A Weekend at the Dallas Art Fair

Over the years, I’ve heard many conflicting descriptions of the Dallas Art Fair;  that it’s wild and wacky, or boring and tepid, filled with oil scions, cowboys, gay cowboys, hipsters, a place where old money meets frantic coastal dealers. This year, it was time for me to figure it out for myself. So, after a week in the Lone Star State perusing both the Dallas Art Fair and the Dallas Invitational, I chronicled a few highlights, including but not limited to a life-changing halibut lunch, a cigarette smoked while hungover at John F. Kennedy’s memorial, and gossipy encounters with art world friends from all across the country.

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THURSDAY 10:22AM APRIL 10, 2025, GLADWELL PROJECTS

There’s so much on the schedule today that I’m fighting off a general sense of overwhelm from the second I wake up. My friend, the elusive artist and provocateur Monsieur Zohore, is part of a group show at a private residence in Highland Park and I’m determined to squeeze in a visit. The Uber drops me off in a neighborhood that I can only describe as the Beverly Hills of the South. I tread over a meticulously manicured lawn and find Zohore’s sculpture in the entry way of taupe Texas suburban heaven. Ironically, the sculpture is a bird of paradise plant plopped inside an open bottle of Windex. The stem is starting to rot and turn blue. He describes it to me as “a kind of a suicide pact for late capitalism.”

12:15 PM DALLAS ART FAIR AT F.I.G.

We’re 45 minutes in and I’m already lost in a storm of chambray, blonde blow-outs, and wedged heels smacking the linoleum floors. Gallerists speak vaguely and robotically of optimism while the fresh news of tariffs hangs heavy in the air. The overarching sentiment I’ve picked up from coastal dealers is that Dallas is a good fair to play things safe, but perhaps this year more so than ever. CANADA has a huge booth right by the entrance and I find myself almost relieved by their use of furniture to cut through the inevitable stiffness of a fair. The booth is a preview for their forthcoming show back in NYC, Couch Paintings, which, as its title suggests, includes paintings best enjoyed while reclining. This should probably be the norm. 

A few other standout works for me include this really peculiar surrealist painting of a meatball sub left unattended in a desert motel by Paul Rouphail at Jack Barrett. When I look at it I get the sense that something really awful must have just happened. It’s sort of like the opening half-hour of The Hills Have Eyes. I’m also really taken by this ginormous oil painting from the musician and artist Brian DeGraw over at Europa. I always love trying to understand an artist through two mediums, and this painting reminds me of what happens to me when I listen to those healing frequencies on YouTube. Also notable are a series of playful resin works, made from snakeskin and the bed of a pickup truck, by Sophronia Cook over at SPY Projects, and a fantastical world-mapping painting by Bradley Biancardi at the Dallas-based Galleri Urbane.

I’m had way too many coffees and conversations, and the convention center has begun to take its toll. We head out to make a quick stop at the Nasher Sculpture Center (where I got to peek at the Haegue Yang show just before it closed) and grab salads to eat by the hotel pool. 

6:15 PM FOUNDATION PREVIEW BENEFIT

I’m back at the fair for the Foundation Preview Benefit. I’ve been told that this is where the ladies and cowboys show up to get drunk and shop. At this point, the fair is roaring with clanking glasses and laughter. Halfway through ingesting a caviar bump, I receive a text saying that Miss Texas,USA has arrived, so I start circling the center at record pace to get a glimpse of her bedazzled butter gown and tiara. I finally spot her in a swell of spray tans and floral flocks. She’s as graceful and warm as I imagine one must be to earn the title Miss anything. Her name is Aarieanna Ware; she’s a homebuilder by trade, and she patiently lets me take a million iPhone photos of her. 

7:31 PM NATURE OF THINGS OPENING

A few of us head over to a newly opened gallery called The Nature of Things, which also has a booth at the fair. I sense some tension when my friend, the artist Sam Lingust, describes this gallery and its founder’s mission as actually fostering Southern artists relative to the visiting exhibitors. Sam’s gorgeous ceramic sculptures, which appear almost warped and worn down by the natural environment, are included in the show. I’m rotating between Pacificos, cigarettes, and elk tacos while my ankles get bitten—I imagine this is about as Texan as it gets.

FRIDAY 9:30 AM APRIL 11, 2025, SPA AT THE JOULE

We’re staying at a really glamorous hotel this weekend called The Joule. It’s a got a really glitzy, old school America vibe and I’m being doted on left right and center. People keep carrying my bags for me and I’m abusing my room service allowance. Tim Headington, the owner, decked out the hotel with works from him private collection, and there’s actually also a Taschen book store in here. It sits opposite that really specific “Eyeboreutm” sculpture, and has a pool that juts out the side of the building. I notice how the architecture here has a very specific late 70’s-early 80’s feel, and I was told it was due to an injection of federal money after JFK’s assassination so that people wouldn’t associate the city with his death. Anyway, this morning they’ve let me join the spa for a massage. It’s located at the end of a maze of dimly lit lobbies and is upscale in a way that I’d like to generally partake in more often in my life.

