“Today has been our most successful first day at Frieze LA since the first year of the fair,” Hauser & Wirth president Marc Payot said in a statement emailed to ARTnews.

David Zwirner’s first-day sales included works by Joe Bradley, John McCracken, Steven Shearer, Lisa Yuskavage, Huma Bhabha, Dana Schutz and Suzan Frecon for values between $250,000 and $650,000.

Along with the mega-dealers who sold works in the early hours of the celebrity-filled fair, Casey Kaplan, Vielmetter, Roberts Projects, and Tina Kim Gallery also reported sales of works priced at $250,000 or higher.

Dominique Gallery said it placed all works in its solo presentation by Mustafa Ali Clayton, including sculptures ranging from $12,000 to $100,000. New York’s Kasmin Gallery reported ten works by vanessa german sold on opening day, each priced between $25,000 and $65,000. The artist won the Heinz Award for the Arts in 2022. pt.2 gallery from Oakland, California, said it placed all of their works by Muzae Sesay, but did not disclose sales amounts.

Below, a look at seven works that were sold during Frieze’s first couple days, according to the galleries that brought them to the fair.

(All sales are in USD unless otherwise indicated. Sales information is provided voluntarily by galleries but does not include confirmation of transactions, discounts, or other fees.)

Founded by Margot Samel, of the eponymous Tribeca gallery, which opened in 2022, and Olga Temnikova Tallinn, of Estonia’s Temnikova & Kasela, the fair will feature presentations by 25 international galleries at the New York Estonian House, a four-story Beaux-Arts building designed by Brooklyn architect Thomas A. Gray in 1899. It is located at 243 East 34th Street.

Esther enters a crowded fair landscape both globally and in New York, with Frieze and NADA fairs set for the same dates as Esther in New York and TEFAF and Independent set for the week after. However, the new entrant said in a press release that it aims to differentiate itself by encouraging potential exhibitors to apply with projects that respond to the unique architecture and history of the Estonian House.

The building’s entrance hall, meeting rooms, grand halls, and clubrooms will house artworks, site-specific intallations, performances and events, all free and open to the public.

“We’ve always been interested in alternative models for gallery collaboration beyond the traditional art fair,” Samel and Temnikova said in a statement. “Coming from Estonia, it’s been especially important for us to rely on collaboration to expand our community and the ways we can share and enjoy art. We have both been to and appreciated Basel Social Club in Basel and Condo in London, and felt that New York was missing this sort of experimental approach—where galleries can afford to take risks while benefiting from the broadened networks and ideas of the international gallery community.”

The galleries participating in the inaugural edition of Esther are:

The aisles were thrumming during the opening minutes, and the works on view were strong. Dealers reported numerous sales by day’s end. And, of course, because this is Los Angeles, there were celebrity sightings made throughout the day.

Below, a look at the best booths at the 2024 edition of Frieze Los Angeles, which runs through March 3.

Located in Melrose Hill (a real-estate term that refers to a neighborhood better known locally as East Hollywood), Southern Guild’s space is near Zwirner, Morán Morán, James Fuentes, and Rele, which was founded in Lagos in 2015. Other galleries are a short drive away.

Taking over a 5,000-square-foot former laundromat, Southern Guild is opening with two exhibitions, a solo show for Zizipho Powsa, whose recent residency in Long Beach was a catalyst of sorts for the gallery’s expansion to LA, and a group exhibition titled “Mother Tongues,” featuring 26 artists on the gallery’s roster, including Zanele Muholi, Andile Dyalvane, Manyaku Mashilo, Jody Paulsen, andJozua Gerrard.

To learn more about Southern Guild’s history and expansion to LA, ARTnews spoke with Trevyn McGowan, the gallery’s cofounder and CEO, during a walkthrough of the gallery’s new outpost in LA.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

ARTnews: How did your expansion to Los Angeles come about?

Trevyn McGowan: We arrived in January [2023], thinking: We’ll see what this feels like. I had this singular vision: we’re opening in America, we’re opening in LA, and we’re opening like soon as we possibly can. We were introduced to this space by very close friends, the Haas Brothers. The whole idea of what they are doing here, how community-focused this development is, how visionary Zach Lasry has been in trying to create something that breaks the difficult parts of LA while embracing the best parts of LA, I think that’s what he’s achieved in Melrose Hill. The people who have been attracted to the district are likeminded in their desire for community, collaboration, breaking that stereotype of hierarchical monolithic galleries.

Had you traveled to Los Angeles a lot previously to deciding to open here in late 2022?

