For its 17th edition, the Dallas Art Fair will take over the Fashion Industry Gallery, located in the heart of the Dallas Arts District, starting on Thursday, April 10, and running through the weekend until April 13.

For patrons, art collectors and enthusiasts, this yearly event may be the local Super Bowl of the Dallas arts scene, sprouting a parade of activities officially and unofficially associated with the fair. The Dallas Arts District, now the largest arts district in the nation, demands a certain amount of respect for casually embodying the “everything is bigger in Texas” ethos. This makes the Dallas Art Fair, which started in 2009, the perfect catalyst for continuously luring international art jet-setters into the Dallas conversation.

The substantial amount of thought and methodology for curating this year’s 91 exhibiting gallery booths may go unnoticed by the untrained eye in the flurry of activity. Dallas is an interesting place. If the West starts in Fort Worth, does the East start in Dallas? Does Dallas' positioning between New York City and Los Angeles mean something more than a strategic geographical point for businesses and flights? For the many kinds of artists and curators participating in the Dallas Art Fair, it may be fair to say that the Dallas eye is broad when it comes to art.

For the New York-based gallerist and curator Daniel Chen of Alisan Fine Arts, which initially started in Hong Kong, the Dallas art market is a place of opportunity. Opening in the early 1980s, Alisan Fine Arts was Hong Kong’s first contemporary art gallery representing artists such as Zao Wou-Ki and Ming Fay, among others. This is the gallery’s first year participating in the Dallas Art Fair.

Chen, who studied art history in Toronto before working with Alisan Fine Art, says the gallery’s program consistently aims to support next-generation Chinese diaspora artists.

“Twenty years ago, Daphne King took over the gallery and decided she wanted to expand,” Chen says. “When Daphne approached me to open something in New York, I had run a gallery called Chambers Fine Art. We decided to connect the New York gallery to Chinese artists working in the West. I would consider these artists as having transnational practices, working with Chinese painting traditions that go back centuries.”

The transition from ancient tradition to the contemporary aesthetic spectrum has been inspirational for Chen.

“Today, this Asian diaspora is now described as a Third Culture,” Chen says. “Some of these artists, born here in the 1990s, are now working in video art and draw effortlessly from the every day both here and from tradition. I feel like it’s a unique moment in time to be working with these artists.”

For the Dallas Arts Fair, Alisan Fine Arts will feature artists Kelly Wang, Ren Light Pan and Julie Chang.

“The main few artists we are bringing to the fair are based in the United States,” Chen says. “They deal with this kind of cultural hybridity in their practice that goes beyond the simple East vs. West dichotomy. In Julie Chang’s work, she’s focused on cultural symbology that goes far beyond art. Ren Light Pan’s work marries autobiography with traditional Chinese ink, and Kelly Wang’s work is kind of the most immersed in traditional Chinese art. She’s a mad scientist with ink, paper, resin and mineral pigments, which she molds into abstract landscapes.”

By attracting international galleries such as Alisan Fine Arts to the Dallas Art Fair, Dallas collectors have repeatedly proven that they are interested in more than just the decorative arts.

“I heard about the Dallas Art Fair from several curators at the Dallas Museum of Art, who encouraged me to apply,” Chen says. “What I have found in Dallas is that there is a great appetite for contemporary art. I’ve noticed it not only in the museums, but collectors and advisors I’ve met too. There’s a curiosity in what we are doing with Chinese diaspora art and it’s exciting.”

One of the most recent examples of such curiosity was the inclusion of Ren Light Pan’s "Sleep Painting" (02/14/15) in Full and Pure: Body, Materiality, Gender, curated by Mara Hassan at the Green Family Art Foundation in 2023, or Pan’s current inclusion in the DMA’s breathtaking When You See Me: Visibility in Contemporary Art/History, an exhibition running through mid-April. Alisan Fine Arts also recently placed artist Lam Tung Pang’s "Mountain Jade" at The Crow Museum at the University of Texas Dallas in 2024.

“A lot of thought went into the process of putting this collection of art together for the Dallas Art Fair,” Chen says. “I think that the interest in this kind of art in Dallas is amazing right now.”

Turner Carroll Gallery, based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, has participated in many editions of the Dallas Art Fair. The husband (Michael) and wife (Tonya) team have run the contemporary space since 1991. It has come to represent works by internationally known artists such as Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, Alfred Jensen, and most recently, Swoon. The couple met while working on a performance art project at Duke University, Michael’s alma mater. Tonya Carroll graduated from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, with a degree in Art History. She almost worked for the Metropolitan Museum of Art before rerouting her career to Santa Fe.

“Receiving a MET internship was kind of a dream at the time, but I had already worked at a couple of museums,” she says. “I felt like I didn’t want to rehash art history but rather create it. I wanted to do something new and promote the kind of work that I was really interested in, by people left out of art history, women, African Americans.”

As gallerists and curators, the Carrolls feel a sense of responsibility to the artists they represent and the clients they advise. The Turner Carroll Gallery Dallas Art Fair booth will consist of six artists with curation that looks to challenge the status quo of collecting.

