At the opening of Frieze Los Angeles on Thursday, collectors and museums appeared especially keen to acquire art, with dealers reporting success in placing works in institutional collections based in the U.S. and Europe.

In their sales reports, dealers said that the return to Los Angeles for this year’s edition of the heralded fair was fruitful. Works valued as high as $3.5 million landed buyers, signaling that business was taking place at a steady pace on opening day.

A few dealers said this opening outpaced expectations. “The energy both at the fair and beyond has been contagious,” Lehmann Maupin partner Jessica Kreps said in an email to ARTnews. “My conversations with curators and collectors seem deeper and much more calculated this year. People are interested in learning more about long-lived and established careers, rather than looking out for the next best thing.”

Gagosian reported that its entire booth of nine works on paper and painting by Rick Lowe sold within the fair’s opening hours. Antwaun Sargent, a director at the gallery’s New York locations, told ARTnews that the fair’s results indicate that excitement over the artist “only continues to grow.”

It was not just mega-dealers who saw multiple works by attention-grabbing artists sell out in the early hours. London’s Victoria Miro reported that 18 paintings, each priced at under $80,000, sold from its solo booth of new work by Doron Langberg.

Two Florida–based Native American activists are asking the city of Miami to stop an ongoing archaeological dig in the Brickell neighborhood. The site is being developed for residential housing.

The artifacts found at the site include pottery sherds, stone tools, and humans remains likely dating back to the Tequesta people who lived along the Miami river.

Will Pestle, a bioarchaeologist and University of Miami professor, told Local 10 News that the site dates back as far as 7,000 years: “[It’s] older than the pyramids. It is older than the colosseum in Rome.”

Meanwhile Robert Rosa of the American Indian Movement of Florida and Betty Osceola of the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida are requesting that the city stop the excavation.

“I was a little bit angered and felt like our ancestors were being disrespected,” Osceola told Local 10 News. She also suggested the area be preserved like the nearby Miami Circle.

Over the past 15 years, Los Angeles–based dealer François Ghebaly has established himself as a major player. He represents some of today’s most important artists, from Farah Al Qasimi to Candice Lin; expanded to New York two years ago; and opened a second LA space earlier this month. Even still, he never considered pursuing a career in art until he moved to LA in the mid-2000s, when he was in his early 20s. 

Ghebaly grew up in Saint-Louis, France, on the other side of the French-Swiss border from Basel. Growing up in a suburb of Basel, Ghebaly regularly took advantage of the “world-class culture” the city had to offer, from its esteemed museums and musical offerings to Art Basel, the marquee art fair that has taken place there since 1970.

“I had a business degree by default because it’s something that runs in the family—I had a job waiting for me in a bank in Switzerland,” Ghebaly said. “No one in my family was connected to the art business, so it was not the kind of business I thought I could do.”

Shortly after landing in LA, Ghebaly started working at the Brewery Art Colony, a former 16-acre Edison power plant in the city’s Lincoln Heights neighborhood that was converted into artist lofts in the 1980s. “I very quickly ended up being surrounded by a fascinating community of artists, some of whom became my dear friends. The community that I came across in LA was so fascinating that I wanted to apply my skills in business for artists,” he said. 

In 2006, Mihai Nicodim, who had also recently arrived to LA from Europe, opened up his own gallery, then called Kontainer Gallery, in Chinatown, and one of his first hires was Ghebaly, as an intern. By his third month on the job, Ghebaly was a director.

A “Balloon Dog” sculpture by artist Jeff Koons was accidentally knocked over by an art collector and shattered on the floor of a Miami gallery Thursday evening. Luckily, for the collector, the cost of the piece was covered by insurance.

The two-decade-old piece was blue porcelain and stood at roughly 15 inches tall. The work was on display as part of the contemporary art fair Art Wynwood, according to a report by the Miami Herald Friday.

“When this thing fell to the ground, it was like how a car accident draws a huge crowd on the highway,” Stephen Gamson, a Wynwood–based artist and art collector, told the Herald.

Attendees were left wondering if this was an accident or possibly part of a performance piece.

Koons speculated that the woman may have let curiosity get the best of her. She has, however, been identified as an art collector.

When the Tate Britain unveils the rehanging of its galleries on May 23, women artists from the 17th century to the present will be more prominently featured, the museum announced earlier this week.

The new displays from national collection of British art will showcase over 800 work by more than 350 artists, including favorites, recent discoveries, and new commissions, including several large-scale contemporary installations. Notably, half the contemporary artists on display will be women, including Bridget Riley, Tracey Emin, Kudzanai-Violet Hwami and Lydia Ourahmane.

The museum’s statement on the rehang said its “longstanding commitment to diversifying its collection means the gallery can also showcase great women artists from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, including many who have never been shown at Tate before.”

Recent acquisitions of female artists that will be newly on display at Tate Britain include a full-length portrait by Joan Carlile, believed to be the first woman in Britain to work as a professional oil painter. The museum acquired the work in 2016. In 2021, Tate also acquired 29 watercolors by Emily Sargent, the sister of the much better-known John Singer Sargent, made on her travels in North Africa. The paintings are part of a much larger collection of 440 discovered in a trunk by a family member in 1998.

“Tate Britain’s new displays will embody our commitment to expanding the canon and diversifying British art history,” Polly Staple, the museum’s director of collection, British art, said in a statement. “In recent years we have brought so many incredible works into Tate’s collection and visitors will soon be able to see these new acquisitions hung alongside more familiar and much-loved classics.”

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