I had not. I’d been to LA twice, once in 1986 and once in 2011. But we had been talking to [ceramicist] Tony Marsh about Zizipho Powsa doing a residency here [at the Center for Contemporary Ceramics at California State University, Long Beach]. She was invited to do the residency in 2018. It was going to be in 2019, then it was pushed to 2020, and we were going to do a three-month pop-up and just hang out in the city. I had a little fantasy in the back of my head [about opening here]. It’s a very romantic city for me, especially the hills and the art history of the ’60s.

We were also spending so much time in Miami, Chicago, and New York. We love all those cities, but none of them felt like it would make sense. We struggled to see how we would fit into New York, even though we did a fantastic show last April, with Galerie 56 and [founder] Lee Mindel for Zizipho Poswa, and we’ve got another one opening April 30, called “No Bats, No Chocolate” with Porky Hefer. Look, the client base in New York is extraordinary. Nobody is going to debate that. But we’re happy to have a longer, deeper, more engaged way of working with people. Those relationships feel like they could be quite authentically developed in this city, potentially more so than in New York. There’s so many people here that feel authentically aligned with what we’re doing.

What about LA felt right? Is it a similar vibe to Cape Town, where the gallery is based?

LA’s a bit of a mixture between Cape Town and Johannesburg, but it’s more like Johannesburg, which is where I’m from. The cities are very similar in age. They were built up for the same reasons—people heading west [in the US] and people heading north [in South Africa] who were literally pioneering. The architecture has a lot of similarities, with its hodgepodge nature. The plants are exactly the same; the weather is very similar. The only thing that we don’t have in Joburg are mountains and palm trees—that’s Cape Town. But LA has that kind of hustle and bustle, friendliness, and openness, and that wanting to make things happen, so that all felt very familiar.

But we also need a space that is as big as this. This is how big our gallery is in Cape Town. Whenever we do booths at fairs, we get very big booths because the work we show is big and the scale of our vision is large. People’s houses are bigger here, people are more experimental.

What made you want to start Southern Guild 16 years ago, and what was South Africa’s art scene like at the time?

Julian [McGowan, the gallery’s other cofounder] and I tend to be quite impulsive. We bought a house in three days [in the early 2000s] when we moved back to South Africa in a place called Wilderness, six hours outside Cape Town, on the spur of the moment after living in London for 22 years. I got back to South Africa after being away for 22 years. Julian was an acclaimed theater designer in London, and I had had an architectural and interiors practice. When we got back to South Africa, on the holiday that we bought the house, I was aware of this incredible creative capacity of people making things there.

In London, I had been sourcing pieces from South Africa. I just realized that there were things going on that were very different there than they were anywhere else. It wasn’t a logical or commercial decision to start a business doing this. It was a passion—falling in love with the makers, the artists, the creatives, and wanting to articulate what they were doing, and be the conduit for them to a global audience.

It was true that that we learned a language that we wanted to help articulate. There wasn’t a collectible design industry on the African continent, really. And to be honest, I didn’t even know that there was such a thing [elsewhere]. We launched in 2008, and our first big exhibition featured 36 designers at the Joburg Art Fair. Then, nine months later, I went to Design Miami/ and realized, Oh, so this is actually a thing that works in this category. So, it started from an impulse and a passion and just being blown away, rather than sort of sort of calculated. We helped to articulate and propel that category absolutely.

We have continued to help facilitate people making and collaborating. We’ve got a residency program. We’ve got a big campus that measures around 32,000 square feet. Some of our artists have their studios there, with the ceramic kilns and painting studios. There are also two bronze foundries. We’re located in the ports in a dead end, so we’ve got this whole street with five different buildings, with all of this creative community going on. We help to produce for international artists. We’ve collaborated with Marc Quinn, the Haas Brothers, Misha Kahn, and other makers here. We really are a bonded pack and a family. A lot of our artists have been with us from the beginning. It has been a wonderful thing to be part of a guild that’s supportive and holding each other up.

We showed contemporary art right from the beginning in 2008. At that time, we made a rule that it was going to be three-dimensional, so it would be wall hangings or sculptural objects. We simply wouldn’t show painting. Then about six years ago, we were like, Why did we put this binary in place? As we progressed, the design has become less furniture—not that it was ever classic furniture. The works we show have become more sculptural, more abstracted, and more things that you interact with rather than just use.

How has the gallery grown since its founding?

About six years ago, we expanded quite dramatically. There are 36 people on our team in Cape Town, and there are four in LA already. That is because of the amount of projects we do. Opening in LA feels like the next decade of major development, ambition, and desire to further broaden the particular way that we do things. I don’t think we’re the same as other galleries. We have aspects of a lot of galleries have. But, this is Southern Guild, encapsulating people who we think are contributing to what it means to be human and to address the issues of the past, what’s currently happening, and how we navigate a better future and more equitable future.