“Right now, we are in a time of change,” Tonya Carroll says. “Now that diversity and inclusion were cut from museums, it’s the galleries' responsibility to be the conduit for these voices. It’s my both responsibility and area of interest to help these artists tell their stories.”

She says the sheer talent of some of these often-overlooked artists is shocking and further inspires them to push the boundaries they aim to challenge. When curating their booth, the couple kept this ideology in mind.

“I’ve long had this belief that if I care if something will sell or not, I may as well have a grocery store,” Tonya Carroll says. “Instead, my passion is running my gallery like its own artistic practice and working to help correct the art canon. All the artists we are bringing to the fair are women and people of color, except for a couple of blue-chip artists like Ed Ruscha.”

The gallery plans to show some works by artists who have never been seen at the Dallas Art Fair, such as Jeanette Pasin Sloan.

“Sloan is at a crucial time in her career, being in her late 70s,” Tonya Carroll says. “Over the past few years a few of us soldiers are making sure these kinds of artists are getting both the recognition and opportunities they deserve. She is so skilled that her works have appeared in the National Gallery and Metropolitan Museum of Art. We are very excited to show her in the Dallas art world.”

She also believes in catering to young art collectors looking to purchase their first serious piece of work.

“It’s very important for me to engage with young collectors, too,” she says. “We will also have prints for sale that are affordable for mid-range to entry-level collectors.”

The Disruptors
The gallery’s booth will also include works from Eri Imamura, Nadya Tolokonnikova of the Russian band/activist collective Pussy Riot and a political series by artist Clarence Heyward dealing with a 1960s-era civil rights protest. Turner Carroll’s repeated participation in the Dallas Art Fair and other major art fairs gives Tonya Carroll the satisfaction of exercising her social and political ideals through her careful curation practice.

“I get excited about the stories and the artwork and enjoy the privilege of talking with people about this art,” she says.

For Dallas native Tessa Granowski, participating in the Dallas Art Fair is a kind of homecoming party and debut of her new Dallas-based gallery, Nature of Things. After graduating in 2011, Granowski moved away and co-founded Brackett Creek Exhibitions, based in Brooklyn, New York, and Bozeman, Montana. Although her previous gallery participation in last year’s Dallas Art Fair was under a different name, this year’s booth will be a tasting party of sorts for the inaugural Nature of Things gallery exhibition titled A Clean, Well-Lighted Place: An Homage to David Hickey and his Gallery (which is located near Turtle Creek in Uptown).

“I like to say that galleries provide context and connections for artists,” Granowski says. “Essentially, for the Dallas Art Fair, I’m focusing on two emerging contemporary artists connected to this larger show. I’m showing one from Waxahachie named Sam Linguist and Candice C. Chu, who spends her time between New York and Los Angeles making large-scale graphite drawings. There’s a sense of immediacy to the work that is beautiful and delicate, but there’s also depth, which I think encapsulates the Dallas vibe,” Granowski says.

Chu is just one of several artists in A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, which also opens on April 10 at her new space and includes works by Dallas artist and former gallerist David Quadrini, Jim Franklin, Vera Simons, Mia Ardito and Terry Allen, among others. The show is loaded with tons of Texas underground flare and nuance. When curating her booth for the Dallas Art Fair, Granowski was looking to bring this local historical sensibility into casual conversations with show attendees.

“The whole thing about art fairs, it’s kind of like speed dating,” she says. “You must make a good first impression, and that leads to good conversations. My read on the fair last year was that Dallas people were the best listeners when it came to hearing about the artists and pieces. Dallas is a very cosmopolitan place, just without the sense of pretension about it.”

Granowski says much effort and research went into curating her booth and gallery as the tentacles of curiosity reached New York City, Austin, and then Dallas.

“I could talk three hours about it,” Granowski says. “I could write a book on it at this point. I’ve been working six months curating this show. I even have Larry McMurtry’s copy of Hickey’s The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty in this exhibition.”

For Granowski, Nature of Things' inclusion at the Dallas Art Fair may be a gesture at reclaiming the rugged “anything goes, even in art” mentality that was so prevalent in the 1970s Texas counterculture.

“It seems Dallas has a rich history of scrappy artist-run spaces,” Granowski says. “Those have largely disappeared, though, and right now, most of the art spaces are large white cube spaces. I’m going to be another house gallery that’s not super-scrappy but can walk the line between DIY and white cube spaces. Basically, what I’m trying to do on my booth is to point to the bigger exhibition because my booth is kind of the tip of the iceberg.”

For the attendees of 2025’s Dallas Art Fair, there most likely will be something interesting for everybody, as an additional 88 galleries are bringing their tastes and practices to Dallas for the weekend. Other scheduled events that run simultaneously with the Dallas Art Fair include special programming from James Talambas’ uber-hip New Media Contemporary, located in Exposition Park and Ro2 Art Gallery in Trinity Groves.