An Art Fair in Transition

by Evan Carter 

 

Upon announcing a new creative director Kate Sierzputowski and curator Essence Harden, Frieze previewed that this year’s edition of EXPO Chicago would be hosting 25 percent fewer exhibitors. The motivation for this being “a more focused, intentionally scaled format, designed to deepen engagement for seasoned collectors, first-time visitors, and regional audiences alike,” according to a press release. However, given that the sales performance of last year’s iteration was dominated by a handful of galleries that outperformed prominent Chicago galleries, this appeared to be a preemptively defensive posture. Add to that the distinct shift in the quality and character of the work shown, as well as one gallery staffer saying that EXPO’s creative director called and pleaded with them to exhibit this year, and it seems that the veneer may be peeling at the edges.

 

        If shrinking the exhibitor list and a shift in curatorial approach was a strategy, it does appear to be an effective one. Strong sales have been reported across a wide range of exhibitors and institutions and more prominence among Chicago and other midwestern based galleries was apparent. Nevertheless, there was a distinct feeling of adapting to constraints while also integrating corporate sponsors into the exhibition. The most notable display of this was artist and designer Alex Alpert drawing on the hood of a white Lexus to create what was billed as a “A car reimagined. A canvas in motion.” Hewing toward tradition one might simply call it a gimmick.

 

        This year’s shift, though generally lackluster was not without some merit. Nor could it be entirely blamed on Frieze as the facilitating entity. It would be absurd to think that the art world is not immune to larger national and global economic anxiety. For the people who think of collecting art primarily as a financial investment rather than an intellectual one, it is already a risky endeavor. And when markets repeatedly stumble due to years of economic volatility capping off with a current war over territory, fossil fuels, and well…other things, a commerce driven art fair is faced with the fiscal responsibility of cutting corners and playing it safe. EXPO Chicago 2026 did indeed play it safe, though the exhibition has been trending in that direction for years. The greater tragedy is for what this direction reveals about the state of the visual arts as a cultural force in society. The response to EXPO in the media, both social and journalistic, has been one of passive celebration and ambivalence toward criticality and substance. There is a sense of resignation that art does not and should not have cultural power beyond, at best, satisfying the shallow politics of a siloed audience, and at its worst offering something pretty for someone to decorate their home with while it arbitrarily accrues value.

 

        Décor itself did seem to feature more prominently this year. There was an abundance of floral-patterned wall pieces as well as more than one display of floral sculptures. Artists have explored nature and floral imagery for centuries and some contemporary artists such as Melissa Leandro, represented at EXPO by Andrew Rafacz gallery, take a more substantive approach to incorporating the decorative and the conceptual. This substance seemed lacking in pieces by other artists working with similar motifs. A more décor forward curation is suggestive of a challenged market and an aim toward a middle tier of sales that contrasts more sharply with the institutional clientele that this fair consistently courts. The contemporary art world has always grappled with class struggles. Given that we live in an age of anti-intellectualism and anti-elitism it is unsurprising that art itself has played a role in valorizing the aesthetics of the ‘common people’ or the underserved and underrepresented. In the 21^st century this is a fraught and complicated task that truly, only the art world can take on in an experimental fashion. The notion of what makes art ‘good’ or ‘bad’ has been fluid since the advent of modernism. The real question is do we want a fluidity that is stagnant or one that has waves? Unfortunately, much of what this year’s EXPO presented felt quite stagnant. Of course, there were exceptions in terms of artwork with strong showings by Leasho Johnson at TERN gallery, Gabrielle Garland at Corbett vs. Dempsey, and others.