We’ve got such a scarred past coming from South Africa. A lot of our practice has to do with healing and forgiving each other’s ancestors for the responsibility they had in the past. How do we authentically try to eradicate any sense of disparity within our group and within the people that we stand amongst and alongside? Hopefully, through that articulation and through those discussions, that helps to make a difference in the world.

Are all the artists represented by the gallery based in South Africa or on the African continent? With the move to LA, do you plan to start working with LA-based artists?

Our artists are predominantly from Africa, but we also represent African diasporic artists. We’re going to do a show with Marc Quinn and Zizipho Poswa. We’re going to do a show with the Haas Brothers. But these are all people who have strong links to the continent, who are authentically working and producing there. For us to suddenly represent a Danish artist, for example, has no authenticity to it for us. But we hope to work with LA artists either who are tied to Africa through diaspora or even just through an authentic collaboration. If people want to work in Africa and we feel they add to our voice, then yes, we will [show them].

You hinted at this before, but the gallery’s name comes from a desire to create a guild of artists, correct?

We wanted to come up with something that was about uniting a band of people who share common principles and goals. A guild, like the blacksmiths guild from 1422, is about those same principles. We think that united we’re stronger. We want to have a voice that speaks for us. With “Southern” at that point [of our founding], we wanted to articulate coming from the Global South. We wanted to get away from the idea of a hierarchical system. That goes for our team as well. We’ve got an incredibly democratic organization with people who work for us. They have a lot of autonomy, and we promote people quickly. We’re not the McGowan Gallery.

Can you talk about how South Africa’s art scene has grown over the past 16 years since Southern Guild’s founding?

One of the reasons why we didn’t open broadly across all categories when we started in 2008 was we’d been in the country for five years. We thought, We’re specialists in this arena. Let’s focus on that—nobody else is doing this. Then, the landscape rapidly grew, and fantastic younger galleries started cooperatives, curators banded together. It has become an incredibly vital and dynamic space, particularly in Cape Town, a wonderfully dynamic, creative environment. And in 2017, two contemporary art museums opened in the city, the Norval Foundation and Zeitz MOCAA, which Thomas Heatherwick designed. That’s when groups from the Tate and SFMOMA started visiting. Any creative landscape needs that kind of rigorous interaction.

The Cape Town Art Fair has gotten better and better each year. We did three booths there this year. Just in general, there is so much more activity, and it’s very interesting to see the stretch from what we would consider our masters [in South African contemporary art] to the very experimental artists, who are breaking the mold and are coming up now. As we became more authentically involved in the landscape, we saw within this whole group artists who, we believe, form a part of what our mandate is.

Can you talk about the LA gallery’s two inaugural shows, a solo for Zizipho Poswa and the group show “Mother Tongues”?

Because Zizi had done this residency, it was always obvious that we would show these works here. The ceramic bases were produced at Cal State Long Beach under Tony Marsh. A lot of very famous artists, like Simone Leigh, have passed through that residency over the past 35 years. Zizi created the bronze pieces [that rest on top of the ceramic pieces] once she was back in South Africa. So they were united about a week ago. They’re inspired by her travels through Africa, through residencies she’s gone to Ethiopia and Tanzania. She has a very positive, uplifting, and visionary take on what she wants to say with the work she produces, which is about honoring greatness in the everyday—caring for objects, the hairstyles she’s worn. In a way, they represent the time that women spend in hairdressing studios and the community and bond that’s formed. It’s also about raising the objects of adornment—a simple bracelet, a comb, or an earring—that gives the wearer the ability to feel elevated, confident, regal about themselves, give them the stature. It’s this moment of pleasure, joy, and affirmation. They’re honoring these objects to this scale and this elevation. She’s saying we need to look to the everyday to realize how important we are.

Regarding “Mother Tongues,” there are 12 official languages in South Africa, but there are many more that are spoken there. It’s a country that is full of different languages and different kinds of people from different backgrounds. How do we come together as one? There are artists between the ages of 22 and 68 in the show, so it spans a lot of viewpoints and generational opinions.

One of our most exciting young artists is Jozua Gerrard, who is 22 and who we’ve worked with for four years already. We showed him at Untitled in Miami Beach this past December and sold several works. The work is hand-painted on the back of glass, so it’s quite labor intensive because the paint moves. They’re photographs of his friends that he then translates into paintings. It’s on glass because it refers to how we’re always looking at things through this glass filter, via Instagram and social media.

