The First Atlanta Art Fair Heralds an Art Destination Ascendant

At the opening of the inaugural Atlanta Art Fair (AAF) this week, there was discussion of what the fair—the first of its stature in Atlanta—is not. A numbers contest; a commercial thoroughfare; a crash landing into some locale’s front yard, complete with cleanup for the locals. The ambition is site-specificity: come, buy, stay, but this labor is foremost for the love of Atlanta.

“All of the people here are so passionate about finding funding, championing their artists. Every dollar has to be fought for, there is so much work to amplify each voice. People need to be paying attention to Atlanta, but there hasn’t been a mechanism for that,” Kelly Freeman, the fair’s director, told ARTnews. (Atlanta, it’s worth noting, ranks 49th in the US in terms of public art funding.) Freeman added that regional artists don’t lack quality or quantity, but rather a gathering place.

The Atlanta Art Fair, open to the public Friday through October 6 at Pullman Yards—jam-packed at the preview—is the presumed remedy.

Five years in the making, the fair was organized by New York’s Art Market Productions (AMP), which Freeman also leads, and Intersect Art and Design, which runs the popular summer fair in Aspen. Nato Thompson, curator and self-described “cultural infrastructure builder,” was tapped as artistic director for AAF.

In the lead-up to the fair, the AAF team said to expect a “unique microcosm of the American South,” with strong representation by regional galleries and a smattering of New York, Los Angeles, and international outfits. I don’t know about the whole South, but the fair was a neat introduction to the outfits that fuel Atlanta art; its cultural partners include the High Museum of Art, the National Black Arts Festival, and Flux Projects. Hopefully the exhibitor list in subsequent editions will expand to include more galleries and partners across the South.

Pullman Yards was a good—but more like, the only—choice of venue. Chatter bounced harmlessly along the exhibition hall’s vaulted ceiling, which also served as a suspended stage for public projects, the centerpiece being a fabric mobile by Jeffrey Gibson.

The fair overlaps with the third edition of Atlanta Art Week (AAW), so art enthusiasts were already in the city for that scattered showcase of galleries and institutions; Atlanta is a sprawl, exacerbating its need for a centralized marketplace. And, to the certain relief of AAF and the arts community, the city escaped the worst of Hurricane Helene, which devastated dozens of Georgia counties in its path across the southeastern United States.

While there wasn’t any formal collaboration between AAW and AAF, aside for the timing, three leading Atlanta enterprises (Jackson Fine Art, Spalding Nix, and Whitespace) have stands at both. Both events also stress accessibility. The price points are relatively modest, mostly hovering below five digits. Atlanta culture runs deep and rich—it’s a major hub for design and film—but the art market is nascent; a local gallerist said that most collectors nip in and out from other metropolitan areas. The collector base is likely to grow, though. In the past four years, Atlanta has jumped from the nation’s ninth most-populated city to sixth, now home to 6.3 million residents.

And, of course, the art-graphic figuration celebrating Black selfhood led the way, followed by thick textural abstraction. Light on sculpture, heavy on painting and photography, with some exceptions. The blown-glass teardrop installation by Gyun Hur, titled Their tears now yours washing over where it aches and presented by Flux Projects, was stellar, as were most of the public projects.

Below is a bit of the best.