Building Frieze LA’s ‘Focus’ Section Is a Challenge for Curators and Galleries
Courtesy Nazarian / Curcio
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For young galleries, art fairs like Frieze Los Angeles are a boon, but also a gamble: there’s the chance for exposure to top-notch collectors and a large audience, but without sales, the high cost can be deadly. The fair needs young galleries as much as or more than the galleries need them. After all, the fair burnishes its credibility by showing the most exciting young talent and the hottest galleries, even if it’s the blue chips that sell the most work. Frieze ensures this through Focus, a special section providing dedicated space to emerging galleries and their artists. But, as the art market grows ever more lopsided, so grows the challenge of putting together such a section.
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For its fifth edition, which opens to VIPs tomorrow, Frieze LA has tapped Essence Harden to curate Focus. When Frieze director Christine Messineo hired them, Harden was one year into a new role as a curator at the California African American Museum in LA. Since 2017, Harden has built a reputation for organizing thoughtful exhibitions that investigate notions of Blackness and queerness. Working with Harden is a major draw for galleries and artists alike. For Harden, curating Focus allowed them to spotlight West Coast galleries that they felt could benefit from the exposure and that rarely show at fairs. About 60 percent of the galleries in Focus and around 50 percent in Frieze overall are based in LA.
Harden was handed a tough task nevertheless. This year’s Focus features only 11 galleries, compared to 19 last year, as part of a larger reduction in the fair’s size. With some 100 galleries applying, a mere 10 percent make the cut. Those odds are even slimmer when you consider that Harden and their Frieze colleagues reached out to certain galleries to encourage them to apply. This is a common, though little discussed, practice that art fairs use to ensure they show what are, in their view, the best exhibitors.
The pitch to galleries and artists for Focus, Harden told ARTnews, is pragmatic. The section is a dynamic “rotating, shifting” space designed to “move people along.” Harden views the fair as a platform to elevate less-established galleries based in California that aren’t active at large-scale fairs. “For those who really need it, it can serve as this guiding thing,” they said.
That pitch is important. Not only do young galleries have a hard time covering the cost of fairs, they also don’t necessarily favor participating in such overtly commercial events. Some dealers taking part in Focus told ARTnews that they hadn’t considered the commercial space to be right for them in the first place. Here, the words of a curator like Harden, whose reputation is built on elevating less salable but conceptually rigorous art, can make all the difference. Participating gallerists described Harden as a rare candidate in their field, a writer who knows the West Coast scene well and goes slowly when observing an artist’s development.
For Seth Curcio, a director at Los Angeles–based gallery Nazarian / Curcio, the hope is that Focus will increase exposure for photographer and UCLA professor Widline Cadet, who has greater recognition in New York after a residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem. In the Focus section, Cadet is exhibiting high-contrast images of Black models meandering outdoors, their faces often turned away from the camera. Cadet took all the photographs in LA, mostly at night, employing local models to stage scenes that reflect on her familial relationships.
“There’s a video embedded in the central photograph, which is primarily documentation from her family,” Curcio said. “We wanted to build on an institutional project that wasn’t presented here, to help bridge that gap a little.”
Still, participation can be a burden. Two galleries involved in the section told ARTnews that they were invited to Frieze at the last minute, which meant upending plans and budgets.
Brock Brake, who runs Oakland-based gallery pt.2, said he had stopped applying to fairs after rejections from the New Art Dealers Alliance and others, and had no plans to show in one this year. But a day before the application deadline, a Frieze LA official reached out asking the gallery to apply. They gave him and his artist, Muzae Sesay, one day to confirm their participation. Brake said he hadn’t planned for an outlay of $20,000 to $30,000, but the pressure of producing shows while under-resourced is something he and his artists are used to.
“There was never really an impetus to go even outside of Oakland,” Brake said, explaining that in the Bay Area, artists tend to follow a grassroots approach, involving small-scale collectives that aren’t sales-driven.
Having previously written press releases for pt.2, Harden knew the program well and felt that Sesay’s paintings—large-scale dusk-toned depictions of “the energy of blackness,” in the artist’s words—deserved a wider audience outside of Oakland.
Quinn Harrelson, a gallerist still in his early 20s who graduated from UCLA last year, also hadn’t planned to participate in a fair this year. The fair circuit hasn’t been a high priority because of the cost, he said, and his primary focus was on facilitating museum acquisitions.
“So much of what I do is determined by financial possibility. There are no collectors here [in Los Angeles],” Harrelson, the son of Cultured magazine founder Sarah Harrelson, said.
Frieze LA is Harrelson’s first fair. Though still in the early stages of building his program, it leans conceptual. He’ll be bringing work by Ser Serpas, a sculptor whose work is included in the 2024 Whitney Biennial. Harrelson became friends with Serpas as a teenager in Miami.
Serpas serves as a guide as Harrelson finds his footing on the West Coast. “She deals with the legacies of the artists that made Los Angeles relevant,” he said, seeing references to Paul McCarthy, Mike Kelley, and Kaari Upson in her work. They combine texture with what Harrelson describes as a “cold blooded conceptual rigor,” saying the era of artistic production feels like it’s no longer active. “I think that not a lot of art like that gets made anymore.”
Harrelson may be reaching toward LA’s art history, but Frieze’s Focus section is also oriented toward the art world’s future, where fashion and lifestyle brands are increasingly a factor. Emily Glazebrook, commercial director at Frieze, told ARTnews, “Focus isn’t oriented solely to facilitate sales, but rather as a space to blend art, content, and commerce.” Frieze is facilitating introductions between the section’s sponsor, the Italian streetwear brand Stone Island, and galleries in the section, in exchange for subsidies on their exhibitor fees. Meghan Gordon, the director of participating gallery OCHI, told ARTnews that Stone Island’s representatives recently visited their Washington Boulevard location to view Lilian Martinez’s work, which the gallery is bringing to Focus. Martinez runs her own brand, BFGF, producing art multiples.
“This is us introducing [Stone Island] to the contemporary art world,” Glazebrook said.
Such an introduction can be just the beginning of a larger process. Gordon said Martinez’s inclusion sparked interest in other gallery artists, leading to discussions about potential collaborations with the brand. Gordon said that Martinez’s portrayal of spaces, particularly those referencing the Yucca Valley, embody a Los Angeles lifestyle, where “leisure, pleasure, comfort, and luxury” are all touchpoints. She described Martinez’s brand as a “symbol of the attainable art object.”
Like that between galleries and fairs, the relationship between art and brands is yet another symbiotic one.
“Certain art fairs provide more visibility than New York Fashion Week,” Robert Liptak, the former creative director at RTA, a Los Angeles streetwear brand that has partnered with Frieze New York, told Vogue in May. He said that the fair franchise brought opportunities to be seen in proximity to other creatives.
This year’s LA fair is the first since media conglomerate Endeavor completed its buyout of the remaining 30 percent of Frieze this past May for $16.5 million, putting its total valuation at $55 million. The gambit for Endeavor is most clear in Los Angeles, where the company is well equipped, as Glazebrook put it, to heighten the fair’s blend of “art and entertainment.”
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