Following a successful debut in Texas last year, collector and entrepreneur Jeffrey Lawson’s Untitled Art returns to Houston next month with an edition that promises to be even more anchored in the city’s expansive art ecosystem. On the exhibitors’ list are 99 national and international galleries operating at different market tiers, attracted by the promise of new buyers brought to town by the major aerospace, tech and manufacturing companies putting down roots in Houston. (NASA, Axiom and SpaceX are all already here, and Apple has just opened its new manufacturing facility.)
Untitled Art’s Texas fair emerged after years of conversations with Houston’s art insiders and local government. The goal was not just to bring a fair to Houston but to create an event that could fit seamlessly into the city’s existing artistic fabric. “There’s already tons of culture,” director Michael Slenske told Observer, “including the Ismaili Center that opened just last year, and expansions on the horizon for the Orange Show for Visionary Art and LMAAHH’s Latino cultural complex.”
Ahead of the fair, we asked a group of Houstonians deeply involved in the city’s art scene how it has evolved and expanded over the years, what conditions past and present have allowed that growth and how Untitled is bringing new visibility to the regional talent among international art lovers and professionals.
“Houston has one of the most dynamic arts and culture scenes in the United States. What distinguishes our city is not only the strength of its major institutions, but also the extraordinary diversity of its audiences, artists, and cultural offerings. Houston’s creative landscape reflects the city itself: global in outlook, entrepreneurial in spirit, and constantly evolving,” Gary Tinterow, director and Margaret Alkek Williams chair of the MFAH told Observer, noting how, over the past several decades, Houston has transformed from a city most often associated with space, energy and medicine into a recognized cultural destination. “We have built extraordinary and unique museums, performing arts organizations, and cultural initiatives that rival those of much older cities, while maintaining our local accessible and welcoming character.”
For Tinterow Houston’s cultural achievements are greater than its national and international profile. “Visitors are constantly amazed, which is always good to hear, but those reactions reveal a communication problem. Our organizations initiate and then export superb exhibitions, operas, and ballets around the world, but one of our ongoing challenges is ensuring that the wealth of culture in Houston is better appreciated within the city and beyond.” His hope is that the Untitled art fair will bring greater awareness of everything that Houston has to offer.
Historical institutions such as the Menil Collection have long attracted visitors to the city. “I think Houston has always been a really thriving art community from artists, supporters, donors, collectors,” CAMH director Ryan Dennis told Observer. Dennis, a Houston native who left and returned, has been leading the institution for three years now, watching the city’s art scene evolve around her. Artists find ways to show their work here, while collectors, as well as local institutions and organizations, offer different opportunities to pursue and support their practices. She pointed to mid-sized organizations such as Lawndale, Project Row Houses and DiverseWorks, adding that she sees “this kind of atmosphere of support.”
Timed with the fair, Project Row Houses will open the third edition of the Southern Survey Biennial, showcasing, in its historic row houses, the work of six artists and one collective selected from more than 200 submissions across 13 Southern states. One will be awarded the $25,000 prize—one of the largest awards of its kind for a Southern-based artist. Founded in 1993 by seven artists who bought a block of neglected houses in the Third Ward and turned them into space for art and community life, PRH has become a national model for socially engaged art.
Reynier Leyva Novo’s Solid Void #1 presented by Sicardi Ayers & Bacino at Untitled Art Houston 2025. Ph: CKA Associates, Courtesy of Untitled Art
According to Dennis, CAMH’s key mission has included helping the city’s art offerings move beyond the “Southern blind spot.” Notably, since its founding in 1948, CAMH has embraced a rare and forward-thinking non-collecting model, closer in spirit to an ICA and focused on creating a responsive platform attuned to its community’s needs. “We do a great job at programming and collaborating with the organizations in the city, from education to other arts organizations and even DJs and performers in the city.”
CAMH’s exhibition of teen-created art spotlights Houston’s young talent while introducing them to the many career pathways in the art and museum worlds. The programming has also included very ambitious projects, most recently a survey of Tomashi Jackson’s decade-long, socially engaged practice, as well as “Theaster Gates: The Gift and the Renege” in 2024, which functioned both as a research platform and a public forum, spotlighting the material history of Freedmen’s Town, a 19th-century neighborhood built by formerly enslaved Africans in Texas after the U.S. Civil War, and expanding the institution’s impact beyond its walls. “It’s often a collaborative process—a conversation between the artist, the museum and the community—that leads to an extension of the exhibition beyond the gallery walls,” co-director Melissa McDonnell Luján told Observer in a recent interview.
