Long a cornerstone of the music and film industries, Atlanta has often been overlooked when it comes to its place in the art world. But in recent years, its position has been rapidly ascending thanks to a thriving artistic community, as the VIP day of the inaugural Atlanta Art Fair demonstrated on October 3rd.
“Atlanta is arguably the home to the kindest people—I’ve never felt more welcome, and so many folks over the last years have been so willing to sit down with me and talk to me about the goals of the community,” said Kelly Freeman, the fair’s director, who regularly traveled to Atlanta for the past two years in preparation for the fair. “It all just comes together with the ability to create a centralized gathering space for what the city already has going for it.”
Atlanta’s art scene is steeped in history—Radcliffe Bailey, Lauren Quin, and Cosmo Whyte are among the leading artists who have called it home over the years—but the arrival of the city’s first commercial art fair marks a new chapter. And with a buzzy arts ecosystem that spans institutional powerhouses like the High Museum of Art to a robust and fast-growing gallery landscape, it arrives at an apt time.
The aim of the Atlanta Art Fair, then, which takes place at Pullman Yards until October 6th, is to showcase this dynamism to visitors and locals alike while inviting other exhibitors to experience it for themselves.
The inception of the fair can be traced back to 2019, when New York–based Art Market Productions (AMP)—known for fairs in Seattle and San Francisco—took note of Atlanta’s position as a rising star in the global art market. From the outset, it sought out leading local gallerists and curators, like Karen Comer Lowe and Lauren Jackson Harris, to ensure the fair reflected the community’s welcoming and inclusive spirit.
Atlanta Art Fair features 60 galleries, including more than 20 from around the city. A crucial goal of the fair has been to engage both collectors and galleries from Atlanta and outside the city about the American South. In many ways, it’s a place populated by people who aspire to collect, but don’t know where to start.
“Local galleries have really decided to use this platform as a mechanism to engage with their collectors, engage with new collectors, and hopefully to have people from outside of the American South learn about who they are and what they do and the artists that they represent,” said Freeman. “I’m so honored that so many folks have decided to use this as a tool.”
After a champagne toast for happy hour, VIP guests descended on the renovated sugar factory in East Atlanta. Those walking to the bar to grab a glass of wine for the 5 p.m. opening encountered Jeffrey Gibson’s The Many Worlds (2024), a mobile of planetary spheres hovering above the bar, and Pam Longobardi’s environmentally charged installation Anxiety of Appetites (2020), made from ghost nets and ocean plastics.
Other than the bar, the landing zones for many of the VIP guests were Atlanta’s foremost local galleries.
Jackson Fine Art—the city’s leading photography gallery—is one of them. Director Anna Walker Skillman, who acquired the gallery from Jane Jackson in 2003, said the gallery is now a “mecca for photography.” In line with this, its booth features work from leading photographers, such as Steve Schapiro, Sally Mann, Sheila Pree Bright, Mickalene Thomas, Nan Goldin, Rineke Dijkstra, and Alex Prager, with works ranging from $3,800 to $35,000.
One standout is the body of black-and-white photos from photographer Mark Steinmetz, many of which are taken across Atlanta and are priced at $4,000 each (unframed). “He’s the classical—if you’re a cinematographer or a filmmaker, you’re walking in to see his work,” said Skillman. “It’s the hardcore photographers.” Elsewhere, the gallery features several figurative mixed media paintings on wood panels from Shanequa Gay, priced between $16,500 and $18,500. But above all, Skillman expressed excitement seeing her Atlanta-based colleagues and collectors all together.
“Atlanta is a really spread-out city,” said Skillman. “There’s a lot of dealers and galleries that have been working tirelessly for years to build [an] art community, and it’s gone up and down and up and down.…Atlanta has always needed a common place for us all to be and shine, and it was so great that Kelly [Freeman] and the art fair took the risk to do this.”
Nearby, Atlanta’s Johnson Lowe Gallery (previously named Bill Lowe Gallery) attracted a steady crowd from start to finish. On the exterior of the booth, the gallery showed massive wall-based resin sculptures that extend above the booth by British artist Judy Pfaff, priced at $25,000 each. The attention-grabbing works made the booth a pit stop for most visitors. Across the booth, Johnson Lowe Gallery showcased artists across its program, with works by Michael David, Yulia Pinkusevich, Sergio Suárez, and Fahamu Pecou priced between $4,000 and $55,000.
