Following its Texas debut in 2025, Untitled Art returned to Houston, opening its second edition to VIPs on Oct. 1 at the George R. Brown Convention Center. This year’s exhibitor list topped out at 98 galleries, with a healthy balance of local names, national players and international galleries across market tiers, all drawn by the current surge of dynamism and wealth as aerospace, tech and manufacturing companies continue to put down roots. NASA, Axiom and SpaceX have long operated locally, and Apple just opened a new manufacturing facility in the city.
Untitled Art’s Texas fair grew out of years of conversations with Houston art-world insiders and local government. From the outset, the idea was not to transplant the Miami fair to Houston but to build something more context-specific: an event that could integrate with the city’s existing cultural fabric, giving local galleries and artists greater visibility while bringing international offerings directly to Texan collectors, thereby testing the depth of a still-evolving buyer base.
Compared with last year, the fair improved markedly in creativity, buzz and reach. Sprawling it may be, but Houston operates in many ways via word-of-mouth dynamics more similar to those of a village, and in 2026, collectors and patrons stepped up to spread the word. Since its first edition, Untitled Art has assembled an impressive host committee of local supporters, 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. As collector and philanthropist Janet Hobby, another host committee member, told Observer ahead of the fair, “Untitled Art is creating opportunities for discovery while giving visiting collectors and arts professionals a deeper understanding of the community that already exists here.”
Installation view: “Dear Daphne: A Stationery Show,” staged at a former Flower shop in Houston. Photo Elisa Carollo
The week opened with a flower-filled party for “Dear Daphne: A Stationery Show,” staged in a former flower shop recently acquired by Ben Ackerley, owner of the Hotel Daphne across the street and several other nearby buildings—hinting at a cohesive vision for the future of the area. Organized with Seven Sisters, Megan Mulrooney Gallery and New York-Los Angeles outfit Half Gallery, the show featured works on paper commissioned on Hotel Daphne letterhead, all the same size and each priced at $400 in a deliberately accessible, democratic gesture toward local collectors. The works hung amid traces of the shop’s previous life—retro typewriters, lists of funeral homes, gardening tools—that preserve the history of the place and, by extension, a piece of the history of the city itself.
Ackerley has supported the fair and its role in the city from the beginning, and this year he launched an acquisition award. “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,” he told Observer. “Seeing the growing number of galleries participating in Untitled Houston, and the caliber of work being exhibited, really helps shine the spotlight on Houston as a world-class art city.”
He was not the only Houstonian excited about the event. When the fair opened its doors at 3 p.m., the aisles filled first with many of the faces seen at VIP events earlier in the day—a meditation at the Rothko Chapel, a visit to the private collection of Houston collector and patron Marita Fairbanks and a studio visit with Houston-based artist Nestor Topchy—before a broader, but notably affluent local crowd arrived. More than one dealer told Observer that last year the fair had felt largely invisible across the city. Another recalled a collector saying that it had seemed like an outsider fair that had simply landed downtown, in a part of the city Houstonians don’t often frequent, hosting events in places where they don’t usually socialize and without enough of the local artists and galleries they knew and wanted to support.
This year felt different. Local galleries and talent had a stronger presence across sections, and the programming showed deeper collaboration with Houston institutions and cultural players. Nineteen galleries were Texas-based with 12 new and returning exhibitors that have roots in Houston, including the longstanding Barbara Davis Gallery, Moody Gallery, Laura, David Shelton Gallery, Mitochondria Gallery, Dimmitt Contemporary Art, Seven Sisters, F Magazine and Lima-based Revolver Galería, which recently opened a permanent Houston location. The Artists Market section made room for independent spaces, nonprofits and artist-led initiatives embedded in the city’s scene, giving the fair a more porous connection to the surrounding arts ecosystem.
“For a fair like Untitled Art Houston to really succeed, the local community has to feel invested in it and feel a responsibility to support it,” art advisor Adam Green told Observer, noting that this second edition was moving in that direction. “The revised layout was well received, opening day felt noticeably better attended than last year, and there was a stronger sense of momentum around the fair week. With institutions like MFA Houston and the Menil, along with a strong community of collectors and arts supporters, Houston has the ingredients to sustain an annual art fair. If the fair can continue to improve the quality of its exhibitors and programming each year, I think it has the potential to become a great annual fair for Texas.”