 

        The organizers’ intention to facilitate dialogue and engagement is also a more noticeable if not debatable success. I experienced conversations with people in Navy Pier’s Festival Hall about as much as any other year, and as usual I saw others doing the same. Whether this was more engagement than prior years, I’m not sure. It also may have been more noticeable because of the slight decrease in attendance. Reports show less than 35,000 visitors this year as opposed to the prior two years in which over 35,000 visitors attended. That is as specific as the public data gets. This vague admission speaks to a broader lack of public engagement with EXPO. If this was anticipated due to overall performance in 2025, it may be one of the more subtle determining factors that led to the downsizing of EXPO that was left out of this year’s press release.

 

        Despite Frieze’s framing, this year’s EXPO could not shake off an air of desperation to curb costs at the greater expense of diminishing what is an annual testament to the city of Chicago’s place in the art world, albeit one that is focused on commerce. Smart business decisions were made, and this is after all a business. But in the end, this was an event that was more subdued, and even more exclusive to art world insiders than I have ever seen before. Add to that the distinct lack of nonprofit organizations, displays by local studio art degree programs, and the floor plan reduced by a third, and this art fair, for better or worse, is not what it used to be.

 

Evan Carter is a visual artist, writer, and Associate Editor at the New Art Examiner. He received and MFA from the University of Chicago and a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art & Design.

 

Selections from FOCUS and Detroit

by K.A. Letts

 

        I always face art fairs with a mix of emotions—I anticipate seeing innovative and thought-provoking artworks but I’m not so fond of the fair-induced temporary ADHD and aching feet. As an artist laboring in flyover country though, I find the much-maligned art fair is an unloved necessity.  

        This year’s EXPO Chicago was a little less daunting than many, since it was about a third smaller than the previous iteration.  I appreciated the slightly slower cadence of activity, which gave me the opportunity to have conversations and ask questions with the art fair’s artists and gallerists. With its blend of shopping mall energy, cocktail party atmosphere and academic rigor, EXPO Chicago provided plenty for me to see and do.

 

        This year, the organizers of the fair thoughtfully made my visit easier by creating several separately curated and thematically distinct sections. Leading international galleries–the usual blue-chip suspects with their established artists–were well-represented in the “Galleries” section. Members from the Galleries Association of Korea+KIAF were interspersed throughout the fair and added a global note, courtesy of Frieze Seoul.  The fairly small non-profit section of the fair was anchored by “Embodiment,” curated by Dr. Louise Bernard, Director of the soon-to-be-opened Obama Presidential Center Museum in Chicago. The installation offered a preview of the new museum’s architecture and commissioned art. The “Profile” section, curated by Essence Harden, Curator of EXPO Chicago, included some of my perennial local favorites, like Corbett-vs.-Dempsey and Andrew Rafacz, plus some that were new (to me) such as Half Gallery (NYC), Affinity Gallery (Lagos) and Materia/Third Born (Detroit/Mexico City).

 

        I was pleased to find an extensive collection of Detroit artist and curator Jova Lynne’s red—very red—photographs in the “Profile” section.  Lynne’s photo explorations represent color as a foundational source of meaning, a generative force that expresses “vitality, joy and insistence.” The photographs share space with altered vintage musical instruments. Artists of color often analogize their way of working as a kind of musical improvisation. Lynne, who is of Caribbean descent, has taken the analogy a step further, creating physical amalgams of musical and visual art.

        I was mostly interested in seeing work in the “Focus” section, partly because it concentrated on new galleries and emerging artists, and partly because it was curated by my fellow Detroiter Katie A Fohl, of the Detroit Institute of Art. The collection showcased up-and-coming galleries and artists whose craft ways and imagery reference African, Latin American and Caribbean diasporas around the Mississippi River Basin.

 

        First on my agenda in the “Focus” section was Buffalo Prescott’s booth, where two Detroit artists harmoniously shared space. Sara Nickleson, a native of Windsor, Ontario now living and working in Motown, practices a kind of painterly painting rarely seen here, where realist painting and graphic public murals dominate. Her uncanny figures, seemingly composed of fleshy stone, or perhaps stony flesh, inhabit an alien landscape made of the same substance. They represent a new kind of surrealist vision; the figures engaged in the process of emerging from the surrounding uncanny space or perhaps dissolving into it.  Her compatriot, Cyrah Darden, is a multi-disciplinary creative who I mostly know as a fiber artist. For this exhibition, though, they consider the properties and origins of color with a minimalist wall of dyed papers derived from materials—natural and man-made–found on the streets, and empty lots of the city. Dardas’s kinetic aluminum construct, Samara Sculpture II, glimmered in the corner.  

