LA Art Week is one of those moments in the fair calendar that feels like trekking up the Himalayas with no summit in sight. Just when you think you have reached the top of the tent, there is another ridge, another dinner, another shuttle ride waiting. By day three you are testing your will to live while simultaneously trying to keep up, mentally cataloging booths, remembering who said what, and calculating how much longer your phone battery can survive.
Between Frieze LA taking over a converted airport hangar in Santa Monica, Felix unfolding poolside in Hollywood, and a constellation of satellite fairs scattered from Downtown warehouses to Eastside storefronts, the week expands outward with no natural endpoint. The air feels thin. The light is cinematic. The traffic is humbling. By night, the art world spills into rooftops, private homes, hotel bars, and back patios where conversations shift from aesthetic to strategic without anyone formally announcing it.
This is not Basel, where efficiency carries you. This is not Frieze New York, where everything runs on a grid and exhaustion feels organized. Los Angeles demands stamina and choreography. You can try to conquer every booth, every preview, every afterparty, but that fantasy collapses quickly. LA Art Week is less about reaching the summit and more about pacing the climb while pretending you are not winded.
Think in zones. Santa Monica for Frieze. Hollywood for Felix. Downtown and the Eastside for satellites and late-night momentum. Build your days geographically or watch them dissolve into traffic while your Uber total climbs into something you do not want to calculate. You will pay a fortune in Ubers if you zigzag across the city without a plan, so carpool. Coordinate. Consolidate. Some of the sharpest conversations of the week happen in the backseat on the way to dinner.
Here are Art Daddy’s tips for surviving LA Art Week, conserving your energy, and knowing which booths justify the chaos.
Keep track of your friends.
LA is too expansive for improvisation to work in your favor. The wrong ride across town can cost you an hour and a conversation that shifts your week. Know who is where and when. Frieze in the morning. Felix in the afternoon. Downtown at night. Move in small clusters. Momentum is social before it is market.
Keep track of your parties.
The loudest invitation is rarely the most consequential. A quiet dinner in Silver Lake can hold more gravity than a branded afterparty in West Hollywood where everyone is pretending not to network. Choose one anchor event per night. Arrive composed. Leave before the room curdles. Exhaustion is not a strategy.
Carpool.
You will pay a fortune in Ubers if you attempt to zigzag across the city alone, and the emotional toll is worse than the financial one. Coordinate rides. Share cars. Consolidate bodies. Some of the most honest assessments of the week happen in the backseat between fairs, when the champagne has worn off and the real opinions surface.
Do your research.
The fair floor is engineered for distraction. Scale. Noise. Velocity. If you enter without intention, you will drift and mistake proximity for importance. Identify the booths you need to see before you walk in. Make a short list and protect it.
Stalk strategically.
This is not paranoia. It is infrastructure. Social media becomes a map of who is hosting, who is buying, and which booths are quietly closing deals before the crowd catches on. Information conserves energy. Energy is currency.
Sometimes you have to go.
There are evenings when staying in feels like self-preservation. Ignore that impulse selectively, because LA Art Week rewards presence. Opening day at Frieze will never tell you the entire story, but being there in the media room, on the shuttle, mid-conversation between collectors and curators is part of the ecology itself. The art, the people, the gossip, the sales all blur into one continuous performance. Being inside that blur matters.
LA Art Week is a test of stamina, but it is also a test of instinct. The floor is crowded, the signals are subtle, and the distractions are deliberate. These were the booths that held their ground.
Frieze LA
Mexico City–based Proyectos Monclova came correct, presenting five new works by Gabriel de la Mora that felt both exacting and inevitable. Long collected across Latin America and Europe, de la Mora’s momentum with American audiences has been building, and this presentation made it clear why.
The works are painstakingly constructed, often requiring five months or more to complete. Layer by layer, de la Mora builds surfaces that appear almost sculptural, creating the illusion of depth while remaining materially flat. The tension between restraint and intensity is deliberate. These are not quick reads. They are slow burns. On a fair floor driven by immediacy, de la Mora’s booth felt disciplined, cerebral, and fully in control.