Laura (the gallery) presenting Reina Lee. Photo: Graham W. Bell
Many of Houston’s younger dealers were concentrated in Nest, the section dedicated to emerging galleries. Among them was Laura Burton, founder of Laura (the gallery), who greeted visitors in visibly high spirits. Several of Raina Lee’s engraved and painted ceramic postcards from Hawaii found buyers in the opening hours, if not before the fair began. By the 9 p.m. close, the gallery reported a nearly sold-out booth, with 19 of Lee’s glazed ceramic “paintings” and postcard-scale wall works sold for $2,000-9,000 each and five more on hold. Buyers included museum trustees, returning collectors and new clients from Texas and beyond.
Burton, who moved to Houston from New York two years ago and opened her gallery last year, is an example of how investing real time in this city can pay off—and of how hard it might have been to build the same sustainable growth so quickly in Manhattan. “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,” she told Observer ahead of the fair. “Coming back for our second year, it’s been especially rewarding to see. As a young gallery, we find that every new relationship takes work, so seeing those connections grow—and meeting people who already know our program—means a great deal.”
Also in Nest, Houston gallery Seven Sisters mounted a whimsical solo booth by Houston-based artist Emily Peacock that unfolds as a fragmented, diaristic account of everyday life in Texas. Hovering between playfulness, humor and a nostalgic, often disenchanted contemplation of the fleeting nature of every moment, this constellation of variously framed photographs examines family relationships and domestic life while reading the Texas landscape and lived experience through the lenses of womanhood and motherhood. Moving fluidly between seemingly disjointed frames—portraits, staged symbolic still lifes and fragments gathered while traversing the mundane landscape—Peacock’s semiotic and narrative strategy recalls Wolfgang Tillmans, whom she cites as a major reference, filtered here through a distinctly feminine perspective. She stages different ways of seeing and feeling at once, exploring how images acquire meaning through context, intimacy, scale, repetition and circulation, much like the shifting frames of memory itself. On opening day, the gallery placed three photographs with established collectors at $1,200-8,000, alongside playful artist-designed merchandise, including postcards and small objects priced at $10-175.
Seven Sisters. Photo: Silvia Ros
Fresh from the Armory Show, San Juan project space Hidrante brought to Houston an intriguing dialogue between paintings by Houston-born Vietnamese artist Alex Nguyễn-Vó and photographs by Puerto Rican photographer Mara Corsino. Together, the works treat car culture in Houston and Puerto Rico as a metaphor for America’s capitalist race toward progress, driven by the persistent myth of endless self-optimization, mobility and efficiency. A video exploring competition, self-realization and capitalism sharpened the tension between aspiration and disenchantment. Prices ranged from roughly $2,000 to $6,000.
Montreal-based Blouin Division spotlighted two rising First Nations artists, staging a dialogue between Caroline Monnet’s cosmological geometric abstractions, built from industrial construction materials, and Renée Condo’s colorful beadwork compositions. The pairing revisits a conversation first staged in a 2025 exhibition organized by Night Gallery at Sidecar, its Los Angeles project space, which juxtaposed industrial materials with deeply rooted ancestral traditions. With a growing international institutional presence, Monnet is also featured in “Radiant Geometries: Vectors of Knowledge from the Indigenous Americas” at Rice University’s Moody Center for the Arts, a thoughtfully curated group exhibition exploring Indigenous knowledge systems and their longstanding relationships with mathematics, science and technology across the Americas. Canadian galleries still face high cross-border costs, but Blouin Division had brought the works into the U.S. earlier, giving it more breathing room to participate in American fairs this season. Monnet’s works were priced at roughly $5,000-20,000, while Condo’s more accessible pieces ranged from $4,000 to $6,000, with several placed during VIP day. The gallery will present a solo booth of new works by Monnet at Frieze London.
Blouin Divisin. Courtesy Blouin Division
The use of geometry to reactivate and transmit Indigenous knowledge and spirituality was also central to the booth of Lima-based CRISIS, which presented the luminous abstractions of Luz Maritha Rodríguez. A member of the Iskonawa, a critically endangered Panoan-speaking Indigenous community of roughly 100 people in the Ucayali region of the Peruvian Amazon, Rodríguez draws on patterns that had nearly disappeared and were recently recovered through conversations between younger women and female elders. Using natural pigments, she translates these motifs, historically embedded in tattooing, utilitarian objects and other forms of material culture, into paintings deeply connected to the land. The canvases were priced at roughly $15,000-28,000. The booth paired Rodríguez with Raúl De Silva, whose fragmented paintings on wood and canvas reconstruct scenes from works lost in a church fire, turning historical loss into a formal strategy that exposes not only what disappeared but also the ruptures and absences produced by colonial presence and cultural erasure.
