The up to date Untitled Artwork honest that has run throughout Miami Artwork Week for greater than a decade will develop to Houston subsequent yr in a transfer organisers say will capitalise on town’s thriving artwork scene and development all through Texas.
The honest is scheduled to happen 18-21 September 2025, beginning with a VIP and press-preview day, on the George R. Brown Conference Heart in downtown Houston. Untitled Artwork describes the occasion as a “boutique invitational honest”, and founder Jeffrey Lawson tells The Artwork Newspaper that he expects round 50 galleries to participate, although exhibitors haven’t but been finalised.
Galleries which have confirmed participation are a mixture of native Texas establishments and sellers from additional afield. Exhibitors embrace Seven Sisters from Houston, 12.26 from Dallas and Martha’s from Austin. Los Angeles’s Varied Small Fires—which has a Dallas location—may even participate, together with Jessica Silverman Gallery from San Francisco, Half Gallery from New York, Megan Mulrooney and Luis De Jesus from Los Angeles and Cecilia Brunson Venture from London. The total checklist of galleries will probably be introduced within the spring. Lawson, along with the author and curator Michael Slenske and Untitled Artwork government director Clara Andrade Pereira, will choose exhibitors.
Lawson says that Untitled Artwork beforehand explored a Houston honest again in 2014, earlier than in the end launching a now-folded San Francisco version. Within the decade since, Houston and the remainder of Texas have skilled an enormous inhabitants increase that outpaces the expansion of a lot of the US. Houston has introduced a $2bn funding within the downtown space surrounding its conference centre utilizing funds from state taxes on the realm’s lodge rooms, which Lawson says got here into play with the choice to carry the artwork honest on the centre. Artwork establishments in Houston have additionally doubled down on growth tasks previously decade.
Slenske will function Untitled Artwork Houston’s director. Primarily based in Los Angeles, he first visited Houston for a good friend’s marriage ceremony and was struck by the flourishing artwork scene within the “nooks and crannies” of town, which famously has no zoning legal guidelines.
“There was a lot cultural infrastructure—the meals, the museums, the galleries. So many artists and other people doing vogue and resorts,” Slenske says. “It appeared like a sleeping large, like this untapped wonderland.”
Whereas Houston could also be ignored by many on the coasts, town of two.3 million individuals is the fourth-largest within the US by inhabitants and residential to a few of Texas’s most established artwork establishments and industrial galleries, in addition to seasoned collectors. Simply final month, the Artwork Sellers Affiliation of America spotlighted Houston galleries at The Artwork Present, its annual honest in New York Metropolis.
Texas as an entire is gaining extra recognition within the artwork market, with cities like Dallas and Austin dwelling to rising scenes. Untitled Artwork will maintain occasions main as much as the Houston honest to have interaction with collectors, artists and galleries, Lawson says. Earlier this month, Untitled Artwork held a VIP weekend in Austin and is planning different gatherings in cities throughout the state.
“We wish it to develop and engender this concept of a city-wide factor, the place it turns into like a Houston Artwork Week, the premier Texas artwork week,” Slenske says. “There’s no restrict to what you are able to do in Houston.”
