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Last week, second edition Atlanta Art Fair, One question filters through humid southern air: Atlanta becomes a national art hub, something like Dallas, billionaires and spacious museums or Chicago, and its shaky artist-run spaces and college backbone? The money is already there: sports, tax destruction of the film industry, bourgeois technology industry, and the spread of wealthy southern families. What is missing is difficult to fix.
Atlanta Art Fair has placed its identity on Pullman yard, Kirkwood District’s 27-acre former railroad project. Once the repair shop for Pullman sleeper cars, before that, the World War I Ammunition Factory-Red Brick Complex had an industrial history of more than a century. For decades, the site was largely abandoned, graffitied canvases and filmed backgrounds until the reconstruction push in the late 2010s began to transform it into a cultural district. Today, the same sponge-shaped shed holds music festivals, reality competition videotapes and immersive exhibitions such as “Imagion Picasso.” Former President Barack Obama in 2022 Dancing with the stars Shot by another.
Atlanta’s Fair Dress Dress or Hotel Ballroom Settings when choosing a Pullman yard. The buildings there are symbols of reinvention: they are still worn in history. But at least during the expo, the buildings also feature banners and spotlights that mark new uses. Unusual venues show that at this fair, Atlanta is the future of the American Southern Art Center and must include the city’s past.
Opening Day is buzzing, but it’s relevant to your typical artistic fair client base. There are as many high school and college students there as many Gucci Loafers. Falcon jerseys and T-shirts have more than three to one blazers. The attendees and staff were very excited. “Hello everyone, welcome, enjoy!” said the person who scanned my tickets when I attended the expo. Will Frieze or Art Basel say this before?
Its center is Kelly Freeman, The director of the fair looked more like Pennsylvania than an impresario on Friday when I attended. She was wearing a grey T-shirt as we spoke, ready, ready, and when she was ready, she turned her eyes to the fair. “We are teaching the city how to use the art fair,” she said, encouraging about 80 dealers under her watch to stand in the aisle, attracting conversations to people and making sure no one feels they’ve been wandering in the wrong room.
She compared the experience to her first visit to a custom tailor. If questions about cuffs and fabrics feel aliens, most people will flee to the Brooks and buy the shelves. In her opinion, the Art Fair must offer both, an accessible experience for new immigrants, and a custom fit for those willing to learn the language.
Sure, sales issues, but her horizon is longer. “I want sales, but if someone drives to Savannah, I’ve done the job because they see something here.” In other words, the fair succeeds when it pushes people beyond their walls.
However, she insists that the future is not her decision. “It’s all about the city’s decision to embrace it,” she said. The fair can build a stage, invite players and prompt lights, but the art world in Atlanta must continue to show up.
On the floor, San Francisco dealer Jonathan Carver Moore Questions were asked in different ways. In two years, he dragged his gallery to 11 fairs – Expo Chicago, Untitled, 1-54 New York, Cape Town Art Fair, and more. This man gave him the opportunity to take a journey with a new collector. “Maybe they’re going into the $5,000 level today, but from now on, they’re probably some of my top collectors,” he said.
Jonathan Carver Moore’s booth was shot at the Atlanta Art Fair.
Despite this, Atlanta stopped him. “I’ve never been to the fairness of most people who look like me,” Moore said. It’s no small matter for a black-owned gallery. The recognition of the room, the cultural resonance of certain works, the shared experience created an atmosphere he had not encountered elsewhere. (“The hot comb in the kitchen,” he laughs, a subtle portrait of an elderly black woman doing hair in the kitchen, with a mirror bracing it on the stove, “this resonates for generations. Even if I was surprised.”) It’s a reminder, it’s a reminder that Atlanta can be a real hub, and it may not need to put Dallas or Chickago cop coplans coplant and and and antant, but it doesn’t need to.
Then Marcia Wood, A dealer has operated a gallery in Atlanta for more than 40 years. She has seen enough understanding of barriers: perception, spread, transportation and collector bases are used to outsourcing their artwork to New York. “They poured it over to them,” she said, but she also noted that the building blocks were there – population, exquisite, money. The challenge is to turn all of this into a continuous collection culture.
For dealers like young dealers Alexander Hawkins, Who runs an ambitious Hawkins Headquarters Gallery, the answer is clearer: Education. He recalled that at last year’s expo, many tourists asked him if he had made all the artworks in the booth. This chaos comes not from malice, but from the gap from the beginning of school. “We are the 49th place in the arts funding, just before Florida,” he said.
consultant Lara Bjork Saying the problem is structural: both collectors and galleries need more education on the actual functioning of the art market. Without this education, the fair risked being a trade show rather than a cultural engine. Atlanta asks not only for more galleries, but for the right gallery, i.e., spaces connected to local scenes, while also bringing perspectives from New York, Los Angeles and beyond.
“The North and South must be connected,” she said. If Dallas had oil and Chicago had universities, Atlanta’s road would come from bridging its southern identity with the larger American art market. She believes Atlanta is the only city in the area that can withstand weight. “Some cities have to do that. It won’t be Charlotte, it won’t be Charleston. It has to be Atlanta.”
Barentine Prize finalist Roscoe Hall, Thank you! ! ! ! (2025) From the Paper Cake Library
Atlanta does have strong institutional anchors at the High School Museum, the Spellman College Museum of Fine Arts and Atlanta contemporarys. The fair is also a good start. But these institutions and fairs cannot bear the burden alone.
Pullman Yards enjoys its share by providing housing, studio space and allowances to Anthony Akinbola, Robert Choe-Henderson, Elfreda Fakoya and Atlanta’s own Adana Tillman. The program not only promises to host artists, but also promises to open their studios to the public, thus creating a pipeline between international practice and local audiences.
The fair itself cooperates with regional participants to establish Barentine Prize, To recognize the Purchase Award of emerging Southern artists, Caroline Allison was awarded this year. Smaller galleries such as Hawkins HQ continue to provide space for artists who may slide through cracks in unlikely venues, from motel rooms to warehouses.
To sum up, these works indicate that ecosystems are beginning to form. (So is the same with the expo attendance: 13,500 people are coming this year.) Atlanta needs connective tissue now, enough to put museums, schools, galleries and collectors together.
“I think Atlanta can replicate what Dallas does in time.” Lauren Kennedy, Founder of Memphis-based gallery cake. “Dallas took what collectors were to come in and set the tone. The power to achieve that has to be put into time, energy and resources. All of this is a long game, you know? But it can happen.”