Geometry as a means of retracing and repositioning the relationship between humans and the natural world reappears in the work of Kelly Tapia Chuning, a Xicana artist with Indígena ancestry from the Sonoran Desert and Sierra Madre. Chuning dismantles and reimagines the traditional Mexican serape as a site of decolonization, revealing histories and erasures while reviving ancestral knowledge and the spiritual bonds between humans, nature and the cosmos. Presented in Nest by Santa Fe gallery Kouri + Corrao, her Ancient One / Ocotillo Relative / Blood Memories / Sacred Bonds (2025), a work tied to ideas of the heart and healing, was selected by the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center for its $20,000 acquisition prize at the fair and will enter the new Cancer Center as part of its Art Experience Program. MD Anderson also acquired a work by Michelle Blade from Night Gallery.
Kouri + Corrao presenting Kelly Tapia Chuning. Courtesy Kouri + Corrao
London gallery Chilli Art Projects brought a solo booth by Indian artist Naresh Kumar, whose work stages a dialogue between inherited traditions and the contemporary politics of extraction. Using mica sourced from Bihar and Jharkhand, Kumar folds the material history of mining into broader questions about technology, ownership and the human relationship to natural resources, while deep arterial reds—evoking both blood and earth—lend the works an almost spiritual charge. Elephants and snakes recur as figures without fixed nationality or geography, while layers of old Yellow Pages introduce an earlier system of cataloguing and ordering the world beneath a pigment now embedded in global supply chains stretching from mineral extraction to semiconductors and A.I. Shipping delays left the booth more minimal than intended, yet the presentation was nearly sold out by the end of the first day, with the gallery still awaiting additional works. With prices ranging from $5,500 to $49,000, Kumar also won the University of Houston Public Art System Acquisition Prize.
Further down, the experimental São Paulo gallery Yehudi Hollander-Pappi presented a contained, minimalist booth of shaped monochrome canvases by Caio Carpinelli. Projecting into the space almost like portals, their polished black surfaces still reveal the human touch—the errors, irregularities and visible brushstrokes beneath the monochrome—while their sheen catches and reflects the surrounding environment. The result is a meditation on seeing itself and on how perception shifts with the body’s position, the senses and the psyche within a given space.
With their austere, minimalist lexicon, these are not the works one might immediately associate with a Brazilian artist, but Carpinelli grew up in an industrial area of São Paulo and has spoken about being inspired by moonlight reflecting off industrial structures at night, the only landscape available to him after long hours of work. His paintings tap into a subconscious register that precedes symbolization and codification, redirecting attention to the immediate experience of perception before reality is named or interpreted. The gallery first introduced his work in São Paulo in a two-person show pairing it with Bruce Nauman’s investigations into the phenomenology of space and the body. The works are priced at $6,000-10,000, and one of the rounded paintings sold to a Brazilian museum.
Yehudi Hollander-Pappi presenting Caio Carpinelli. Photo: Silvia Ros
Other presentations hinted at a renewed need for tactility amid the increasingly disembodied, desensitized mode of perception that technology induces. A standout example is Charles Hickey, presented in a solo booth by L.A. gallery Feia. Hickey works with a 3D pen—a handheld tool that extrudes colored plastic—almost as a kind of paint, building forms layer by layer before returning to them by hand with oils and acrylics. The result can resemble icing piped onto a cake, but conceptually the process is closer to re-embodying the fabric of an image, reassembling iconic paintings mark by mark as though trying to “etch” them back into his mind through making.
As he explained to Observer, this interplay between painting and sculpture grew out of the frustration of going to a museum, looking closely, taking photographs and later realizing how much of the encounter had vanished from memory. His art attempts to rematerialize that experience as a tangible, highly tactile presence. There is something Cézanne-like in the approach—not stylistically but philosophically and semiotically, in its insistence on the construction of perception. His still lifes suggest that an apple is never simply the same apple; it takes on different meanings as it passes from object to symbol, image and art-historical reference, moving between personal and shared cultural memory.
The new works respond directly to Houston, mining the Menil Collection and the Rothko Chapel and rebuilding fragments of the canon through a materially eccentric process that collapses painting, sculpture and design. With prices ranging from $1,250 to $14,000, the booth was nearly sold out by 5 p.m., mostly to Texas-based collectors, including members of Menil Collection committees and advisory boards. One work was also acquired through Park House Houston’s prize at the fair, building momentum ahead of Hickey’s solo show at Feia in January.
