WHAT SOLD AT EXPO CHICAGO

Anna Louie Sussman

Terry Adkins, Untitled (Bessie Smith Head, Red) , 2007. © Terry Adkins. Photo by Elisabeth Bernstein. Courtesy of Lévy Gorvy.

Amir H. Fallah,  Calling On The Past , 2018. Courtesy of Shulamit Nazarian.

On most occasions, art fairs feel like their own little worlds—festive bubbles cocooned in the thick walls of climate-controlled convention centers, humming on coffee and champagne, impervious to natural light and whatever is happening in the real world.

On Thursday, much of the country was gripped by the testimony of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, who alleged that Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when she was a teenager, and by his subsequent response. The intensity was such that not even the remote location of Expo Chicago—at the tip of a long pier, surrounded on three sides by Lake Michigan—could shelter art lovers from the political storm. A simple “How are you?” at the opening night of Expo’s seventh edition often launched a conversation about the hearings. Women, in particular, walked the fair looking slightly stricken (hardly surprising, given that one out of six women in the U.S. has been the victim of an assault or attempted assault, according to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network). Many attendees said they’d been streaming the hearings all the way through the cab ride to the fair, and dealers admitted following along on their phones during the day.

“People were pretty distracted,” said Martin Aguilera, sales director at Mendes Wood DM, a Brazilian gallery. “I saw people actually streaming [the hearings] while looking at art.”

“People could not focus,” said Wendi Norris, a San Francisco–based dealer whose booth by the entrance showed three large-scale works by Dorothea Tanning, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, and Ana Teresa Fernández. “I definitely think politics can have an effect on fairs in general,” she added, noting other dealers had compared the mood to the 2016 edition of Art Basel in Miami Beach, which came just weeks after Donald Trump had been elected president.

Chicago-based dealer Monique Meloche said several of her artists had arrived to the Thursday night vernissage late because they needed time to “pull themselves together.”

“Luxury assets tend to do well”

Cheryl Pope, Woman and Man Reclining on Striped Mat, 2018 (left) and Woman and Man Reclining with Plants, 2018 (right). Courtesy of the artist and Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago. Photo by Robert Chase Heishman.

As unfestive as Thursday’s political events were, the economic backdrop to the fair was conducive to buying, said several bankers in attendance. Evan Beard, national art services executive at U.S. Trust, Bank of America Private Wealth Management (and an Artsy contributor) said the bank was holding an event with Richard Gray Gallery for 50 collectors later that weekend, and he’d seen important “up-and-comers” from New York, Minneapolis, and Chicago at the opening night.

“We’re in a strong economy; I think the macro story is overwhelming any micro story on tariffs right now for wealthy people,” Beard said. “Chicago’s been a good market for us this year,” both for the art lending division and for engaging with collectors more broadly, “and this fair is an important pillar.”

The region itself is on an upswing, said Mac MacLellan, executive vice president of wealth management at Northern Trust, the presenting sponsor of the fair, with technology companies and seed capital pouring into Chicago, thanks to its concentration of universities. He noted many of the manufacturing-heavy Midwestern states—Wisconsin, Indiana, Iowa—had unemployment rates below the already-low national average of 3.9 percent. He said it was too early to feel the effects of tariffs recently announced by the Trump administration; regardless, the benefits of the large corporate tax cut enacted in 2017 will balance out the impact of tariffs for most companies, he said.

“Net-net, they’re probably going get a bigger boost from the tax cuts than they are going to get hurt by the tariffs, at least that’s what we’ve seen so far,” MacLellan said. “Art is considered a luxury asset, and luxury assets tend to do well in a bull market.”

There were some questions as to whether Chicago’s smaller local galleries did not participate in the fair due to costs, as was suggested by a story in The Art Newspaper published Wednesday. But Meloche pointed out how the story failed to note that several of the Chicago galleries that weren’t doing the fair had recently moved to new locations—with all of the energy and expense that entails—and the owners of those galleries could be seen at the vernissage, shepherding their collectors around and showing their own support for the fair. The fair had 135 galleries this year, the same number as last year.

Tony Karman, the president and director of the fair, pointed out that Chicago heavyweights such as Meloche, Rhona Hoffman, Richard Gray, and Kavi Gupta were all present (and have been since the beginning of the fair), and that support for the fair was widespread throughout the city. He acknowledged that fairs are expensive for smaller galleries, though at an average of $50 to $55 per square foot, Expo Chicago is cheaper than many other fairs (booths in the Exposure section, for younger galleries, are around $8,000). He also said his fair has long offered a tiered pricing system with lower per-square-foot costs for smaller booths, which has been recently adopted by larger fairs such as Art Basel and Frieze. And the fair has only had a price increase once in its seven years.

“It’s our job to adjust and be nimble and be respectful, and I’m more than open—and always have been—to make sure that we’re providing the value that they deserve,” Karman said……….

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