At the Inaugural NADA Chicago Fair, Low Price Points and a Quirky Old Hotel Attracted a Curious and Unfamiliar Crowd

In the early 2000s, before Heather Hubbs became the director of
the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA), she helped mount a small
Chicago satellite fair that ran concurrent with Art
Chicago. The Stray Show, as it was called, gathered scrappy
young dealers from various parts of the city who had founded
galleries in the years just prior. By the 2002 edition,
dealers were bringing works by people like Sterling Ruby and
Gabriel Orozco, and artnet Magazine reported that the latter
artist’s work was on sale for the “ridiculously expensive”
price of $4,000. (A recent price for an Orozco at auction was
$429,000.)

In 2004, as Art Basel Miami Beach was quickly becoming the
dominant art fair in the country, Hubbs took over the directorship
of NADA, which the previous December had launched its own Miami
fair. NADA New York followed in 2012, but was cancelled after the
2018 edition as the city’s packed fair calendar proved too much
competition for the organization.

So Hubbs asked the NADA board about starting a fair in Chicago,
which had changed dramatically since she first started out in the
city’s art scene two decades ago. Their discussions led to the
creation of the NADA Chicago Invitational, which wrapped up its
first iteration Saturday after a four-day run in the restored
Chicago Athletic Association Hotel on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile,
just across the street from the Art Institute.

“There’s more and more good young galleries and not-so-young
galleries setting up shop here, and it feels like people are
committed to staying,” Hubbs told me Friday.

She was sitting at a vintage poker table with cupholders carved
into ancient wood, just one of the quirks of the 1890s building,
which was refurbished and reopened as a hotel in 2015.

“Chicago’s always had this incredible history of having
alternative spaces and a commercial gallery scene, but I feel a lot
of times in the past, when people got to a certain point in their
career, they felt like they needed to leave,” Hubbs continued. “And
now it seems like the opposite—more people are coming here. People
are staying and committed to being in this city.”

With Expo Chicago as an anchoring event (the bigger fair was a
ten-minute drive north), collectors, curators, and curious locals
streamed into NADA Chicago. A smattering of galleries set up shop
in booths on the ground floor, while others camped out upstairs in
hotel rooms and a large space that was once the athletic club’s
basketball court. (In total, 39 dealers from 19 cities
participated.)

Helena Anrather Gallery from New York was in the living room of
a large suite, and had installed Farah Al Qasimi’s full-length
video work Um Al Naar (Mother of Fire) (2019) on a video
screen that’s usually just there for guests to watch TV. By the
second day, it was sold to a non-local collector.

“I love how all the curators have come through—from Chicago, but
also from New York,” Anrather said, lounging in the suite’s plush
couch.

A few doors down, Rachel Uffner was in what they called a
mini-suite, and had a number of Sally Saul’s ceramic sculptures
installed on pedestals. The room had large windows with great views
of the Frank Gehry-designed Jay Pritzker Pavilion, with its
whorls of stainless steel, in Millennium Park just below. Down
the way was Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate, better known as the
Bean.

“There were more people in Chicago than I thought would come,
and there’s been a ton of foot traffic,” Uffner said, adding that
she had just met curators from the Aspen Art Museum and the Akron
Art Museum.

The centerpiece of the booth—a new painting by white-hot artist
Shara Hughes—had sold to a Chicago collector for $35,000, but
Uffner admitted that it was a pre-arranged transaction, as the
waiting list for the Hughes’s color-burst floral landscapes is long
and still growing. (Her works have sold at auction for more than
$150,000.)

“The waiting list has gotten so long that people have gone from
being mad at me, to just thinking that it’s funny,” Uffner
said.

On the basketball court, Nicelle Beauchene was showing three
large-scale paintings by Jordan Casey, all of which had sold. Next
to her was the Chicago outfit Patron, which was started by two
veterans of the longstanding local powerhouse Kavi Gupta Gallery.
Patron’s owner, Emanuel Aguilar, said that, while the gallery has
done Expo in past years, he jumped at the opportunity to
participate in the NADA Chicago Invitational instead.

“We’ve had a longstanding relationship with NADA and Heather,
who has her roots here in Chicago, so for us it felt important for
us to be part of this moment, this homecoming,” he said.

He added that a quirky, welcoming satellite fair in a hotel,
full of young undiscovered artists at low-ish price points, is
perfectly attuned to the vibe local collectors are chasing.

“A lot of the collectors here like discovering things, and there
are a lot of people in their 30s and 40s who are only now coming
into collecting,” Aguilar said. “NADA provides a platform where
they don’t have to walk in and feel intimidated by prices. Gallery
culture and art fair culture is exclusionary, and NADA provided an
option to go in and just check it out.”

Patron had a good fair, selling 60 percent of what they had
brought, bringing them into the black on the week.

In another wing of hotel rooms, Shane Campbell—one of the few
galleries at NADA Chicago that did The Stray Show all those years
ago—had a big pair of pants by Amanda Ross-Ho just lying on the
bed. The installs often got creative. Good Weather, the beloved
North Little Rock, Arkansas, gallery, was sharing a room with San
Francisco’s Et al., and hung Shana Sharp’s paintings on coat
hangers in the closet. Many galleries used the shower as a private
viewing room.

Some dealers did note that there was not as much of a sales
frenzy as you see at, say, NADA Miami, but there was a steady
stream of earnest, curious Chicagoans, many of whom might have a
small budget to spend on a work they really like.

“I had a few people come up to me that were like, ‘I just want
you to know, I’m not in the art world,” said Erin Riley, a director
at Good Weather. “And I would say, ‘That’s OK!”

Ultimately, the show proved that, between the NADA Chicago
Invitational and the Felix LA fair—which is set to once again take
over the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel in February during Frieze LA—the
hotel model works for particular kinds of events. And Hubbs said
she very much plans to make the NADA show an annual event.

“Chicago’s a great city,” she said. “Every time I come back, I
learn about some other new gem.”

The post At the Inaugural NADA Chicago Fair, Low Price Points and a
Quirky Old Hotel Attracted a Curious and Unfamiliar Crowd
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