COURTESY MATERIAL ART FAIR
The ambitions of Mexico City’s Material Art Fair are quickly growing. In its first two editions, held in 2014 and earlier this year, Material, which focuses on emerging galleries and runs concurrently with the well-established Zona Maco fair, welcomed about 40 galleries per year. But next year, from February 4 through 7, some 64 galleries are on tap, a jump of more than 50 percent.
“We felt like we had to leave a lot of good proposals out last year because there just wasn’t enough space,” Brett W. Schultz, one of the fair’s three cofounders, told me in a Skype call yesterday. To accommodate more galleries, Material has moved the festivities from Auditorio Blackberry, a concert hall in the Condesa neighborhood, to Expo Reforma, a convention hall near the city center in the Juárez neighborhood, that in the past has actually hosted Zona Maco.
Which is not to say that Material is making a sharp turn toward the mainstream. The exhibitor list is still heavy on young, experimental galleries, like Queer Thoughts (of New York), Proyectos Ultravioleta (Guatemala City), Lulu (Mexico City), and Natalia Hug (Cologne), and more than half of the participants are new to the fair.
The look of Material also sounds like it will be pretty unusual. “The layout is super important because it won’t replicate any other art fair,” Daniela Elbahara, another Material cofounder, who runs the Mexico City gallery Yautepec with Schultz, said on the Skype call. “It will be quite different and a little bit like a labyrinth.”
Material (whose third cofounder is Isa Natalia Castilla, who runs an art-advisory firm called Incontemporary in the city) tapped the Mexico City architectural firm APRDELESP, which has created a layout without aisles for the fair’s 2016 edition. Gallery booths will have ceilings and many will flow into one another. “It’s going to be like a little village,” Elbahara added. “You’re going to enter the space [without realizing] you’re in a convention center at all.”
Various public gathering spaces will not have ceilings, providing a varied architectural experience. One such gathering space will house Beverly’s, the rough-and-tumble art bar on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, which will curate its own group exhibition while reprising its role as fair watering hole. Elbahara held up blueprints to the camera and pointed out the swath of floor that Beverly’s will call home. “It’s huge,” she said. It is.
Below, Material 2016’s complete list of galleries. The exhibitor list was chosen by a selection committee made up of Michael Clifton, the cofounder of New York gallery Clifton Benevento; Stefan Benchoam, an artist and cofounder of Proyectos Ultravioleta; Attilia Fattori Franchini, a London-based curator; and Willy Kautz, a curator in Mexico City.
8eleven, Toronto
Galleria Acappella, Naples
Alter Space, San Francisco
American Medium, Brooklyn
Galerie Rolando Anselmi, Berlin
Arturo Bandini, Los Angeles
Beverly’s, New York City
Bikini Wax, Mexico City
Bosse & Baum, London
Buenos Tiempos, Int’l, Brussels
BUREAU of CHANGE, New Orleans
CACTUS, Liverpool
CARNE, Bogotá
Casa Imelda, Mexico City
City Limits, Oakland
Clifton Benevento, New York City
Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles
COOPER COLE, Toronto
CourtneyBlades, Chicago
cuatrotrece, Monterrey
David Petersen Gallery, Minneapolis
DOCUMENT, Chicago
East Hampton Shed, East Hampton
Ed Video Media Arts Centre, Guelph
Efrain Lopez Gallery, Chicago
eitoeiko, Tokyo
Et al., San Francisco
Exo Exo, Paris
Fourteen30 Contemporary, Portland
Gaudel de Stampa, Paris
Gildar Gallery, Denver
Good Weather, North Little Rock
JAUS, Los Angeles
joségarcía ,mx, Mexico City
K A N S A S, New York City
Kandor 13, New York City
KB – espacio para la cultura, Bogotá
Kimberly-Klark, Queens
Kunstverein Toronto, Toronto
LA PLAGE, Paris
LambdaLambdaLambda, Pristina
Last Resort, Copenhagen
lodos, Mexico City
Lulu, Mexico City
Michael Jon Gallery, Miami
Muscle Beach, Portland
Natalia Hug, Cologne
Neon Parc, Melbourne
New Galerie, Paris
Parallel Oaxaca, Oaxaca
Proyectos Ultravioleta, Guatemala City
Queer Thoughts, New York City
Roberto Paradise, San Juan
SADE GALLERY, Los Angeles
Sala Seis, Mexico City
Seventeen, London
Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago
SMART OBJECTS, Los Angeles
SPF15, San Diego
Spinello Projects, Miami
Springsteen, Baltimore
What Pipeline, Detroit
xpo gallery, Paris
Yautepec, Mexico City