In 2014, in Los Angeles, a small art fair opened at Paramount Ranch Western Town, a group of sets—and now a national park attraction—that was previously used for shooting Hollywood movies. The fair, named Paramount Ranch after its location, was founded by gallerists Alex Freedman and Robbie Fitzpatrick and artists Liz Craft and Pentti Monkkonen as a way of bringing smaller, emerging galleries to the California city. Running at the same time as the bigger, glitzier Art Los Angeles Contemporary fair, Paramount Ranch became a trendy alternative to art showing at the same time. As The New York Times put it, “Despite its rising profile as an art capital, Los Angeles has never quite mustered an internationally attended art week until, arguably, just now.”
Three years later, Paramount Ranch has almost doubled in size, while Art Los Angeles Contemporary remains about the same. (The latter, by comparison, was founded in 2010 by Tim Fleming with the intention of it being Los Angeles’s first major contemporary art fair, and it still is. It’s now in its seventh year.) A look at where the galleries come from proves that these fairs are still Los Angeles–heavy—almost a third of the exhibitors from both fairs come from the Californian city. Yet Paramount Ranch also aims for a slightly more international crowd, perhaps because the fair was never intended to be as much of a Los Angeles fair as ALAC was.
Above is a graphic showing where the exhibitors at Paramount Ranch and ALAC are coming from. (A note on methodology: galleries were given one point per location, such that galleries like Mathew, which now has spaces in New York and Berlin and is exhibiting at Paramount Ranch this year, can be counted into both the numbers of non–Los Angeles U.S. and international.) Art Los Angeles Contemporary opens its seventh edition on January 28, while Paramount Ranch 3 opens on January 30.