One of Los Angeles’s most important galleries will open a third location. Ten years after opening in the Southern California city, and three years after opening a second location in Seoul, Various Small Fires will open a new space in Dallas in April.
Located on Commerce Street within the Joule hotel in downtown Dallas, the ground-floor space will open with a group exhibition titled “TEXAN” that will present the work of contemporary artists who are either from Texas or currently living in the state whose practices “engage with racial politics, LGBTQIA+ identity, and feminist objectives,” according to a press release.
The artists lined up to show are Diedrick Brackens, Rosson Crow, Aaron Curry, Hayden Dunham, Jeff Elrod, Troy Michie, Puppies Puppies (Jade Kuriki Olivo), Daniel Rios Rodriguez, Ryan Trecartin, and Sarah Zapata; only Brackens is officially represented by Various Small Fires.
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Various Small Fires’s founder Esther Kim Varet was born and raised in Texas and sees this new space as a homecoming. “The vibrant cultural scene of Texas and its neighboring states in the American South has made an indelible impact on me from a young age,” she said in an email. “VSF Texas will not only highlight this vibrant legacy, but also Texas’s foundational relationship with Mexico and Latin America.”
The gallery was among the first U.S.-based enterprises to open a location in Seoul, doing so in 2019. Since then that city risen in prominence within Asia’s art market, as numerous other galleries have flocked there. Frieze will launch a fair there later this year.
Dallas has a long history of active collectors living in the city, including several who have featured on ARTnews’s Top 200 Collectors list over the years, among them Gayle and Paul Stoffel, Marguerite Hoffman, Cindy and Howard Rachofsky, and Raymond D. Nasher, who established the city’s Nasher Sculpture Center in 2003. Recently, a new crop of collectors has risen in the city, like Janelle and Alden Pinnell, Thomas Hartland-Mackie and Nasiba Adilova, Jordan Jones, and Kaleta Blaffer Johnson, to name a few.