At the latest edition of Expo Chicago (until 12 April), more than half of the stands are part of a curated section or thematic selection, extending the foremost Midwestern fair’s reputation as a magnet for curators and institutional leaders. The fair has long held a directors summit and curatorial forum, but its new director Kate Sierzputowski felt it was important for that institutional engagement to be felt in the aisles and stands, too.
“We’ve had all these curatorial and directorial activities embedded in the fair for years but not really happening at the centre of the fair,” Sierzputowski tells The Art Newspaper. “I wanted to make sure that all the curators we’re working with year in and year out are more apparent inside the fair.”
Under Sierzputowski, who previously served as the fair’s artistic director for five years, Expo Chicago has brought on Essence Harden—who co-curated the most recent edition of the Hammer Museum’s Made in LA biennial—to be the fair’s curator. She curated the fair’s Profile sector, which this year includes 21 solo, dual or thematic presentations. The fair’s Focus section, for galleries 12 years and younger, features 52 galleries and was curated by Katie A. Pfohl, an associate curator of contemporary art at the Detroit Institute of Arts. And a small section titled Embodiment and curated by Louise Bernard, the founding director of the Obama Presidential Center (OPC) Museum, features stands from galleries showing artists who have been commissioned to create works for the OPC, which will open to the public in June on Chicago’s south side.
Expo Chicago 2026 Photo by Casey Kelbaugh/CKA. Courtesy of Expo Chicago
Gallery Wendi Norris, which is based in San Francisco, has devoted a large section of its stand in the Embodiment section to three works by María Magdalena Campos-Pons, who was revealed on Thursday (9 April) as one of the artists selected for the final round of commissions for the OPC. The capsule survey of the Cuban-born artist’s work includes a triptych sculpture from 1991, a surrealist composition of 12 large-format Polaroid photographs from 2007 and a mixed media-on-paper work from 2024. By the end of the fair’s preview on Thursday, the work on paper had sold for $22,000.
Committed collectors
Becky Koblick, a director at Gallery Wendi Norris, says the gallery was confident Campos-Pons’s work would be well received at Expo Chicago because of the groups of collectors and curators it attracts. “The collectors in Chicago are really carrying on a tradition of caretaking, they understand what it means to collect,” Koblick says. “It’s hard to find that, but everything this fair does with curation, bringing together institutions and collectors, makes a big difference—the community really shows up.” The gallery’s VIP day sales also included two works by the Pakistan-born, Texas-based artist Ambreen Butt, for $8,000 and $38,000, the latter of which went to an unspecified US institution.
Also in the Embodiment section, the longtime Chicago gallery Gray is showing multiple works by OPC artists on its stand, including pieces by Rashid Johnson, Theaster Gates and the late sculptor Richard Gray. Meanwhile, a large portion of the stand is devoted to works by the Chicago-born artist Torkwase Dyson. “Louise Bernard reached out to us specifically to ask that we feature Torkwase’s work,” says Valerie Carberry, Gray’s president and chief executive officer. “She isn’t one of the artists commissioned for the centre, but Louise said that her work has been really influential for how they are thinking about architecture, space and abstraction.”
During Thursday’s preview, the gallery sold one of Dyson’s works, Scalar 2 (Hypershape) (2024), for $55,000, as well as one piece each by Johnson, MacArthur Binion and Candida Alvarez for prices ranging from $25,000 to $100,000.
The longtime Chicago gallery Secrist Beach has one of the most magnetic stands in the general galleries sector thanks to a wall-filling installation of neon-hued geometric compositions on aluminium panels that is lit by black lights. Its patterns are based on the abstract stained-glass windows of Le Corbusier’s chapel in Ronchamp, France. The glowing installation, by the Chicagoan duo Luftwerk (Petra Bachmaier and Sean Gallero), is titled Open Frame (2025), priced at $150,000 and was acquired by the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City during Thursday’s preview.
The installation Open Frame (2025) by Luftwerk (Petra Bachmaier and Sean Gallero) was acquired by the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art from Secrist Beach's stand at Expo Chicago Courtesy Secrist Beach, Chicago
“For us, Expo is a great opportunity to check in with local collectors who maybe don’t make it to the gallery on a regular basis,” says Britton Bertran, a director at Secrist Beach. “Another great benefit is that the fair puts so much effort into bringing museum groups, curators and directors here.”