There’s also a gallery scene that, despite being relatively contained, has remained at the forefront of the latest artistic expressions. Barbara Davis, founder of Barbara Davis Gallery, was one of the first dealers to show Joseph Beuys’s work in Houston and gave Julie Mehretu her first solo show, among many other pioneering moments across more than four decades of operation. “There’s a stereotype of Houston and Texas, but when you’re there, you don’t see any tumbleweeds or cowboys. It’s a very sophisticated city, with several world-class museums and a great cultural offering between ballet, opera and theater,” she told Observer.
Davis pointed to the Moody Center for the Arts as an example. It’s currently showing “Radiant Geometries: Vectors of Knowledge from the Indigenous Americas,” an ambitious group exhibition exploring Indigenous knowledge systems and their longstanding relationship with mathematics, science and technology in the Americas. Featuring works by now more widely acclaimed artists such as Sara Flores, Melissa Cody and Eamon Ore-Giron, among others, the show demonstrates how these forms of ancestral wisdom and technologies, revived through contemporary practices, offer ways of knowing that continue to shape relationships to territories, waterways and interspecies care, as mathematical, metaphysical and artistic knowledge converge within them.
Installation view: “Vincent Valdez: Just a Dream…” at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, 2024. Courtesy Contemporary Arts Museum Houston / Photo: Peter Molick
Davis also pointed to a series of new private initiatives; some collectors have opened new art centers or provide access to their holdings. PAC Art, for example, opened in the city in 2022 and hosts artist residencies and a rich public program of talks and other gatherings. During Untitled, PAC will present a public art project by Cuban artist Reynier Leyva Novo, Blue Bones (2026), during which Novo will cover images and objects in blue paint, shifting their function into material evidence of the survival, loss and urban change of the Third Ward neighborhood. The project is part of the fair’s extensive, citywide programming, which allows exhibitors to present site-specific works alongside their fair booths and collaborate directly with local institutions and partners.
Over time, Davis has cultivated a group of collectors who have grown more sophisticated and increasingly able to appreciate challenging works rather than simply decorative ones, though she admits there’s still more work to be done. “My goal has always been to be an international gallery. That’s why when I first opened the gallery, I brought these shows to Houston,” she explained. Today, she still shows artists who continually challenge and reinvent traditional approaches to the medium. “I look for artists who are making something that is fresh, smart, universal, and lasting. That’s what I want. I know when it transcends you, the artist is saying something.”
Last year at the fair, the gallery presented an installation-heavy, elegant solo booth by Teresa Serrano. This year, Davis is staging “The Shape of Breathing,” a solo exhibition by Yuriko Yamaguchi, at the gallery through October 17, 2026. At the fair, she will present the articulated structures of Miguel Ángel Madrigal, paintings by Vargas-Suarez Universal, the spatialist sculptures of Eduardo Portillo and delicate installations by Yamaguchi.
Patricia Domínguez, Matrix Vegetal, 2021-22. The work is on view in “Radiant Geometries: Vectors of Knowledge from the Indigenous Americas” at Moody Art Center through December 19, 2026. Commissioned by Screen City Biennial, with the support of Cecilia Brunson Projects and Galería Patricia Ready
The city’s gallery scene has also been expanding, welcoming new spaces, including the Brazilian gallery Almeida & Dale and dynamic new prospects such as the whimsically named Laura (the gallery). Founder Laura Burton is a seasoned art professional who moved to Houston after a few years working in New York galleries. Houston is a much easier city, she pointed out: “In New York, I never had a commute shorter than 30 minutes, and 45 minutes to an hour was pretty normal. Here, my life is contained within a handful of neighborhoods. I can be at the Menil, MFAH, CAMH, Asia Society, Craft Center, HMAC or Lawndale in five minutes. My longest commute is to my gallery in the Heights, about 15 minutes away.”