In the main section, Houston stalwart Barbara Davis presented an installation-heavy booth featuring the adiabatic structures of Miguel Ángel Madrigal and delicate installations by Yuriko Yamaguchi, who also has a show at the gallery through October 17. Also on view were the fluid, rounded compositions of Vargas-Suarez Universal and Eduardo Portillo’s more geometric, three-dimensional abstractions, all drawing early interest from local collectors.
Other Houston galleries reported notable early sales, with Moody Gallery selling Mary McCleary’s Felt the Wound for $80,000 and McClain Gallery placing Dorothy Hood’s Tixo in the Morning with a local collector for $95,000. Los Angeles-based Night Gallery also returned this year, selling works by Tomashi Jackson in the $80,000-100,000 range on the heels of her recent major survey at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, which traced a decade of her socially engaged practice.
Ackerley acquired one of Emma Beatrez’s symbolically charged paintings of fiery cheerleading rituals through the Hotel Daphne’s acquisition prize, which allocated $30,000-50,000 toward purchases at the fair as part of the hotel’s broader commitment to Houston’s art scene. Presented by Hair + Nails at $6,000-14,000, the Minneapolis-based artist continues to gain momentum among collectors and is also the subject of a nearly sold-out exhibition at the gallery’s recently opened New York location. Anchored by recognizable imagery—cheerleaders, chandeliers, flames, faces and fragments of pop culture—her uncanny canvases have a seductive, almost witchy quality, hovering between ominous dreams and elusive hallucinations as familiar scenes turn strange, revealing the symbolism and emerging rituals embedded in ordinary American life.
Hair + Nails also showed sculptures by Houston-born Christina Attie Ballantyne, whose rough, almost prehistoric forms carry a geological presence, extending concerns explored in the paintings the gallery showed at last year’s fair. Nearby, Giulia Garcia’s works operate in a more fluid register inspired by her upbringing in the Everglades, turning painting into an unstable repository of memory. Works across the presentation were priced at $4,000-10,000.
Among the most powerful presentations in the main section, Richard Saltoun staged an intergenerational dialogue among women artists united by a distinctly mystical, psychologically charged sensibility, tracing a line from Surrealism to its contemporary afterlives. The gallery reported several early sales, including three works by Bea Scaccia, whose market continues to gather momentum following her solo exhibition curated by Francesco Bonami, which sold out before opening at Gagosian New York. Also among the early sales was a striking Leonora Carrington etching, priced at $40,000, featuring an iconic, almost archetypal image of two mysterious masked figures on horseback.
Another highlight was a recently resurfaced painting by Mexican Surrealist Sofía Bassi, whose biography is almost as extraordinary as her rediscovered work. The painting dates from her incarceration following her 1968 conviction in connection with the death of her son-in-law, a case that remained controversial. During nearly five years in prison, Bassi painted prolifically, producing hundreds of works and developing an increasingly visionary language shaped by alchemy, spirituality and what she described as otherworldly inspiration. Her imagined out-of-body experiences became dreamlike, symbolic compositions that are only now receiving renewed attention in the international market.
Equally rich in symbolism and discoveries was the curated booth of Nassau-based TERN Gallery, returning to Houston with a presentation rooted in Caribbean memory, spirituality and place. Richard Nattoo’s altarpiece-like works and symbolically charged canvases build dreamlike worlds from Jamaican folklore and syncretic belief systems while reviving histories marginalized by colonial narratives. His practice is deeply informed by ancestral spirituality and grounded in the land: the artist incorporates water from a local sacred river and a specific native plant into the works’ wooden elements. The gallery placed four of his works, each priced at $3,500. Also worth watching is Marisa Willoughby-Holland, whose imaginative figuration emerges from a fascinating meeting point between Rousseau’s naïve lushness and something of Frida Kahlo’s intimate symbolism. Raised in the U.K., Willoughby-Holland draws on her Jamaican heritage through an interplay of imagined tropical nature and dissolving memory, exploring longing, belonging and the emotional pull of home. Her work pairs naturally with that of Tessa Whitehead, who similarly turns to the Bahamian bush as a space of femininity, intuition and ancestral connection. Sales were strong for both artists, with three works by Willoughby-Holland ($1,500-5,000) and four by Whitehead (each $1,900) going to private collections in Houston, New York and Fort Lauderdale.
