{"id":1874690,"date":"2026-04-08T15:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-04-08T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1874690"},"modified":"2026-04-08T15:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-04-08T12:00:00","slug":"can-a-slimmed-down-expo-chicago-still-throw-its-weight-around","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1874690","title":{"rendered":"Can a Slimmed-Down Expo Chicago Still Throw Its Weight Around?"},"content":{"rendered":"

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/EXPO-CHICAGO-2025-015.jpg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n

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Editor\u2019s Note:<\/strong>\u00a0This story originally appeared in\u00a0On Balance,\u00a0<\/em>the ARTnews\u00a0newsletter about the art market and beyond.\u00a0Sign up here<\/em>\u00a0to receive it every Wednesday.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n\tAsk incoming Expo Chicago fair director Kate Sierzputowski what her city\u2019s art scene is like, and you get a couple of very illuminating examples to illustrate its nature, which she describes as \u201cdistinctly collaborative.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tFor many years, dealer Rhona Hoffman hosted an August ping-pong tournament, Sierzputowski told ARTnews<\/em> recently. \u201cEveryone showed up, drank some beers, and put their name on the board, from gallery owners to art fair directors to art handlers to artists to heads of independent spaces and museum directors,\u201d she said. (After Hoffman gave up her space in 2024, another longtime Windy City dealer, Carrie Secrist, hosted the event at her larger new space, Secrist Beach.) And the Renaissance Society, the University of Chicago venue beloved for its brainy shows, has for three years now hosted a November fundraiser at\u00a0Seven Ten Lanes in Hyde Park, where ticket holders show off their skills at bowling; the event page for 2025 promised \u201cstrikes, spares, suds, and sliders.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIt is in this distinctive Midwest city on Lake Michigan, with its close-knit, supportive art scene, that some 130 galleries will convene for the 15th edition of Expo Chicago (April 9\u201312), its first under Sierzputowski\u2019s leadership and its third outing as part of the international Frieze brand, which purchased the fair (along with New York\u2019s Armory Show) in 2023.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe gossip around the art world is that as the market suffers, many fairs have had trouble getting their booths fully subscribed; ARTnews <\/em>reported in October, for example, that at least eight galleries had pulled out of December\u2019s Art Basel Miami Beach even after their participation was announced. When Expo revealed its 2026 lineup of 130-some exhibitors, it was down nearly 25 percent from the last three editions, which hosted in the region of 170 galleries.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tSierzputowski maintains that this was a deliberate decision, made before the fair even opened the application process. \u201cFor us it was a purposeful move,\u201d she said. \u201cWe decided after 2025 that we wanted the fair to seem a little more accessible, and more curated, to show the refinement of the fair under Frieze. In a more manageably sized fair, our audience can feel like they have direct relationships with the galleries and not feel overwhelmed.\u201d While mega-dealers like Gagosian and Zwirner are sitting it out, major galleries such as New York and LA\u2019s Karma (a first-timer), New York\u2019s Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, Nara Roesler (S\u00e3o Paulo, New York, and Rio de Janeiro), and Vielmetter Los Angeles, along with Chicago mainstays like Monique Meloche and Patron, are on the roster.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd if the main fair has lost some weight, the city is beefing up with one new satellite, Neighbors, in a luxe Gold Coast apartment, which joins Barely Fair, \u201cthe 1:12 scale international contemporary art fair,\u201d ongoing since 2019, which brings a new meaning to the term \u201cmicro fair,\u201d with miniature artworks in Lilliputian spaces.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tWhat\u2019s more, the energy around fair week may be only greater this year, as both the Renaissance Society and the Museum of Contemporary Art have aligned their benefit events to coincide with Expo. The RenBen, as the former\u2019s is affectionately called, \u201calways creates so much FOMO and such iconic moments,\u201d says Sierzputowski. That will doubtless be even more so this year as world-famous Italian artist and trickster Maurizio Cattelan is the RenBen\u2019s artistic director, organizing a \u201cSilent Party\u201d on April 8 that will transform two floors of the historic Chicago Athletic Association hotel into a labyrinth of myriad art performances, edible offerings, and more.<\/p>\n

