After the disruptions of the pandemic years, the Dallas Art Fair appears to be settling into a steadier rhythm and consistently drawing a distinct roster of dealers and collectors. This year’s edition saw fewer departures from its exhibitor roster, with around 31 galleries not returning from 2025, compared with more than 40 in previous cycles. The overall number of exhibitors has held roughly constant at around 90.
“We have a great return rate and list of returning galleries every year, and strong desire from others to get in,” Kelly Cornell, the fair’s director, said during Thursday’s VIP preview. “We think it’s due to the market and that they’re able to place work here.”
That stability reflects a collector base often described as both tight-knit and deliberate. Local buyers may acquire only one or two works annually, but will wait to make those purchases at the Dallas Art Fair, reinforcing its role as a focal point for the city’s market. Dealers reported solid interest during the preview, albeit with few immediate sales. Transactions in Dallas tend to unfold slowly; collectors often revisit stands multiple times, with deals sometimes only confirmed on the fair’s final day (19 April).
The art institutions in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex are among the most important in the state and region, and the opportunity to connect with their directors, curators and board members is a selling point for participating dealers. This year, the Dallas Museum of Art acquired six works for its permanent collection through a combination of the Dallas Art Fair Foundation and the museum’s own acquisition fund. With a total spend of $100,000, the museum purchased works by Nicole Eisenman from the New York gallery Anton Kern; Caroline Monnet from the Montréal- and Toronto-based gallery Blouin Division; Hasani Sahlehe from the New York gallery Canada; Gloria Klein from the Los Angeles-headquartered gallery Anat Ebgi; and two pieces by Raymond Saunders from Andrew Kreps Gallery of New York.
Like last year, the New York dealer Hollis Taggart reported the highest-priced sales right out of the gate, placing Sam Francis’s Untitled (Blue, Green, Red) (1964) for $140,000 and Corinne Michelle West’s Red Still Life (1959) for $100,000. Carvalho, a gallery in Brooklyn owned by a Dallas native, reported the highest overall volume of sales at the fair, with seven works by Rachel Mica Weiss generating a combined $177,000, including the marble sculpture What Weight To Wield? (2026) and multiple textile-based works.
Jody Klotz Fine Art from Abilene, Texas, reporting selling Alice Baber’s Piper’s Message (1962) for $120,000 and Wolf Kahn’s pastel Orange Band for $32,000. Spinello Projects from Miami reported selling half its stand, dedicated to works by Marlon Portales priced between $4,000 and $20,000, as of Friday afternoon.
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles reported four sales ranging from $3,000 to $35,000, including works by Evita Tezeno and Gabriel Sanchez. The Sydney-based gallery Piermarq reported selling Henrik Godsk’s Young Matriarch with Pink Skirt (2026) for $12,000, and Cannon Dill’s Portrait of a Bull (2026) for $10,000.
“Dallas is a place where you can make a strong foothold in the South,” Cornell says. “It’s a place where you can really build relationships and grow a business.”
A visitor at the Dallas Art Fair. Photo by Chase Hall
The nature of North Texas
For younger dealers, those relationships can extend beyond the fair floor into the broader—and at times challenging—local ecosystem. Tessa Granowski, the founder of the Dallas gallery Nature of Things, is presenting a solo stand of paintings by Carrie Cook, a Texas-raised, Los Angeles-based artist whose renderings of quotidian objects, like empty glasses or orange slices, convey a sense of understated tension.
Granowski’s programming is nomadic, though not by her own decision. While attempting to establish a permanent space in Dallas's Turtle Creek neighbourhood—in a house owned by her family, next to her childhood home—she has run up against the city’s well-known regulatory hurdles, including stringent parking requirements that have long frustrated local gallerists. In the interim, she has organised pop-up exhibitions across the city, five in the past year.
“Although it’s put some pressure on me and been a bit frustrating, it’s been a really rewarding experience to be able to activate new spaces and new neighbourhoods, and get really creative with trying to solve those problems of alternative spaces that already exist here,” Granowski says.
She returned to Dallas after closing the Brooklyn project space she ran, Brackett Creek Exhibitions, in 2024. The move was a shift to a market with lower overhead and the freedom of space from New York’s saturated ecosystem. Granowski says she wanted to re-examine the history of local artists and art movements in Dallas to gain a better understanding of the city’s cultural identity, which has been hard to define because of a variety of wide-ranging factors, from tough zoning laws to frequent real estate redevelopment and a growth-oriented business mindset.
“Both for local artists and for artists that are from outside of here, you’re trying to figure out what is Dallas’s identity, what’s its personality, what’s its theme. It’s hard sometimes to know what that is,” she says. “I’m also trying to do a little bit of that by digging up certain histories.”
One such effort revisited the Dallas Nine, a loose group of painters associated with the Lone Star Regionalism movement of the 1930s and 40s, led by Jerry Bywaters. Their work, rooted in Southwestern landscapes and local industry like oil fields, offered a counterpoint to art being created elsewhere during that time. Granowski staged her Dallas Nine exhibition at the Texas Theatre, a historic cinema probably better known for being where Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested after he assassinated president John F. Kennedy.
This month the gallery is holding a group show in Deep Ellum of works by Texas artists, including some affiliated with the Lone Star Regionalism movement as well as contemporary artists like Will Boone and George Zupp. The exhibition’s title, Minor Regional Artists, is borrowed from a phrase worn on a sweatshirt by Lonesome Dove author Larry McMurtry poking fun at critics’ diminutive treatment of creatives working away from the East and West coasts.
Some Texas (2026) by Elsa Hansen Oldham Courtesy Nina Johnson
Patching into local lore
Even dealers and artists from out of town are looking to examine Texas’s diverse cultural history. At the dealer-led fair the Dallas Invitational (until 18 April), the Miami dealer Nina Johnson is showing a quilt by the Kentucky-based artist Elsa Hansen Oldham that maps Texas identity through a patchwork of cultural figures. Beyoncé appears alongside Waco cult leader David Koresh; Donald Judd is depicted next to one of his signature stack sculptures; Selena Quintanilla is shown at her last concert and Willie Nelson wears his red bandana and carries a guitar. Oldham also included politicians like Ann Richards, the most recent Democratic governor of Texas, and James Talarico, the progressive challenger for one of Texas’ senate seats.
“She's been really interested in Texas politics and this idea of how a place comes to be known for one thing, when there really is a population that’s very invested in another way,” Johnson says.
The work sparked conversations among visitors, even some who had personal connections to the quilt's subjects. Johnson says she spoke to attendees who recalled the actors Andrew, Owen and Luke Wilson growing up in Dallas, or shared anecdotes about living near the film-maker Wes Anderson in Houston.
“What I love about Elsa’s work is that it’s so warm and tactile and welcoming, and it does have that feeling of you’re being wrapped in it,” Johnson says. “That really disarms people and makes them feel comfortable. They want to chat a little bit about it.”
As of Thursday afternoon, the quilt remained available, priced at $18,000—another indication that in Dallas, even amid strong interest, buyers move at a more ponderous pace.
- Dallas Art Fair, until 19 April, Fashion Industry Gallery, Dallas
- Dallas Invitational, until 18 April, Rosewood Mansion on Turtle Creek, Dallas
