COURTESY DALLAS ART FAIR
Increasingly, art fairs are aiming to be something more. Art Basel recently mounted curatorial programming in Buenos Aires, and NADA is planning a gallery weekend in New York. Now, the Dallas Art Fair is getting in on the game.
On March 2, it will launch 214 Projects, a 2,500-square-foot permanent exhibition space in Dallas that will host projects by invited galleries throughout the year. The first gallery to stage an exhibition at 214 Projects will be Harlan Levey Projects, of Ixelles, Belgium, bringing new work by Emmanuel Van der Auwera. At the same time, 13 murals by Clare Woods will be shown on the space’s exterior. (Woods was selected from an open call to fair exhibitors.)
The fair’s art space is located in Dallas’s Design District, in a new redevelopment project called River Bend that is being overseen by John Sughrue, the chairman of the Dallas Art Fair.
Kelly Cornell, the fair’s director, said that 214 Projects was founded, in part, to offer more contemporary-art programming in Dallas, a city that has few commercial art spaces of international renown. “The goal is that some of these galleries that use this space will take a longer-term space in Dallas,” she told ARTnews. “We’re thinking about how it can be a real extension of the fair.”