Seattle Art Fair celebrates its tenth edition this year. Writer Vittoria Benzine explores how the event has helped shape Seattle’s flourishing art scene and become a cornerstone of the city’s cultural calendar.
Summers in Seattle are the stuff of legend. “You’re right on the sea, and the mountains rise up, and on a clear day, you can see Mount Rainier, and you gasp at the beauty of it,” says Kelly Freeman, director of the Seattle Art Fair, over the phone. “Everyone’s sitting around eating crab and oysters.” That’s partly why the Seattle Art Fair takes place every July. What’s more, the art world is traditionally quiet during summer, as collectors escape the heat. Here, the season’s mild.
Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen launched the Seattle Art Fair in 2015. Shortly after Allen’s death eight years ago, Art Market Productions (AMP), the Seattle Art Fair’s co-producer, added the event to its portfolio, which today includes the San Francisco Art Fair, Atlanta Art Fair and Art on Paper in New York. For the fair’s tenth edition, 101 exhibitors—47 local, 33 national and 21 global—will take over the event hall across from Lumen Field, home of the Super Bowl-winning Seattle Seahawks.
Local art dealer Judith Rinehart has participated in the fair since its first year, when she was still working at Winston Wachter Fine Art, a contemporary art gallery based between Seattle and New York. Rinehart struck out on her own in 2019, opening her Northwest artist-focused J. Rinehart Gallery on Pioneer Square, in Seattle’s Art District, a newly designated Washington State Creative District. J. Rinehart Gallery has participated in all six editions of the Seattle Art Fair since. “It really has become the art event of the year in the Northwest,” Rinehart says on another call. “We don’t have a huge collector base, but there’s regularly 20,000 people coming out to the fair.” Museums and galleries have started scheduling their programming to align with this week.
Rinehart is bringing a rare fresh batch of doughnuts by Toronto-based ceramicist Catherine McMillan to this year’s Seattle Art Fair. “They don’t come available very often, and they’re hard to get when they do,” Rinehart says. J. Rinehart Gallery is also one of several Seattle outfits showing at both the Seattle Art Fair and the first edition of Assembly Art Fair, an experimental fair organised by local art dealers Sarah Traver of Traver Gallery and Carol Clifford of Greg Kucera Gallery.
“It’s two different opportunities,” Rinehart explains. The Seattle Art Fair offers access to an elite clientele. Assembly, an invitational, promises intimacy and curatorial rigour, at lower price points for galleries. Together, both fairs embody a rising art-world debate years in the making: which is better—big, ritzy, costly convention hall art fairs like The Armory Show in New York, or smaller upstart art fairs such as Arrival in North Adams, Season in Detroit or Elsewhere in Philadelphia?
As usual, the answer’s likely not binary. Big-tent events do have benefits. Satellite fairs like Untitled in Miami or Felix Art Fair in LA traditionally resemble moons, since they rely on the mass of another event. Yet all three of the aforementioned freshly launched small fairs take place independently of any larger event. Nevertheless, Freeman and Rinehart both agree the Seattle Art Fair has helped the city’s art scene. “This fair has grown to be something that can be supported by the folks who live and work in the Pacific Northwest, and that’s really special for us,” Freeman says. Rinehart, meanwhile, muses, “it has shown a lot of folks what’s possible.”
Storm Ascher’s nomadic Superposition Gallery will make its Seattle debut at the Seattle Art Fair with an immersive booth by Los Angeles-based ceramicist Alex Anderson, building on their acclaimed, sold-out presentation at Untitled Art Fair Miami Beach 2024. “I often have Storm in mind when I’m making works, and when we reach a certain point, then we do a fair,” Anderson tells me on another call, alongside Ascher. “That’s been a good rhythm that we’ve established.”
Anderson has titled this latest body of work Material Realities, a reference to creation’s most basic machinations—combining two elements. In the kiln, his glazes grow crystals. New semi-Surrealist sculptures teeming with nature motifs will appear throughout Superposition’s Seattle Art Fair booth atop painted hand-plinths. Mural-sized close-up photographs will cover the walls, ensconcing guests in the sensation of coal turning into a diamond, as Ascher phrased it.
The presentation took root as Anderson told Ascher he wanted to get involved in his hometown after 11 years in Los Angeles, where he moved for his MFA. Along the way, Anderson took the leap. “I want to move back to be part of that piece of art history,” he says of Seattle. “There’s a canon there that I think should be highlighted.” He moved this Monday, seizing the moment. North Carolina-born and California raised Ascher, who’s never seen Seattle, is bringing her mother for the fair. She loves witnessing pivotal moments in an artist’s practice. “As a curator-artist,” Ascher says, “even though, you know, we keep it going, we do make the sales.” Art Basel partner UBS will sponsor a dinner this week for Anderson. There, the Seattle Art Museum’s director will host a talk. Anderson is also taking part in a panel with a curator from the Fry Museum amid the fair’s star-studded programming, all “to come back and connect immediately and deeply,” he says.
All parties consider Seattle materially minded. “They actually want to know things about the material,” Anderson says. “They’re probably going to listen to you when they ask you a question about the work versus performatively doing it, which people seem to do sometimes in LA.”
“Seattle is a city of makers,” Freeman notes. Buzzy Amsterdam-based installation duo Studio DRIFT will debut an artwork inspired by the city at the Seattle Art Fair. English conceptual artist Jeremy Deller will host a participatory drawing installation—a fair first for me. The event recently chose to hone in on one material over a few editions—first glass, now fibre. Tapestries by French duo Lucy + Jorge Orta will adorn its lounge, courtesy of New York-based Jane Lombard Gallery. The Northwest Quilt and Fiber Arts Museum will lead a textile tour of the fair floor, too.
To that end, the community is collaborative and pragmatic. A Seattle Arts Club has coalesced. Seattle Art Fair is letting more than a dozen community cultural partners table at the front of the fair, which is also cross-promoting with Assembly. I ask Rinehart, who arrived from Salt Lake City 22 years ago, if nature’s grounding qualities bear any influence. “The nature here is Jurassic,” she agrees, before citing Seattle’s tech history—plus new initiatives like xispa, an “art innovation lab, residency, and exhibition space” from curator Lele Barnett and Meta engineer Doug Carmean.
Yes, the international art market is poised to flourish in this lush metropolis, tucked into the uppermost corner of this strange land we call America. No matter where you look, art abounds.