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Maurizio Cattelan is artistic director for this year\u2019s benefit for the Renaissance Society.<\/span>Alberto Zanetti<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tThis year, Expo aims to capitalize on building excitement for the Obama Presidential Center, which opens to the public on July 19 and has already commissioned projects from high-wattage artists including Mark Bradford, Nick Cave, Jenny Holzer, Julie Mehretu, and Carrie Mae Weems. The fair\u2019s \u201cEmbodiment\u201d sector is curated by Louise Bernard, founding director of the Center, and will present galleries inspired by its architecture (by the husband-and-wife team of Tod Williams and Billie Tsien) and its commissioned artists. Among them are Anton Kern Gallery and Regen Projects, which are mounting a joint presentation of paintings by Mexico City\u2013born, New York\u2013based Aliza Nisenbaum, who has a major mural commission at the Center.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI\u2019m so honored to be part of the tradition of social activism and plurality and all the values Obama subscribes to,\u201d Nisenbaum told ARTnews <\/em>in a phone conversation ahead of the fair. It\u2019s a homecoming for her, as she earned her BFA and MFA at the renowned School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her 70-foot-long Obama Center mural, Reading Circles\/ Weaving Dreams\/ Seeding Futures <\/em>(2026), celebrates the public library and will feature spotlights on numerous writers as well as visual artists. The galleries, meanwhile, will show portraits that grow out of her extended exchanges with immigrant communities, work that will no doubt be especially resonant against the backdrop of the Trump administration\u2019s violent raids on immigrant communities, including in the Windy City.<\/p>\n

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Aliza Nisenbaum, El Taller, Queens Museum<\/em> (2023).<\/span>\u00a9 Aliza Nisenbaum, courtesy the artist and Anton Kern Gallery, New York and Regen Projects, Los Angeles.<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tSierzputowski joined the fair in 2020 as a coordinator, and was promoted to director of programming in 2021 and artistic director in 2023 before her appointment last year as director. Under her tenure in those earlier positions, the fair has organized a summit for museum curators as well as a forum for curators (dubbed \u201cone-of-a-kind\u201d by Chicago publication NewCity<\/em>), and she hopes that the fair\u2019s institutionally minded attitude will be clear on the main floor of the fair. That will come partly through Louise Bernard\u2019s presentation and partly with the contributions of the fair\u2019s curator, Essence Harden, also named in 2025, who will oversee the fair\u2019s Profile sector (featuring solo and group projects by international galleries), and of Kate A. Pfohl, associate curator at the Detroit Institute of Arts, organizing the Focus section (highlighting emerging galleries and artistic practices).\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Elian Almeida, \u201cFirearms shall not reach my body, knives and swords shall break without touching my body, ropes and chains shall snap without binding me. For I am dressed with the clothes and the weapons of Saint George\u201d<\/em> (2025).<\/span>Rafael Salim Estudio<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tBut a fair doesn\u2019t succeed by the attendance only of museum curators and directors, important as they may be; quality collectors have to come through in numbers, and Patricia Pericas, senior director at Nara Roesler, says the fair succeeds on that front. The gallery will present work by two young Brazilian artists, Elian Almeida and M\u00f4nica Ventura, whose work is priced as high as $35,000 but as low as a very accessible $7,000.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI love the collectors there,\u201d said Pericas (who is also on the fair\u2019s selection committee) in a phone conversation. \u201cThey are old-school. It\u2019s not a jazzy, flashy collector. They dive deep into the program.\u201d Collecting may happen at \u201ca different pace\u201d than at more glitzy fairs like Art Basel Miami Beach, she said, but the collectors are still \u201ccosmoplitan and elegant.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tEven museum trustees, she says, collect boldly, buying work that may be provocative or political: \u201cThey\u2019re not afraid of it.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

[analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/market\/can-slimmed-down-expo-chicago-still-throw-weight-around-1234779786\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/EXPO-CHICAGO-2025-015.jpg?w=1024″] Editor\u2019s Note:\u00a0This story originally appeared in\u00a0On Balance,\u00a0the ARTnews\u00a0newsletter about the art market and beyond.\u00a0Sign up here\u00a0to receive it every Wednesday. Ask incoming Expo Chicago fair director Kate Sierzputowski what her city\u2019s art scene is like, and you get a couple of very illuminating examples to illustrate its nature, which she describes as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1874690","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1874690","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1874690"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1874690\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1874690"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1874690"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1874690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}