Another exhibitor benefiting from the large contingent of institutional leaders at the fair is the Nashville-based gallery Red Arrow, whose stand in the Focus section pairs playful ceramic and mixed media sculptures by Jocelyn Reid with surreal paintings depicting biblical episodes by Annie Brito Hodgin. During the VIP preview, the gallery sold seven paintings by Hodgin, for prices ranging from $4,500 to $5,800. One was acquired by the Museo Internacional de Arte in Guadalajara, Mexico, while another was acquired by the Bennett Collection—devoted to buying works by women-identifying artists that portray women—and will go on show at the Muskegon Museum of Art in Michigan.
“As soon as I sent the catalogue for our stand to Kate [Sierzputowski], she said, ‘You have to send this to the Bennett Collection,’” says Katie Shaw, a gallerist at Red Arrow. “We don’t have a collecting institution in Nashville, so the connections to curators and institutions that Expo Chicago offers is really important for us and our artists.”
Annie Brito Hodgin's The Creation of Eve (2026) Courtesy the artist and Red Arrow, Nashville
Also in the Focus sector, the Buffalo, New York-based gallery Rivalry Projects is showing a solo stand of sunset-hued landscape paintings and found-material sculptures by the Arizona-based artist rocki swiderski, whose work focuses on contested landscapes—places where infrastructure and nature compete for scarce resources, or where the environment is interrupted or surveilled. The gallery sold eight of swiderski’s works during Thursday’s preview, for prices ranging from $3,000 to $15,000.
Midwest mainstay
“Being based in the Southwest and thinking about water and its scarcity is crucial to rocki’s work,” says Olivia Mcmanus, Rivalry Projects’ director, who previously worked at the Chicago galleries Rhona Hoffman and Patron, as well as the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago. “Chicagoans are not afraid to spend money on works that are challenging or thematically charged, and Expo Chicago is an incredible fair for how it brings together the local community of buyers and curators from across the Midwest.”
For Sierzputowski, maintaining and amplifying the fair’s Midwestern identity has been a top priority, even as its visibility rises internationally following its acquisition by Frieze in 2023 and its ongoing partnership with the Galleries Association of Korea and Kiaf Seoul, which has led to 12 Korean galleries showing at Expo Chicago this year.
“We want to make sure that galleries and institutions from across the Midwest feel like they have a home here,” Sierzputowski says. “I made sure to invest our outreach budget to visit cities and institutions across the Midwest and, through those connections—specifically this year with the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Saint Louis Museum of Art and the Speed Museum in Louisville—meeting the key people in all of those communities.”
The strategy seemed to be paying off on day one, with artists and dealers from across the Midwest making significant sales. The perennial Chicago gallery Monique Meloche sold two Yvette Mayorga paintings for $50,000 each, a group of Luke Agada paintings for $36,000, multiple assemblage works by Sheree Hovsepian for $30,000 apiece and several paintings by David Shrove for $22,000 each. From their joint stand, the Chicago gallery Good Weather and Detroit’s What Pipeline sold a Dylan Spaysky sculpture for $40,000. The Chicago gallery Patron sold around a half-dozen works including a painting by Lindsay Adams for $32,000, a painting by Caroline Kent for less than $45,000, multiple works by Miao Wang priced between $9,000 and $15,000, and two paintings by Alice Tippet for prices ranging between $8,500 and $15,000.
Additional museum acquisitions include the Peabody Essex Museum from Salem, Massachusetts, which bought multiple wall-mounted sculptures by Lakela Brown from the artist’s solo stand with 56 Henry, plus a work by the Singapore-born textile artist Jovencio de la Paz from Chris Sharp Gallery. The Denver Art Museum also acquired a piece by De la Paz, plus a sculpture by the Brazilian artist Caroline Ricca Lee from the São Paulo-based Galeria Verve. In addition to works by LaKela Brown and Luftwerk, the Nelson-Atkins Museum acquired a painting by the US artist Lindsay Merrill from the Dutch gallery Enari. And the Bronx Museum acquired The Work (2025) by Sadie Barnette from the San Francisco gallery Jessica Silverman through the fair’s Sherman Acquisition Award, an Expo Chicago initiative to support the purchase of a work by an artist in its Profile section.
- Expo Chicago, until 12 April, Navy Pier, Chicago