This translates into another, more generative proximity between artists, industry professionals and collectors. “We hang out in each other’s homes. You might meet an artist or curator for the first time in your bathing suit at a pool party,” she joked, noting how that casualness and accessibility, combined with the aforementioned physical proximity, make for unusually easy relationship building. “Sometimes I think that Houston’s art scene must be what SoHo felt like in the ’60s and ’70s. Our art world is compressed here, and I think that’s a great thing,” Burton added, recalling how recently she went to a curator’s birthday party at Neon Boots, a queer line-dancing and karaoke hall, and the room was full of artists, curators, collectors, gallerists and museum directors, all dancing together under a cowboy-boot-shaped disco ball, which was “very Houston.”
BARBARA DAVIS GALLERY at Untitled Art Houston 2025. Courtesy the gallery
The city is also enormous and growing, with people arriving as major industries put down roots. “There is an extraordinary concentration of people doing incredibly ambitious things,” she went on, sharing how a friend, a fashion designer from New York, moved here to work on the spacesuit for the next crewed lunar mission. “My last opening was filled with hot young gays who moved to Houston for their careers. I meet newcomers more often than I meet people who grew up here. Houston is a city of transplants, and I think that constant influx makes the cultural fabric richer.”
There is, of course, serious economic power behind all of this. “If Texas were a country, its economy would rank among the 10 largest in the world, but Houston has always had this funny disconnect between what exists here and how the city is perceived from the outside,” according to Burton. “Houstonians know what they have, and frankly, I don’t think they’ve ever been terribly concerned with whether everyone else knows it. I moved here from New York, thinking I was leaving the center of the universe. Houston doesn’t seem particularly concerned with being anyone’s center. It still feels a little like a best-kept secret.”
Shuling Guo, Booth A28, Untitled Houston 2025. © Alex Barber, courtesy the gallery
Since opening last year, Laura (the gallery) has been growing sustainably. Burton had a particularly successful Untitled last year, with a solo presentation of Shuling Guo that sold out and placed a painting in the collection of the Dallas Museum of Art. Other works went to blue-chip collectors from Los Angeles, New York and Asia. “The fair was massive for me last year. I still felt like a newcomer to the scene, and through Untitled I met collectors who became clients and built relationships that continued long after the fair closed,” Burton said.
She will also be showing again this year in the Nest sector, where she will present the work of Raina Lee, whose research-driven practice transforms personal travel, and in particular her recent discovery of Hawaii and its cultural memory, into glazed ceramic “paintings” and postcard-scale wall works. With its more reasonable fees, Nest offers an access point for younger galleries like Burton’s. This year, it will host 24 emerging galleries, artist-run spaces and nonprofit organizations from across the U.S., Latin America, Europe and the state of Texas, including Serious Topics (Los Angeles), CONSTITUCIÓN (Buenos Aires), mimo (Brooklyn), Martha’s (Austin) and Gattopardo (Los Angeles), among others. The sector will also inckude a special presentation of works by alums of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s Core Residency Program.
One of the great advantages Burton has found in having a gallery in Houston is that, since Texas still feels like relatively uncharted territory, she can work with extraordinary artists who might already be represented in New York or Los Angeles. “Running a gallery here is incredibly rewarding,” she said. “I think a lot of that goes back to the extraordinary cultural legacy Dominique de Menil established here.”
Since its first edition, Untitled has had an impressive host committee, including Texas-based philanthropists and collectors such as Jereann Chaney, Suzanne Deal Booth, Judy Nyquist, Melanie Lawson and John Guess Jr., as well as cultural advisors such as Katharine Barthelme, Adam Green and Lea Weingarten. But philanthropist Janet Hobby, who also served on the fair’s host committee, argued that Houston has had a distinctive arts ecosystem well before the arrival of the fair, which is simply adding another layer to its richness by bringing visitors from around the world to town. “We have world-class institutions and collectors who are deeply engaged in what is happening internationally, but there is also a real commitment to supporting Houston and regional artists. I think that combination is what has made the city’s art scene so vibrant,” Hobby said. “Untitled Art is creating opportunities for discovery while giving visiting collectors and arts professionals a deeper understanding of the community that already exists here.”