“We are a returning exhibitor to the fair and were pleased to make sales to collectors we met last year, alongside sales to new faces. We also received excellent institutional engagement, and the deep conversations elicited by our program confirmed that Houston has the chops to be a very fruitful space for our gallery and artists,” TERN co-founder Amanda Coulson told Observer. Many visitors, she noted, picked up on affinities between the dense Caribbean landscapes on display and Texas’ bayou country, revealing broader cultural and environmental ties between the American South and the Caribbean.
Marisa Willoughby Holland, After the flood, 2026. Courtesy the artist and TERN, Nassau
Also in the main section, London-based Refusé showcased New Orleans artist Auudi Dorsey with a new series exploring the hidden histories and cultural legacies of jazz and blues while celebrating vibrant Black culture. Developed through research with the New Orleans Jazz Museum, the works examine the forces that contained, influenced and shaped the circulation of these musical forms. In Pick Your Jazz, Dorsey focuses on juke joints, gathering places for Black communities under segregation that later became crucial incubators for jazz and blues. A vintage jukebox advertisement replaces its white model with a Black woman, reclaiming an object named for Black social spaces but later installed in venues that often excluded Black people. Self-taught, Dorsey learned to draw while spending time in his father’s auto shop, eventually developing a style anchored in art history that gives musicians and partygoers the same weight as historical icons. Works are priced at roughly $7,000-20,000, and Pick Your Jazz sold in the opening hours.
Also making its Houston debut was Miami-based Opa Projects, with Camille Marie Dahl’s vibrant, earthy paintings made with marble dust on canvas. The works hover between tactile materiality and a more elusive space of memory and imagination, a tension that carries into the exchange between her new paintings and wood sculptures. Priced at roughly $8,000-20,000, they precede an upcoming presentation at NADA. The gallery paired them with Mbo Maurice’s stratified canvases, which build dense surfaces and layered pictorial fields of metal and paint, priced at approximately $17,000-60,000.
Toronto gallery Devan Patel came to Houston straight from The Armory Show, banking on a strong collector base in Texas built over years at the Dallas Art Fair. Its presentation included works by Mia Sandhu, who draws on the visual language of cinematic props and staged environments to explore dual identity, femininity and the instability of self-image. The gallery also reported strong sales for Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber, placing four works of varying sizes that pair deadpan text with deceptively naïve, cartoonlike visual narratives, priced at roughly $5,000-30,000, along with five watercolors.
The Brazilian presence is strong this edition, with substantial group presentations by Nara Roesler and Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino, which opened a Houston space last year. Several Italian galleries are also showing, including Genoa-based ABC-ARTE and the younger LUPO Lorenzelli, which presented a solo booth of new paintings by Aniela Preston, created specifically for Houston and centered on intimate narratives, layered imagery and memory.
Rome-based Andrea Festa, also making its fair debut, staged a dialogue between Jean-Baptiste Bernadet’s vibrant, shimmering abstractions, each priced at $24,000, and the intimate, psychologically layered figurative portraits of Irish painter Sinéad Breslin, a former mentee of Alex Katz, priced at $6,000-12,000.
Refusés presenting Auudi Dorsey. Courtesy Refusés
Returning to Houston for a second year, Bologna’s Galleria Studio G7 presented a curated booth of Italian artists who share a commitment to small scale, material precision and concentrated looking. Anchoring the presentation are paintings and charcoal works on paper by Giulia Dall’Olio, whose work found a strong reception among local collectors last year. “We felt a stronger connection between the fair and the city,” said gallery founder Giulia Biafore. “From the very first day, we experienced great energy, genuine curiosity, interesting conversations and also sales,” she added, noting that she had been surprised by visitors’ familiarity with Italy, which helped create common ground.
kaufmann repetto came to Houston with the specific goal of placing Simone Fattal’s work with local institutions, sharing the booth—and the same institutional ambitions—with Anton Kern, which is seeking institutional opportunities for the sculptural practice of Brazilian artist Marepe. Kaufmann Repetto is also showing new surreal, body-reassembling compositions by Corydon Cowansage, who was awarded a residency at the new Houston nonprofit PAC Art.
In its second edition, Untitled Art Houston is clearly beginning to find its footing—and, more importantly, its place within the city. Rather than importing an external model, the fair is increasingly positioning itself as a platform that activates Houston’s expanding cultural fabric, bringing in a tightly curated selection of galleries and artists worth watching from elsewhere while giving homegrown talent greater visibility, access and opportunities for connection.