This sculpture is by Andile Dyalvane, and it’s a topographical map, flying over the Eastern Cape, where he was born. He achieves these recesses by putting little firecrackers into the clay, and then, when it heats up in the kiln, they explode. This piece is older, from 2016; it’s one that I think is one of his most important.

A lot of what you see around us [in this exhibition] is work in which the use of material is very labor intensive. Everything has a lot of hand in it, but also reuse and repetition, like pieces by Patrick Bongoy with the inner part of tires, Usha Seejarim with clothes pegs, or Ranti Bam with glazed terracotta that is fragmented yet fine like porcelain. Or even in works by Ayotunde Ojo, who is painting his own studio. Often in his paintings, his work is half in progress behind him, so there’s this intimacy and this tenderness. Compare that to an artist like Tony Gum, whose photographs are bold and confident and are talking about the rape of the African continent: the milk bags representing money bags that become cheese and then cash. The jewels represent how we objectify the beauty of Africa when we’re not robbing and pirating its wealth of the natural resources. All of these voices come together in something that is cohesively communicating our perspective.

What’s next for the gallery’s program?

Our second show in LA, opening on May 11, is for Zanele Muholi, who will have the whole space. Her solo show is currently on view at SFMOMA. She has her second career retrospective coming to the Tate next year. She’s very focused on education and public programming. We did a lot with 18 public walkabouts, interactions, and panel discussions for her show in Cape Town last summer last. It was a cross-section—kids, teens, people in their 20s, and established collectors— talking about sexual health, gender-based violence, empowerment as a woman, and the quality of life in where you were born in the country. People have said they leave feeling like they’ve been through some sort of therapeutic experience. We will do the same kind of programming here, which is to engage the immediate environment, the audience, the community that used to use this space as a laundromat. We invite them to come and share something that could contribute to their lives in a different kind of way.

We have found a very strong audience in South Africa, but South Africa is a very small art buying population. But we see that what we do there is very important for our community, both for our artists and for each other but also as a place of education—it’s important for us to have rigorous exhibition programming.

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.

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.”

The new location at 19 E. 66th Street will be the third for the eponymous London-based post-war and contemporary art gallery, which was founded in 2012. It opened a second space in Rome’s Via Margutta in 2022.

The inaugural show at the New York location will be a showcase of African Canadian mixed-media artist Jan Wade in her first-ever solo show in the United States. It will precede the retrospective exhibition Soul Power at the Art Gallery of Hamilton opening on June 27.

In a press statement, Saltoun called it an “honor and privilege” to open a space in “a city renowned for hosting some of the most important exhibitions of the past 100 years.”

ARTnews spoke with director Aloisia Leopardi about the new space, what she’s most excited about, and why the gallery felt now was the right time to come to New York.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

ARTnews: What was the planning process for this new location? How did Covid-19 affect that?

Aloisia Leopiardi: The conversations had been going on for a long time. There’s moments in which things like Covid-19 slow [business] down. But this slowing down actually creates new opportunities. And that’s when we thought of opening a gallery in New York.

Actually, it happened quite fast. Richard and I were in New York for the Independent [Art Fair] last May. We both hadn’t been in a long time. And we were both like, “Wow, New York always has that feeling.”

I think it’s something that as Europeans, living in London or spending lots of time in Italy, when you go to New York, everything is so vibrant. Everything moves at twice the speed. It’s really fascinating. So we immediately started thinking we need to open a gallery in New York. At first, it was more of a dream initially. And then we’ve been contacted about this opportunity.

We’re opening the gallery in this ex-gallery space that freed up recently. We made an offer on the space just at the end of the year, and the offer got accepted, weirdly enough.

Lots of galleries closed during Covid-19. I think it helped us in this case because we were able to make an offer, enter, get the space.

We’ve had the space from January until now. It’s been renovated a bit. We’re very excited. The process has been kind of simple in a way. It’s been very smooth.

We’re really excited to be opening in May, with Jan Wade, who is our Canadian artist. It’s going to be the first solo show she’s ever had in in America.

After 10 years in London and then opening in Rome, what do you feel like you learned the most from those experiences that you will bring to the New York space?

First of all, our program is quite unique. We focus a lot on women artists. Now, it’s something that has become more and more common, but if you think about 10 years ago, no one was really showing women artists.

The first reason why we also chose to open in Rome is because in the ’60s and ’70s, there were fantastic artists working in Italy, which is similar, to New York to the US, if you think about it, it’s like two different periods, two different groups forming in the cities at different times.

