As an Austin artist, I’m always excited by new events in town. When I heard about Friends Fair, a homegrown fair started by the Friends of Galleries (FOG) collective, I wanted to talk to the members about the nitty-gritty of the event. I sat down with Philip Niemeyer, Jill Schroeder, Jill McLennon, and Kevin Ivester (who joined us about halfway through the conversation) to talk about the collective, the idea behind the fair, and their broader hopes and goals for the fair and the Austin community at large.
Friends Fair opens on May 15 by invitation only at the Loren Hotel, Austin. It is open to the public May 16 and 17. Attendance is free, but RSVPs are required. The following interview has been edited and condensed.
Friends of Galleries dealers: Kevin Ivester of Ivester Contemporary, Jill McLennon of McLennon Pen Co., Phillip Niemeyer of Northern-Southern, Ricky Morales of Martha’s Contemporary, Jill Schroeder of grayDUCK (not pictured is Meredith Williams of Martha’s Contemporary). Image courtesy of FOG
Renee Lai (RL): Friends of Galleries (FOG) consists of grayDUCK, Ivester Contemporary, McLennon Pen Co., Martha’s, and Northern-Southern. How did you form your group and why now? What are the collective’s goals?
Phillip Niemeyer: I think all of us would answer that question differently. The idea came to Kevin and I in a conversation, and we reached out to Ricky, Jill, and Jill. We started the club thinking we would have special events for the people who buy art as a way to show gratitude. If you buy art from one of us, you get into this club, and we’ll do fun things for you. It’s hard to answer what our goals are. I love hanging out with everyone in the collective and doing projects with them. When Kevin said, “Hey, let’s start an art fair,” I thought, “I’m all in!” Everyone was all in.
Jill McLennon: I feel like Ricky has always been talking about starting an art fair, and I thought it would be so much work. There was this moment when we were at Ricky’s house when Kevin pitched a hotel art fair. That instantly clicked for me.
Lai: What is it about the hotel that made the art fair feel doable?
Jill Schroeder: We don’t have to build infrastructure. Our booth is already there. It is a room, so that simplifies it. The Loren is so art-centric that it seemed like the perfect place to have a fair.
Our goals are to encourage people to buy [art and] to grow this community. The fair is doing that exact thing. It’s all this hype about our city and our spaces. I feel like we’re growing to another level and encouraging even more people to buy from our city.
Lai: Did you start out mostly targeting local collectors for FOG?
Niemeyer: Exclusively. Jill (McLennon) has New York collectors; I have a smattering; Ricky has a bunch, but we want to develop our own city. This is our community. These are the people we see all the time, and we want [collecting] to be part of our culture. It is a wealthy city.
Lai: Can you tell me about your interests in art fairs in general? Why is the art fair able to reach more people? Is it because there are local galleries in the fair, but also galleries from Houston, Los Angeles, and New York City?
McLennon: We are pulling together our contacts and it’s making this buzz. I’ve heard of some people that are coming from out of town, from Marfa, Houston, Dallas, even one curator from Savannah.
Niemeyer: People are also coming from upstate New York, El Paso… I think art people are excited about fairs, maybe disproportionately to how we as gallerists and artists view them. I always view the gallery show as the sine qua non. You’re in your space and you can do whatever you want, but the art fair is just this little booth. For some reason, I see art advisors that I never see at my gallery at art fairs. If I have a booth in Miami, I’ll see them every time. But I won’t see them at my gallery, Northern-Southern.
McLennon: Art advisors can show their clients so many different things all at once, and we all have our price list at hand. It’s clearly very commercial, so maybe that makes people more comfortable asking about the price.
Niemeyer: You read Hyperallergic and other art publications that review the art fair like an exhibition, taking the temperature of what art is now.
McLennon: I did the Affordable Art Fair last year. It was their first year at the Palmer Events Center in Austin, and they are doing it again this year. We chose May 15 through 17 to align our art fair with theirs. It’s about making an art week for Austin.
Niemeyer: I was reading this book about famous exhibitions that shaped art history. This exhibition called the Salon des Refusés in 1863 Paris had all of the artists that were not allowed in the official salon. That’s where people first saw Manet and Whistler. This whole book is about organizing, which is not that different from what we are doing. You realize that art history is local history, that the Impressionists or other groups of artists were just a bunch of people getting together and deciding to do something.
