it’s booth after booth packed with artwork.”
“It feels a little rat-race,” she added.
So she and two like-minded colleagues from the Boston art world, gallery owner Yng-Ru Chen and artist Crystalle Lacouture, decided to launch an alternative. Two years after hatching the idea, their vision, Arrival Art Fair, opens this weekend in North Adams. The biannual event is thought to be the first ambitious fair for commercial art galleries in New England.
Arrival will be more intimate than most other fairs: Exhibiting galleries will set up in rooms at Tourists, a North Adams hotel and retreat center. Programming includes satellite galleries in people’s homes, studio visits with local artists, live music, and exhibitions at sites in North Adams and nearby Williamstown. A host of panel discussions will offer reflections on collecting, funding, publishing, and more.
The Tourists hotel will be the site of the Arrival Art Fair. (Suzanne Kreiter/Globe staff)Suzanne Kreiter/Globe Staff
Admission is free, though registration is required. Compare that to Art Basel Miami, where last year, a day ticket cost $85.
Arrival was conceived in 2023, when Chen, who owns Praise Shadows Art Gallery in Brookline, had a booth at a fair and invited Galender Meyer to help. Lacouture was an exhibiting artist.
Chen was looking for “a more level playing field for exhibitors,” she said, “because there are so many exorbitant costs associated with traveling and shipping and then accommodations for exhibitors, while you’re also paying for a booth.”
Arrival is a seat-of-the-pants operation compared to behemoths like Art Basel and Frieze. Such fairs are a high-stakes business (Frieze, valued at almost $200 million, was recently sold by the entertainment conglomerate Endeavor Group Holdings) where a collector may drop $1 million on a single artwork.
The North Adams fair, with 36 exhibitors from around the U.S., offers a broad price range, with art books and limited edition prints starting in the hundreds.
Lacouture, Chen, and Galender Meyer formed an LLC, which in this first iteration as an incubator project has accepted donations. One of those donors, the Cambridge based Wagner Foundation. Founder and president Charlotte Wagner said the foundation is “really invested in making Greater Boston a place for artists to stay and thrive,” and Arrival can help with that.
“We need opportunities for artists, and we really need an ecosystem to support them,” said Wagner. Arrival, she added, is “an innovative model, and I think it’s really invested in the region’s cultural economy.”
Opting not to create a nonprofit left the three founders, who haven’t been paying themselves, able to pursue their own ideas without having to answer to a board.
“We really wanted to have our own agency,” Lacouture said. “All three of us are mothers. All three of us have full time jobs. We wanted to have direct impact as we went.”
North Adams seemed an ideal spot. Chen attended Williams College, and Lacouture lives in North Adams part time. With Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, Clark Art Institute, and Williams College Museum of Art nearby, the area has institutional clout. Williams also has a distinguished graduate program in art history. Arrival’s slate of Curatorial Ambassadors,who nominated galleries for the invitation-only fair, have ties to the institutions, lending Arrival academic rigor.
“There’s so many well-known curators, art historians, and museum directors who graduated from Williams and are always happy to come back,” Chen said.
Historically, contemporary art has been slow to thrive in New England. In the last 20 years, Mass MoCa, the Institute of Contemporary Art, and other museums have turned that around.
“A lot of exhibitors intentionally wanted to come and do Arrival because they know so much about the strength of the museums in Massachusetts, and also the curators,” Chen said.
Commercial galleries have been another story. If Boston is known for its art schools and its museums, commercial galleries have struggled. Some say Arrival may be an opportunity to give the New England gallery scene a shot in the arm.
A painting by Elizabeth King Stanton, "Ignoring The Weeds," will be exhibited by Abigail Ogilvy Gallery at Arrival Art Fair. (Abigail Ogilvy Gallery)Abigail Ogilvy Gallery
Gallery owner Abigail Ogilvy, who ran a Boston gallery until last year but is now based in Los Angeles, lauded the contemporary art scene in Boston but said the city ”often acts in isolation of its peers. If you want something to happen in Boston you have to build it,” she said.
She will be showing art at Arrival and said she sees the new fair ”bringing the best of San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and more, together to Massachusetts where in collaboration, galleries are much stronger.“
Arrival’s co-founders hope gallerists and art lovers alike will network, find community, and enjoy themselves.
“We want people to feel taken care of,” said Chen. “Maybe that’s the mothering in us.”
ARRIVAL ART FAIR
At Tourists, 915 State Rd., North Adams, June 13-15. Admission free, registration required. https://arrival.artsvp.com/0b5bcd?link=website
Cate McQuaid can be reached at catemcquaid@gmail.com. Follow her on Instagram @cate.mcquaid.