Women were not represented at the time. Working with estates, you manage to find huge bodies of works that you can work with. So Rome, in that sense, was a very special place for us because we really rediscovered lots of artists we would have never discovered if we hadn’t opened a gallery in Rome. like Romany Eveleigh, who is going to be in the Venice Biennale this year. She was completely unknown until we started working with her.

We hope to do the same: bring our artists to New York, bring our program that is heavily focused on historical women artists, but also discover new artists at the same time. It gives us the possibility of spending more time there doing studio visits and estates visits.

In terms of difficulties, yes, of course, there are thousands of difficulties, especially the beginning: finding your way around, building a new team from scratch. Each one of us will have to work way harder, that’s for sure. Especially at the beginning, traveling back and forth between the three spaces, thinking of a program that would fit. Also every program is different. So it has to be catered to the audience it’s being presented to.

But New York, in that sense, also has amazing curators. We collaborate a lot with curators. Often we invite curators to either work with a gallery artist or present group exhibitions. So the location will also facilitate a lot of the dialogue with a more US-based crowd which could include curators and artists.

We already represent a few artists that are based in the US so that will give us the opportunity of really working with their works in more depth and be able to do more exhibitions.

For now, we were just coming to New York for art fairs. It will be nice to have a real presence for collectors also to see that we’re investing in New York and we’ll be able to see them more often. They’ll be able to have a sense of what our program looks like by attending our exhibitions. I think that will make a huge difference in terms of our credibility as well with building stronger relationships with artists, curators, and collectors.

What were some of the other positive indicators or business considerations that encouraged you to open a location in New York?

We have a program that is quite unique. We have a big US base of collectors. In a way, you know, it’s always a risk. We don’t really know how it will go, but we feel quite positive. I think New York is still really important for galleries to be there when they have an opportunity.

We are sharing the space with Franklin Parrasch. That will help us. We will do three exhibitions a year.

It’s a bit of a smaller program in New York at the beginning, which will help us get the whole programming going, the staff, etc. It will also give us time to go there and and focus on meetings, build, rebuild … we enhance our connections with the institutions, with collectors, with artists and then possibly expand the program even more. I think New York would be also positive if we sign on a new artist. I think like that already would be a great opportunity in a way because, from an artist’s point of view, or collector’s point of view, you feel you can trust a gallery with three spaces. Having three spaces allows us the possibility of showing more artists, bringing on new people, allows us to do more art fairs, just be more involved in general.

It’s a bit like the bigger galleries that actually we’re surrounded by—Hauser or Zwirner—they have spaces all around the world and it works for them. We’re a much smaller gallery, but I think it makes sense. The more you expand, the wider your network becomes, and the easier it is to sell, take on new artists, and have stronger relationships with curators.

It’s always difficult because we’ve never worked in the US before, apart from fairs. You never know, it might be a tragedy, but hopefully, hopefully it’s not going to be.

I feel like what’s good is that our program is so unique. Even speaking about recessions and sales going down, we have people coming up to us because we’re the only one really representing these sorts of artists. That helps us in a way. We never really had issues selling or our sales going down too much.

How did you decide on Jan Wade as the inaugural show?

The main reason why we chose Jan’s work is, first of all, because it coincides with her retrospective at the Art Gallery of Hamilton in Ontario. And secondly, because there’s lots of references, Jan Wade references a lot of her Southern American roots and the historic slave trade.

We thought there was a very strong, contemporary political relevance with what’s happening in the US today. Her paternal grandparents were from Virginia, Southern America. And because her work has never really been presented in the US before, just in Canada. The show now that’s opening at at the Art Gallery of Hamilton. And then she had a show before that was at the Vancouver art gallery in 2021 and 2022.

We thought it was a good moment to present her work, which we find is very strong. We’ve never shown her work before in a solo exhibition. We thought it would be interesting to bring it to a wider audience and for her to finally get the visibility that she deserves. She was born in 1952 and never really had much visibility until recently with these two major respectives in Canada, but that’s it. And so we thought it was the right time to bring her to New York and see how the public reacts because there’s all these resonances with the US.

How did you choose the location on the Upper East Side?

Everyone’s now opening in Tribeca, so it’s a bit of a strange location to open in. But actually, I’m so excited about it, because MoMA is like a 20-minute walk. It means that between one meeting and the other, I can literally pop into all my favorite museums that I never have the chance to visit during art fairs because I’m stuck at the booth. I think that will make a huge difference. Just to spend time in the book shops, you can discover new catalogs and publications. I think that will be really exciting.

I think the only difficulty for us working as a team will be the time difference. That will need a bit of adjusting.

