Frieze will launch a new fair in Los Angeles, with the inaugural edition set to take place in February 2019.
The fair will be run by Bettina Korek, a native Angeleno who has worked for the Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time initiative and who is also the founder of ForYourArt, which has staged a variety of performances and exhibitions. Chiefly important to Frieze is to quell concern that the city’s great sprawl makes it hard to host a centrally located fair—previous entrants into the L.A. fair gambit, such as Paris Photo and FIAC, failed to stay afloat and were cancelled or postponed. There are two existing Los Angeles fairs, the L.A. Art Show and Art Los Angeles Contemporary, but they attract mostly local galleries, and Korek thinks that Frieze Fairs—which was started in London in 2003 and expanded to New York in 2012—can expand the city’s international art market cache. “Frieze has unparalleled experience developing new fairs and integrating them into the cultural fabric of international art world destinations,” she told the Los Angeles Times. It also helps that Frieze has leading investor Ari Emanuel, the collector and Hollywood superagent, who heads up the Endeavor agency and manages one of the city’s top talent stables. The fair—which will feature only 60 galleries compared to the roughly 190 that show in New York—will open on February 14th, 2019 at Paramount Studios, in Hollywood. The announcement comes in a big week for the Los Angeles art world. The city’s Hammer Museum announced on Thursday that it had received a $30 million donation from philanthropists Lynda and Stewart Resnick, and a $20 million donation from board chairwoman Marcy Carsey, bringing the total raised for the institution’s $180 million capital campaign to $132 million. Roughly $80 million from the campaign will go towards a new expansion of the museum, the Los Angeles Times reported.