Garth Greenan Gallery arrived at Frieze with authority, anchoring its presentation with a knockout work by Howardena Pindell. After more than five decades of work, Pindell does not need context to justify her place on the floor. She is not a rediscovery. She is infrastructure.
On view was Untitled #21 (HP DNA BHAMAS) (2023), a work that distills the force of her practice. Thousands of hand-punched circles are layered and stitched into a dense, uncompromising surface. The repetition reads as discipline. The accumulation reads as power. Every inch carries evidence of labor, intention, and control. In a fair environment that rewards immediacy, her work did not chase attention. It held it.
Vielmetter Los Angeles did not come quietly. Their two-person presentation featuring Tonia Calderon and Alec Egan landed with force, and Calderon in particular owned the wall. A California native based in Los Angeles, she brought scale and conviction that refused to be ignored.
Eight paintings filled the space, each asserting itself through sheer size and saturated intensity. Calderon does not hedge. The gesture is confident, the colour unapologetic, the compositions expansive. On a fair floor built on visual competition, hers was the kind of presence that stops traffic.
Felix
Now in its eighth year, Felix Art Fair has fully come into its own as the cooler counterpoint to more institutional fairs. By utilising the Roosevelt Hotel, the fair transforms cabanas and hotel rooms into exhibition spaces that feel intimate but charged. The bottom of the pool, painted by David Hockney in 1988, carries its own mythology. According to hotel lore, Hockney arrived one afternoon with a can of paint and a broom-attached brush and completed the mural in a matter of hours. That irreverent iconography seeps into the atmosphere.
Poolside, the mix skews toward seasoned collectors in linen, Hollywood actresses in sharp silhouettes, younger advisors moving quickly between rooms, and the inevitable cross-coastal dealer energy. It is less formal, more porous, and arguably more dangerous in its ease.
For DIMIN’s Felix debut, Robert Dimin did not play it safe. The Tribeca gallerist arrived with a tightly edited presentation that felt calibrated to the setting. Emily Coan, a Hudson Valley–based painter, anchored the room.
Emily Coan, Human Spider, 2025; Ye Zhu, Scale Snail, 2025. Courtesy DIMIN Gallery.
Coan reworks the language of femininity through imagined landscapes that feel less nostalgic than strategic. She recentres women within archetypes that once confined them. Her figures do not dissolve into scenery. They command it. The palette may lean romantic, but the posture is deliberate. At a fair built on visibility, Coan’s work felt self-possessed and quietly subversive.
Feia, the Los Angeles gallery founded by Thomas Martinez Pilnik and Jake Cavallo, approached Felix with clarity and conviction. Their presentation anchored the interior room with a solo by Long Beach–based artist Charles Hickey while activating the outdoor cabana with a focused group show.
Hickey’s work carried the center of gravity. Blurring painting, sculpture, and design, he incorporates 3D pen elements, paint, and collage into layered compositions that push beyond the flat surface. For Felix, he debuted new paintings alongside handcrafted lamps that extend his visual vocabulary into functional form. The surfaces feel built rather than applied, dense with gesture but disciplined in execution. Feia did not come to fill a room. They came to establish presence.
Brigitte Mulholland’s second time showing at Felix felt measured and intentional. Leaning into the hotel-room intimacy, she presented a controlled group show that understood the setting and refused excess.
Brooklyn-based Elizabeth Schwaiger’s Borrowed Silence carried the charge. Built from layered, bright blues that shift in tone and intensity, the painting feels alive and subtly busy, animated by sharper accents that keep the surface in motion. It hums rather than shouts. The cerebral Brooklyn energy translates seamlessly in Los Angeles light, where colour amplifies and atmosphere matters. At Felix, sunlit and slightly surreal, the work felt electric but disciplined — a quiet flex in a fair that rewards confidence.
In a city built on image, the art that lasts is the art that refuses to perform. LA will test your stamina, your schedule, and your spending limit. The real flex is knowing where to stand still.