I think the most exciting thing is that New York is always generating incredible exhibitions and no w we will finally have the opportunity of seeing, exploring, and discussing. I think that also adds to the beauty of New York in a way because there’s this aspect to it which is in constant evolution, which is so beautiful.

The visual artist and digital storyteller is the brains behind @jerrygogosian, a popular Instagram meme account that satirizes and comments on the global art world through viral images, videos and text pieces. UTA, the Hollywood talent, entertainment and sports company, will partner with Helphenstein on upcoming projects across a range of media.

“Together, we stand on the cusp of a thrilling chapter, ready to seize the myriad of opportunities that await and to make an indelible impact on the world of art and culture,” Helphenstein said in a statement on Tuesday. She is currently at work with the charity English Heritage on an exhibition scheduled for 2025.

“We couldn’t be more excited to welcome Hilde Lynn Helphenstein to the UTA Fine Arts family. She is a luminary in the art world, known for fostering a vibrant community through her engaging social channels. Her commitment to supporting fellow artists is evident throughout her work as is her dedication to making the notoriously opaque art world feel welcoming to more people,” UTA Fine Arts’ senior director Harrison Tenzer added in a statement.

Having launched @jerrygogosian as a pseudonym, Helphenstein came out as the artist behind the social media account in 2021 and has since gained around 130,000 followers on Instagram. She launched her own art gallery in Los Angeles in 2016, also publishes The Jerry Report newsletter and co-hosts the podcast Art Smack.

Helphenstein has also collaborated closely with Sotheby’s auction house and other brands like On Running, Ruinart, The Edition Hotel and The Standard Hotel. She is also at work on an executive MBA from the NYU Stern School of Business.

With a flagship Beverly Hills location, the UTA Artist Space showcases the work of globally recognized talent, and also has a new Atlanta office and gallery.

As this year’s editions of Frieze Los Angeles at the Santa Monica Airport and Felix Art Fair at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel approach, ARTnews catches up with 10 art dealers to know in Los Angeles, who are actively crafting the scene in the City of Angels.

But this Frieze week marks a special kind of opening for The Pit, since the gallery is now preparing to relocate to a 13,000-square-foot industrial building in LA’s Atwater Village neighborhood. Sited at 3015 Dolores Street, a short drive from the original location, the new space will include 8,000 square feet of exhibition space across three galleries, offices, on-site storage, a private viewing room, a ceramics studio for Miller, and, very important, a parking lot.

“When we walked in, both of us were like, this has so much potential,” Oder told ARTnews. “It was perfect for the growth that we want to make.”

Miller added, “it echoes a lot of the original sort of sentiments of the original space.”

Since its founding in 2014, The Pit has always been something of an island unto itself. Glendale is a neighborhood where many artists have their studios, but it’s not exactly a destination for viewing art, since few other galleries are there. Generally, most dealers have opted to instead open up shop in the Downtown Arts District or Hollywood.

But Oder and Miller said they wanted to stay in Northeast Los Angeles, specifically because of their proximity to other artists, which Miller said could be “of more importance or greater value than collectors and people than it might be on the West Side. We started in Glendale; we are exhibiting artists. It would seem odd for us to just pop up on Santa Monica Boulevard on the West Side.”

After getting their MFAs in 2008 from ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, Miller and Oder worked as studio assistants for artist Sterling Ruby and, in their spare time, began organizing group shows (accompanied by zines) at various venues across the city. They did that for about five years before they considered opening their own space. “We literally ran out of spaces,” Oder said.

They were also inspired by artist Laura Owens, who opened 356 Mission, an artist-run space in Boyle Heights, in 2013; it closed in 2018 after members of the community protested, claiming that the space had played a significant role in gentrifying a historically Latinx neighborhood. (The Pit itself faced similar protests in 2018 from community members who accused it of doing the same in Glendale. Miller and Oder apologized and vowed to “do better” after the outcry.)

“Back then, there were so many preconceived notions of what artists could and couldn’t do,” Miller said. “We had gallerists tell us, ‘No one’s ever going to take you seriously if you curate and you’re an artist.’ I felt like we were going against that by organizing these alternative shows.”

Despite this pushback, Miller and Oder launched The Pit in July 2014 with a group show of eight LA-based artists with studios near the gallery, including Mary Weatherford, Shana Lutker, Mungo Thomson, and Jon Pestoni. Initially, the gallery’s space was a converted garage located in an alley. “We really ended up there by happenstance,” Miller said. “The original space felt like it had this magical presence. It was just very unassuming.”