Donovan Johnson, who took the reins after founder Bill Lowe’s passing in 2021, sees the Atlanta Art Fair as a chance for galleries to put the vibrant arts community in the city on display for a broader audience. “Atlanta has always been an extremely multicultural and multigenerational arts community,” he said. “It’s just that the rest of the world is now catching up to what’s going on here.”
A nod to the tight-knit community, Johnson pointed to the booth of his neighbor, Hawkins HQ, run by Alexander Hawkins, who is also a gallery assistant at Johnson Lowe. The young gallerist champions a program that balances Canadian and American artists. His booth, adorned with dark curtains around the wall works, features five artists: Toronto’s Yan Wen Chang and Marni Mariott; and Atlanta’s Kole Nichols, Scott Keightley, and Sergio Suarez. Prices for works in the booth range from $2,750 to around $10,000.
At one of the busiest intersections of the fair during its VIP day was the booth of Alan Avery Art Company, one of the oldest commercial galleries in Atlanta, founded by Alan Avery in 1981. Taking up the space of three booths, it contains some of the fair’s only blue-chip works from heavy-hitters such as Keith Haring and Robert Rauschenberg, including an $80,000 tapestry by Rauschenberg. Alongside these works, Avery is showcasing some emerging talent from artists like Wole Languju and Craig Griffin, both of whom received attention from visitors throughout the night, particularly the artist’s expressive ink drawings.
For the galleries from further afield, the buzz around Atlanta was cited as a key factor for their participation.
West Coast tastemaker Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is among them. Founder Luis De Jesus told Artsy that he felt inspired to join the fair after his Atlanta-based collectors encouraged him to check out the city. He was particularly encouraged to show the work of gallery artists Evita Tezeno, June Edmonds, and Melissa Huddleston. Prices for the works range from about $10,000 to $40,000. In the first few hours of the fair, De Jesus and co-owner Jay Wingate noticed just how eager new collectors were to learn.
“For so many people, this experience is brand new,” said De Jesus. “It is so interesting to see these new collectors, and from our conversations, it’s been very positive. There is something that can be grown existing here in this city—it’ll be good for the city, good for the culture, and once those people become bitten by the bug, that’s a great thing.”
Another Californian exhibitor, Rick Garzon of Residency Art Gallery, shared this optimism. “We’ve been trying to get here for a while because we know that Atlanta is on the verge of being one of the next booming art markets. Atlanta needs to be a hub for artists in the South,” he said.
For the gallery’s Atlanta debut, Residency Art Gallery presented a double exhibition of Atlanta-based painter Kirk Henriques and Los Angeles–based performance artist Autumn Breon. On the right side of the booth, Henriques’s paintings on fiberglass mesh, priced from $8,500 to $14,500, focus on the relationship between Black men and cars. Meanwhile, on the left side of the booth—arguably the most photographable of the fair—Breon creates an immersive experience of a salon designed with pink walls and a bright pink salon chair in the center. Her works include sculptures such as hair product jars for $250 each and inkjet prints of the artist with rollers curling her dyed-pink hair, each for $2,800.
Similarly, Richard Levy of Richard Levy Gallery—traveling to Atlanta from Albuquerque, New Mexico—felt compelled to see what Atlanta had to offer because he’d “heard it’s a good market.” So, anticipating an eager collector base, the gallery pulled out all the stops, featuring artwork from household names such as Derrick Adams, Elizabeth Chiles, Jeffrey Gibson, Alex Katz, and Jennifer Lynch, among others.
The standout selections at the gallery are two massive works by Nikesha Breeze, priced at $35,000 and $42,000. These figurative works, depicting Black figures in greyscale amid wooden settings, are based on the few early daguerreotypes of Black individuals. “They were expensive to make, and so they hardly exist, but she’s trying to give these people, these anonymous people new life,” said Levy.
Atlanta Art Fair is the city’s first commercial art fair, and by the mood among dealers and VIPs on its opening day—which reported some 3,500 visitors—it already feels like a welcome fixture in a crowded fall calendar. This is bolstered further by the third edition of Atlanta Art Week, which is running concurrently with a series of initiatives across the city to celebrate local visual art and culture.
As the city’s art scene steps into the spotlight with these events, Atlanta’s burgeoning presence as an art capital is only set to rise further. “Atlanta just shows up,” said Freeman. “When you attend events here, you see collectors and patrons—there’s no event too small for people to want to go to and celebrate their city. I think that that’s something that we could all really use a bit more of in the other places that we work as well.”