Two art fair organizers, Art Market Productions (AMP) and Intersect Art and Design, have joined forces to create the Atlanta Art Fair at the city’s Pullman Yards, which has played host to immersive exhibitions and movie productions.
The new fair, which will be helmed by AMP director Kelly Freeman, will have its first edition in October 2024 during Atlanta Art Week, the second iteration of which is currently underway. The exhibitor list will be announced next spring, but the fair plans to have around 50 galleries participate, as well as robust public programming and large-scale projects organized by Nato Thompson, who will serve as artistic director.
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Atlanta has seen a large influx of attention from the art world since the launch of the Atlanta Art Week in 2022. UTA Artist Space, a contemporary art gallery based in Beverly Hills that is affiliated with the talent agency, hosted pop-up exhibitions in the city before opening a permanent space in the city’s Midtown neighborhood in March. Atlanta is also home to the Atlanta University Center, a consortium that includes Spelman College and Clark Atlanta University, which have long been centers of scholarship for Black artists and trained generations of art historians and curators.
“There is so much happening in Atlanta from a cultural perspective,” Freeman said in a statement. “We have been watching as Atlanta’s art scene has grown from strength to strength and recognize the need for the city’s art market to have a centralized meeting point. Our priority is to engage the local community and really listen to what it needs to help support its expansion.”
AMP currently organizes four art fairs: the Seattle Art Fair in July, the San Francisco Art Fair (previously Art Market San Francisco) in April, Art on Paper in New York in September, and Art Market Hamptons during the summer. (The company is also a division of a21, a marketing agency that puts on over 100 events each year, including the editions of the Food & Wine Festival in Atlanta, New York, Palm Beach, and Pebble Beach.)
Intersect Art and Design currently organizes two art fairs: Intersect Aspen (formerly Art Aspen) in August and Intersect Palm Springs (formerly Art Palm Springs) in February.
In a statement, Intersect CEO Tim von Gal said, “Having been based in Atlanta for the past 27 years, we have long recognized the need and opportunity to establish an art fair for the city and wider region. At a time when smaller, independent art fairs are facing more competition, we feel it’s more important than ever to build a fair that speaks to the community.”