Curators from across the country soon came to closely watch the gallery’s programming. The Pit’s third show, for example, looked at H.C. Westermann’s influence on contemporary artists, bringing together pieces by established LA-based artists like Billy Al Bengston, Laura Owens, and Meg Cranston and emerging artists such as Miller, Andrew Sexton, and Matt Paweski.

The Pit’s specificity to Los Angeles was also key to its early success. Oder said, “Hands down, we never would have been able to do what we have done in New York. We were able to organically grow.”

Miller added, “So much of our careers developing is because of access to space. We didn’t set out to be commercial gallerists. We set out to throw cool parties and organize interesting shows.”

But soon, the gallery became a more formalized venture, mounting exhibitions on a regular schedule, representing artists, participating in art fairs, and ultimately taking over several other spaces in that Glendale building, including The Pit II, a 100-square-foot micro-gallery meant for solo shows that opened in 2015 with an Erik Frydenborg outing.

“Since the first show, it’s been a running joke that we have made use of every inch of that space,” Oder said. “In the last couple of years, we felt that we’ve done the most we possibly could do with this building. It was time.”

Around the five-year mark, Miller and Oder decided that they would eventually move the gallery to an expanded space, but they were always waiting for the right location, one that would maintain the “DIY-like vibe” on which they had long prided themselves, Miller said. And they didn’t want to follow the trends initiated by other galleries, and end up in Downtown Los Angeles or Hollywood or in some new construction.

“Pretty early on, we started talking about leaving and expanding to a different area,” Miller said. “That charm of being off the beaten path didn’t feel like it was providing as much for those artists and for their careers in the long term as it was doing for the reputation of the gallery when we first started.”

Ahead of their eventual move to a larger gallery in LA, Miller and Oder decided to open a satellite space in Palm Springs, near where they spent much of the pandemic lockdown. Miller noticed that the city’s main downtown strips had empty storefronts from businesses that had shuttered because of Covid. He started scanning listings for a potential new gallery outpost.

“I’m always like, OK, I’ll entertain this, but it’s not going to happen,” Oder said, as they both began to laugh. “But with this space, I was like, Oh, this is a great space—this makes sense. New York has the Hamptons”—where many blue-chip dealers operated temporary spaces in 2020—“and Palm Springs is like LA’s little spot.”

Miller said that the Palm Springs space is more intimate, and that it allows the gallery to mount different kinds of shows than in their new LA digs while also attracting a different audience. “Even though we get big crowds to come to our shows in LA, sometimes it feels insular,” he said. “You have to be aware of the art world to know about The Pit, but in Palm Springs, we’re right on the strip, next to a public parking lot. I love that in theory, someone could park in the parking lot, and they could walk by with a little kid, who could look in the windows and see the art and have a powerful experience with it.”

Miller and Oder said that by moving the LA flagship, they hope it will signal a maturation of the gallery, potentially allowing them to start adding more artists’ estates and more established artists to its roster. Last December, for example, the gallery mounted an exhibition for the late ceramicist Viola Frey.

The gallery’s two opening group shows are indicative of that as well. “Cognitive Surge: Coach Stage” will pair the work of iconic LA artist Paul McCarthy and Benjamin Weissman, who was Miller and Oder’s art professor at ArtCenter. Meanwhile the larger group show, “Halfway to Sanity,” will feature new and recent work by some 50 artists from the gallery’s “past, present, and future,” including Sterling Ruby, Laura Owens, Erik Frydenborg, Amanda Ross-Ho, Shana Lutker, Mindy Shapero, Aaron Curry, Umar Rashid, Amir H. Fallah, Joel Gaitan, Blair Saxon-Hill, and Tamara Gonzales.

“We find such value in providing a context where emerging artists can show work alongside someone who has been a profound influence to them,” Miller said. “We want the program itself to be more indicative of that as a whole, rather than project to project.”

The vernissage saw a crowd of around 5,000 attendees which included largely local collectors taking an early look at 400 works mainly by African artists and artists its diasporas. Key local market heavyweights like Goodman Gallery, Stevenson, SMAC Gallery, WHATIFTHEWORLD, and Southern Guild, which will open a Los Angeles outpost later this month, showed alongside Kenya’s Circle Art, Galerie Cécile Fakhoury from Côte d’Ivoire, A.Gorgi from Tunisia, Botswana-based Ora Loapi, and Borna Soglo Gallery from Benin. Several  Italian exhibitors, such as Galleria Giovanni Bonelli, Galleria Anna Marra and Shazar Gallery, were also on hand, likely due to the fair’s Milanese owner company, Fiera Milano.

Laura Vincenti, the fair’s director, described the last decade as “a learning curve.” In that time, she has focused on bringing “galleries with content that communicates with the local scene,” she told ARTnews. “I have learned that not all galleries are prepared to show in Cape Town.”