12:12 PM DALLAS INVITATIONAL

This year, the Dallas Invitational has moved over to the Rosemont Mansion on Turtle Creek, a welcome change I’ve heard. The fair was previously held at The Fairmont, which the artist Arthur Peña described to me last night as “dusty, 80’s corporate chic.” Each gallery shows in a different hotel room and the art is scattered throughout. The energy at the Invitational is a little moodier, more reserved, or maybe I’m projecting since it’s the first time I’ve walked into a hotel room occupied by a stranger to talk about art.  I’m drifting in and out of the rooms and making half-hearted attempts at jokes that aren’t landing. There are a few standout pieces right off the bat. The first is a work from the Brooklyn-based sculptor Cate Pasquarelli at François Ghebaly, a miniature of a New England church with a projection running inside that emits a TV glow. She later tells me over Instagram that it was born out of her fascination with pastoral American life and small towns. 

Further along, I find out that a Frank Bowling painting shown at Vardaxoglou, a London-based gallery, has sold for six figures and broken the record for the highest-ever sale at the Invitational. I’m not a market reporter, but I like the idea that someone might think I am. 

Over in Room 106, LOMEX is showing the apocalyptic fortellings of the beloved Japanese artist Yoshitaka Amano, which I was pleased to see after I missed his show in New York last month.  Since I associate his work with cityscapes,  it was funny to see it in the context of a breezy sun-drenched day in Texas.

At Night Gallery, a great but grotesque incinerated Samara Golden sculpture sprouting doll hair occupies the center of the hotel bed. The sculpture starts glistening a little bit when you shine a flashlight on it and I love how insane it looks resting beneath the harsh hotel room lights. I wrap up and order halibut on the patio, which is utterly serene. They keep calling me “Miss Sandstrom” and bring me lemon wedges on a separate plate for my iced tea and I’m wishing I could spend the whole day here. 

2:14 PM THE WAREHOUSE 

I’m ripped away from my patio paradise to make it on time for a tour of the Rachovsky Collection at The Warehouse. We’re given a walkthrough of works by Calvin Marcus, Hannah Levy, Josh Klein (a bagged up and balding “unemployed journalist”), and Elaine Cameron-Weir, who exhibited a jarring, metal-clad sculpture that explores military and medical operational equipment. The range of works are certainly edgier and more brazen than I would have ever imagined for a Dallas collector.

We’re almost finished but my stimulants are doing too much and my attention is starting to drift. While I’m meant to be looking at the towering resin-dripped Sterling Ruby sculpture, I secretly look at lymphatic drainage before-and-after photos on X–just one little push down the side of my collarbone and I could look 15 pounds lighter overnight, allegedly. I zone back in as we dive into the final work: an Urs Fischer sculpture from 2015 made of wax. There’s an actual flame and the heads have fallen off. I wasn’t paying attention to how it was made but I did hear that they don’t know how long it’s going to last. I start muttering under my breath to the person next to me about one of my favorite horror movies, House of Wax (the 2005 one, with Paris Hilton). The set completely burnt down halfway through filming and they actually had to start from scratch. 

7:33 PM THE DALLAS CONTEMPORARY

We arrive at the Dallas Contemporary for an opening and I’m swept away to the back patio for a drink before I even have a chance to walk through the show. I bump into a friend who tries to break down the Dallas collector base for me: it’s a mesh of old American old money and the “Tesla nouveau riche,” he explains. The phrase rattles around in my head for the rest of the night. The husband of a prominent art world figure joins us and quips that the two biggest class indicators in Dallas are your AC and your car. He later declares Dallas the most classist city in America. He’s Scottish, so I take this insight seriously.

11:53 PM MIKES GEMINI 

We head over to Hannah Hoffman’s party at Mike’s Gemini, a perfectly sticky dive bar where I was pleased to learn that the cigarette vending machine actually works. There’re a lot of gallerists still in suits describing the first two days of the fair to me: “Slow.” “Sloowwww.” “It was slow.” The music is frantically toggling between Chief Keef and Benson Boone when I start to realize how drunk I am. There’s a real melange of characters here: writers, collectors, cowboys, gallerists, hobbyists, artists, publicists. I finally meet Silke, of Silke Linder, who has a show of Lyric Shen’s works up back in New York that I highly recommend. We bond instantly over our excessive cigarette consumption that we both deem to be vile, just before I learn that we’re going to make one final stop at The Round-Up, a gay saloon filled with cowboy strippers. 

SATURDAY APRIL 12, 2025, 8:45 AM GRASSY KNOLL 

I jump out of bed the second my eyes open so I can pretend that the tequila hasn’t given me the worst hangover I’ve had in months. My Vyanse-Trazadone-mezcal-tex-mex diet is really starting to wear me out. Haggard and hungry, I trudge alone to JFK’s assassination site just down the street, where I struggle to produce any emotion or even a singular coherent thought.

 5:05 PM NORTH PARK MALL

Some truth-spreaders are making noise outside my window, interrupting my early evening TikTok binge. It’s time to turn off the analysis of the Bhad Bhabie-Alabama Barker drama and the tedious details of Hailey Bieber’s inner world. I hit North Park Mall before going out to dinner. It’s essentially just a regular semi-upscale mall, flush with braces, flip-flops, cargo pants, crying children, and teen couples strolling hand in hand with AirPods in. But just to the left of the faint glow of Dillard’s sign, a Katharina Grosse hangs in place. North Park Mall has an absurdly large and prestigious public art collection. There’s a Roy Lichtenstein nestled between a Prada and Burberry store, a Frank Stella opposite an Eataly, and a Mark di Suvero sculpture towering up from the ground floor. It was a fitting farewell to the home of the flatlands and obsessive pleasantries.