“Houston’s art scene rivals that of any city in our nation, and it’s great for us to add Untitled Art Houston to the roster of reasons for artists, collectors and patrons from around the country to come visit,” echoed Ben Ackerley, a collector and co-owner of Hotel Daphne, the art hotel that opened in late 2025 with artworks from his family collection. “We built Hotel Daphne to bring a cool boutique hotel to the Heights, finally, but also to be able to have a space to showcase works from our collection by incredible local artists.” This year, they are sponsoring a new $30,000-50,000 acquisition prize at the fair to further their commitment to fostering the local art scene.
Hotel Daphne is a 49-room luxury boutique hotel located in the historic Houston Heights neighborhood that displays 160 pieces from Bob and Nora Ackerley’s private art holdings. Hotel Daphne
As collector Dan Zimmerman told Observer, Houston’s art world doesn’t just live in museums and galleries but increasingly extends to restaurants, hotels and other hospitality structures. “It lives in the places people spend their time,” he said. Zimmerman is co-owner of La Colombe d’Or, another Houston-based boutique hotel featuring work from the owners’ private collection. “At our hotel, guests are surrounded by art before they ever walk into one of the many shows staged in the city.”
To Zimmerman, this evolution of what can be considered a cultural venue is one of the factors that makes Houston different. “There is incredible work happening outside the traditional art circuit that the rest of the world simply hasn’t caught up to yet,” he argued, adding that an international fair like Untitled gives the city an opportunity to shine a light on the depth and energy of an existing art scene.
Owen Duffy, meanwhile, is a curator who recently moved to the city to take over the position of head curator at Asia Society Texas, the largest and most active Asia Society center in the United States. Timed with Untitled, the institution is staging a major show by Yoshitaka Amano, one of the most celebrated illustrators and character designers of our time, responsible for the creative direction of iconic media universes, including the groundbreaking Vampire Hunter D franchise and the beloved Final Fantasy video game saga. Titled “Yoshitaka Amano: Big Bang,” the exhibition surveys approximately 30 years of Amano’s multimedia painting practice through roughly 40 works in oil paint, ink and automotive paint, including New York Nights II (1997), a surreal scene extending more than 50 feet.
For Duffy, it was quite a change to move to Houston, not only because of the city’s sprawling, horizontal topography but also because of the very different pace of life. “If New York is competitive, Houston is collaborative above all, with colleagues across the various institutions genuinely wanting to uplift the city’s art and culture scene collectively,” he told Observer.
Asia Society Texas is the largest Asia Society in the United States, housed in a building designed by Yoshio Taniguchi to architecturally connect east and west. Photo: Paul Hester
Duffy also noted that the city has undergone significant growth since he moved, both in terms of its literal physical transformation and in the maturity and sophistication now circulating through its networks. “When I interviewed for the position at Asia Society Texas, everyone admitted it wasn’t the prettiest place, but it was booming,” he recalled. “The city’s architecture and topography basically embody unchecked growth. However, amid the sprawl in Houston, there is a bubbly, percolating belief in the potential of the city itself, as a laboratory for the future of America, in many senses: demographics, economics, weather, politics and beyond.”
The city has offered him opportunities for growth and to stand out he might not have found elsewhere. “In Houston, if you genuinely want to contribute to the cultural scene, you’ll find like-minded people who want to help you do that. It feels like things can just happen here if you have the passion and drive to execute,” he reflected. “There aren’t barriers in terms of insane real estate costs. Sure, you might not be able to see 100 gallery shows in a day, but you have space for deep, extended and meaningful conversations.”
Duffy also drew a parallel between Houston’s current scene and what New York’s art scene must have felt like during the 1950s and ’60s in terms of social dynamics. “A sprawling city, but a tight-knit art scene. It’s weird, dynamic, and booming,” he said, acknowledging that Untitled has tremendous potential to be a catalyst for energy in the city, activating on a larger regional, national and international scale what was already there. “Houstonians are extremely welcoming, and extremely proud to show off their city as something more than an energy capital. All year I’ve been telling folks that they should come visit for this week (and anytime, really, even the summer—you can see how we truly live in the swamp). And, simply put, last year’s Untitled was just really dang fun.”
Untitled Art Houston brings together an international community of galleries and artists from 20 countries and territories, thereby creating new connections between Houston and the wider art world. Photo: CKA Associates, courtesy of Untitled Art