In addition to the main gallery section, Investec also includes eight curated sections like Generations, which is new to the fair this year. (Exhibitors can participate in multiple sections.) Organized by Natasha Becker and Amogelang Maledu, Generations pairs young artists with established names to show parallels between artists’ work across decades. Johannesburg-based painter Boemo Diale, who exhibited with South African gallery Kalashnikovv Gallery, received the section’s cash prize of $80,000 South African Rand (around $4,200).

“The goal is to create fresh perspective on historical figures through the lens of contemporary artists who are in dialogue with the past,” Becker told ARTnews.

One example is placing SMAC Gallery’s presentation of Bonolo Kavula’s ephemeral geometric cutouts of shweshwe cloth adjacent to the Melrose Gallery’s booth dedicated to color-bursting paintings and sculptures by Esther Mahlangu, the grand dame of South Africa’s art scene, whose career survey at the Iziko South African National Gallery also opened this week.

Nearby, the vibrantly corporal paintings by Terence Maluleke at the Southern Guild’s booth flirt with Riaan Bolt Antiques’s group presentation dedicated to early Apartheid-era tapestry and pottery which has largely remained in European collections. Southern Guild sold all seven of Maluleke paintings which range between $5,000 and $8,600 before the end of the VIP day. “The response was extremely positive,” said Southern Guild director Jana Terblanche of the gallery’s multiple presentations at the fair, which also sold four Kamyar Bineshtarigh paintings for around $20,000 each and a timber-and-acrylic sculpture by Dominique Zinkpè for $24,000. 

In the main section, Goodman Gallery exhibited a selection of roster artists including international powerhouses like William Kentridge and Yinka Shonibare alongside Kudzanai Chiurai and Gabrielle Goliath, who will both feature in this year’s Venice Biennale. On par with the gallery’s intergenerational presentation, prices for works sold on the first day ranged broadly from $12,000 to $275,000.

Goodman is also showing in a section of the fair called “Tomorrows/Today,” which speculates on “tomorrow’s leading names,” per the fair’s description. The gallery introduces the subtly documentarian photographs of Lindokuhle Sobekwa ahead of his first institutional show at the Johannesburg Art Gallery this September.

“Sobekwa’s imagery has a delicate yet powerful quality that draws viewers into the stories he articulates. He is definitely an artist we are excited to support,” said Olivia Leahy, Goodman Gallery’s head of curatorial.

Stevenson, another established South African gallery, had in its booth a kitchen photograph by South African Pieter Hugo; a nocturnal-hued, large-scale abstraction, titled The Abundance of life (2023), by New Zealand–based Nigerian painter Ruth Iga; and Penny Siopis’s Mercy (2007), a striking drawing of a figure that leaps out of the frame into a plastic chain to spell the work’s title.

The scene-stealer in WHATIFTHEWORLD’s grouping was Chris Soal’s intricately built toothpick and concrete sculpture, Inferno, which sold for $17,100. Pierre Vermeulen’s mixed-media linen painting of faux gold leaf and sweat, Somewhere I have never travelled, gladly beyond, found a collector for $13,400.

Another standout at the fair comes in the Solo section, where EBONY/CURATED has a presentation dedicated to local painter Anico Mostert, who makes dreamlike oil on canvases with powdery hues. His 2023 work, From View to View, sold for $4,200 on the first day. 

One of the fair’s section with the abundant promise of discovery is ALT, which provides a platform for nontraditional commercial formats, such as curatorial collectives, nomadic spaces, advisory services, and online galleries. South African curator and adviser Anelisa Mangcu’s four-year-old initiative Under the Aegis builds a corporal tie between Dutch-Ghanaian photographer Casper Kofi’s dramatically lit images of landscapes and men, alongside Buqaqawuli Thamani Nobakada’s female protagonists painted with acrylic on lace and paper.

Church Projects’s gold-painted booth drew visitors to Durban-based photographer Alka Dass’s moody prints of men that she adorns with gentle punches of red thread and beads. Borna Soglo Gallery displayed London-based artist Tamibé Bourdanné’s photographs of Bubu Ogisi performing in Benin for a personal exploration of African masquerades that are accompanied by the plush toys donned by Ogisi in the booth’s corner.

The Investec Cape Town Art Fair continues into the weekend, with stand-out programming like a two performances by Cape Town–based artist Thania Petersen at the Bo Kaap Museum on Saturday evening, accompanied by jazz musician Hilton Schilder, Afrikaaps rapper, poet Jitsvinger, and a handful of dancers.