 

        Down the hall from Buffalo Prescott, What Pipeline (Detroit) in cooperation with Good Weather (Chicago) showed work by featured artist Dylan Spaysky, whose clever wicker women, elegant but slightly awkward in their barely-there little black dresses and improvised hairdos, were an interesting combination of department store mannequin and cult object. His mirrored and lit wall-hung cityscape silhouettes riffing on “Sex in the City” didn’t particularly land for me, possibly because I am the last sentient being on earth who hasn’t seen the television series. 

        Across the aisle in the 56 Henry (NYC) booth, LaKela Brown, whose work was shown recently in a solo show at Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, was represented by sooty black casts of her signature diasporic foodstuffs, the ruffled collard greens, corn and okra subtly suggesting baroque architectural ornamentation.

 

        I was momentarily distracted by Chicago artist Mindy Rose Schwartz’s vintage fur jacket at the M. LeBlanc booth. Schwartz has inventively deconstructed and repurposed the garment into a tapestry that aims to conjure the lost souls of the slain animals. Like many Detroiters, I find I’m often drawn to work that upcycles previously discarded materials. The creature produced by Schwartz was a perfect example of improvisational art.

        Art Expo this year seemed to me a bit subdued, like a slightly deflated party balloon. Perhaps that was because of its smaller size, but also it seems to me that the art community is in a moment of stasis universally shared throughout the country, unsure of who we are or where we are going. We are still making things—often beautiful things–but have fallen back on familiar, self-soothing forms and tropes.  The attempted takeover of the country by authoritarians, abetted by our fellow citizens, has called into question our previous confidence in ourselves as brave and open-minded creatives representing common American values.  The question now is whether we can dust ourselves off and recapture our lost cultural momentum.

 

K.A. Letts is the Great Lakes Region editor of the New Art Examiner, a working artist (kalettsart.com) and art blogger (rustbeltarts.com). She has shown her paintings and drawings in galleries and museums in Toledo, Detroit, Chicago, and New York. She writes frequently about art in the Detroit area.

 

 

Works that Caught My Eye at Expo Chicago 2026

by Michel Ségard

Expo Chicago 2026, although shrunk from past years by about a third and missing most of its nonprofit participants, still had some works of art that were worth thinking about. Below are 15 that I thought worth considering, for better or for worse.

Simplicity

A number of pieces stood out because of their simplicity of composition. They provided a refreshing rest from a large number of works that were crowded and fussy. Four examples are shown below.

Size can overwhelm

There were quite a few extra-large paintings, and most were extremely busy. Here are three that caught my eye for their compositional intricacy:

Should They Have Been in the Show?

Finally, there were a few pieces whose presence at the fair were, to my eye, questionable. Here are four of them. You decide.

Two pieces presented by Yehudi Hollander-Pappi gallery Sau Paulo, Brazil. One was a large vat of water liquid. The other was a stone suspended on a shelf in such a way that the stone’s shadow became part of the piece. The works were accompanied by a wall label of unintelligible art speak.

On the left, glass flowers on this kiosk were unidentified. They were excellently crafted but with a ‘HomeGoods‘ aesthetic. The image on the right shows a Lexus painted with Chicago landmarks in a Haring-esque style by Alex Alpert. He executed the drawing on site at the fair.

 

Michel Ségard is the Editor in Chief of the New Art Examiner and a former adjunct assistant professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has been a published art critic for more than 45 years and is also the author of numerous exhibition catalog essays.