McLennon: I looked to history when I was trying to figure out what to show in my hotel room. Peggy Guggenheim used to have exhibitions in a hotel room before she had her palazzo. Duchamp had a traveling museum in a suitcase.
Another hotel fair that is big right now is the Felix Art Fair in Los Angeles, at the Hollywood Roosevelt hotel. It’s the same time as the Frieze LA. There’s also the Dallas Invitational, satellite to the Dallas Art Fair. [This year it was] held at Rosewood Mansion on Turtle Creek hotel.
Lai: Is there an overall curatorial focus for this fair?
McLennon: We’re each curating our hotel room however we want. Each room will be totally different. I am doing a solo booth for Alexandra Valenti. The other gallerists will have multiple artists. We are all grappling with the hotel room space.
Lai: I want to know more about that. What are some of the challenges that come with working in a hotel room?
Schroeder: We’re all so used to our own spaces, so it’s a weird puzzle. It also helps you be more creative to adjust to a different space that you’re not used to, which got me really excited.
Niemeyer: I think it’s exciting because people walk into hotel rooms with a different set of expectations. When art overlaps with that expectation, it can result in a lot of fun friction.
Ivester: There are a lot of people who are moving to Austin. They might not feel comfortable in galleries, but everyone’s been in a hotel. The hotel is a neutral, friendly territory for some people who might be interested in the arts but don’t want to go to a gallery.
Lai: Why does Austin need this art fair? What do you hope to accomplish with it?
Niemeyer: We need to believe in the art community we have. We need something to galvanize us, and this is it.
Lai: Has there been a problem galvanizing people in the past?
McLennon: We’re always trying to come up with ideas for how to keep electrifying things.
Ivester: The “art world” in Austin is very insular. We all know each other, and it’s great and I love other art people. However, the city is growing all the time and we have to reach new people. We want to continue to be a part of this city so we have to get creative.
Lai: What are you most excited for?
Ivester: What I liked about this process is the professional knowledge that we can share with each other. As gallerists, we are usually on our own little islands, but this is an opportunity to get together and have conversations that mutually benefit each other.
I think we’re all recognizing that this fair will have to grow next year. I’m excited to see the response from the city and figure out once and for all if Austin is ready for something like this.
Lai: How will you gauge the fair’s success?
Ivester: If the other galleries decide that Austin isn’t ready to support the arts in the way we think it should be, this will be a disaster.
The success is if galleries leave this fair and announce Austin is ready to be taken seriously to their own respective cities.
Lai: Will you just hear about this through the grapevine?
Niemeyer: It will be very obvious after the second day. Sales are the gauge.
McLennon: Everyone selling out would be the best thing, the A+.
Ivester: I hope that down the line these galleries tell other people this is a place where you can open a gallery and make it. For the longest time, I always heard that Austin doesn’t have a good market for the arts. That [can be] a self-fulfilling prophecy, which I don’t think is true.
Lai: If an A+ is selling out, what is a B-? What’s passing?
Ivester: We need to make some sales.
Niemeyer: There needs to be sales. The art is going to be great. The art has been great in every one of these spaces for years. But is Austin ready to support it?
Schroeder: Because I’ve been around for so long, I’ve seen this art community go up and down. I believe in these spaces that I’m working with. You are all so talented, driven, and creative that I think we are going to bust the graph and finally be a legitimate art city.
Lai: What does that mean, to be a legitimate art city?
Schroeder: When you ask people what Austin represents, they talk about it as a music city capitol. People never say visual arts right away. Houston, NYC, and LA are automatically thought of as arts cities. I want Austin to be automatically thought of that way, too.
Lai: When you all keep asking whether or not Austin is ready, it strikes me that you’re really asking whether or not the collectors in Austin are ready. You are all prepared, but is it hard to not have control over that crucial part?
Ivester: It is all tied to education about the arts. There can be a real lack of art education in Austin, but in Dallas or other art cities, you don’t really run into that. People already know how a gallery works, how it’s different from a museum, what a studio is. I hope that this event will help educate people. I also hope people come prepared and recognize what this art fair is.
The inaugural Friends Fair will take place May 15-17, 2025, at the Loren Hotel in Austin.
