Like many good ideas, the story of the Future Fair begins with brainstorming – in particular, Rachel Mijares fantasizes about giving back her ideas about what the art fair should be with what she sees in the market. “I was just playing with these ideas at first. I just put them out and put them in documents and then save them in folders on my desktop called “Future Art Fair” instead of thinking about it becoming a real business.” From the beginning, Mijares Fick and her co-founder Rebeca Laliberte wanted to address the growing frustration in small and emerging galleries that priced in the Blue Chip Fair ecosystem as they tried to find a foothold during the city’s Spring Art Week.
Both served as exhibitors a few years ago, bringing deep industry experience, including gallery business and art fair production. The basic idea is to create a collaborative platform that grants sustainable visibility to young dealers while recruiting new collector waves – those seeking more accessible entrances to enter a frequently-emerging industry. “We wanted to create something high enough to attract experienced customers in the art world, but it's also easy to get, approachable and exciting for our generation of consumers,” Laliberte said.
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Together they began sketching a new show in 2018, which was built for truly emerging dealers. “We spent two years bringing face-to-face performances to life due to the 2020 pandemic, which became a big part of the fair story in the future.”
Telling the right story is crucial to the enduring power of the fair. It started during the pandemic and sounded out of place, but it was an opportunity for forward thinking from the start. “We did a digital show instead of in-person shows, which allowed us to even develop many things that were interesting before. We are thinking about digital campaign strategies, questioning how to attract new audiences on Instagram, thinking about how we create campaigns around artists and dealers at artists and dealers, and dabble in storytelling Millennials and X Collectors collectors of X Collectors of X Collectors,” Laliberte sexed offer offer of lalaliberte Interated.
In the early days, they looked at how contemporary brands communicated with younger audiences, providing not only a product but also a symbolic value that could be incorporated into personal identity. “We ask ourselves: Why don’t we build experiences with art … the experiences of falling in love with artists’ practice,” Mijares Fick said. “We are very proud to pioneer this in the industry because I think our generation of collectors are extremely valuable.” The result is the first model for storytelling, starting with the founding gallery of Q&F, introducing dealers as relevant, enthusiastic peers. “We want people outside the art world to understand its challenges, but it's a passionate project to run such a business,” Laliberte added. The strategy extends to artists, who shoot in studios and present entrepreneurs themselves. Laliberte reflects: “I didn’t know what the profession in the art world is like until I moved to London.” Part of attracting a new generation of fair people involves humanizing dealers, artists and the art industry as a whole.
Right now, Mijares Fick and Laliberte encourage participating galleries to work together to collaborate on each other through collaborative presentation at the fair. “It was a very interesting, but also very groundbreaking experiment,” Lalibert said. “Some exhibitors worked closely together; they shared shipping costs and even commissions.” For smaller dealers and dealers from underrepresented backgrounds, it was a way to thrive despite rising costs and fierce competition across levels. “At the heart of us, this sense of collaboration is always that, and it’s what really defines us.” Future Fair also explores a unique model of collaboration fairness that accepts collaboration by pairing exhibitors at sixteen booths.
This spirit of collective effort is not only encouraged—it is institutionalized. Unlike many fairs, future fairs will not be cut from exhibitors. Instead, expenses are used to cover operations, which mainly generate profits from ticketing sales and sponsorships. Mijares Fick and Laliberte even launched a four-year profit model involving the founding gallery in 2020. Future Fair has provided $35,000 in grants to support emerging and diverse exhibitors between 2023 and 2025, and this year, Future Fair is expanding its Payment IT Forward Fund to allocate 15% of its profits to emerging dealers who will not be able to attend New York this week.
“With direct experience, we understand the costs involved in all these small galleries, to attend an expo in New York City,” said Mijares Fick. “We know it’s a huge investment, but it’s also an investment with significant potential for returns, because New York City is a unique cultural melting pot.”
This year, Future Fair welcomes a record 69 exhibitors, including international galleries from Canada and participants in the first New York Expo in cities such as Detroit, Houston, Santa Fe and San Juan. “We have a great story about exhibitors who just opened the door six months ago, published a rapid growth in the New York Times and now owns space in the city,” Lalibert said. “We are proud to be involved in it all.” Artlogic also supports new exhibitor grants, while the 21C Museum Hotel is committed to sponsoring the Acquisition Awards.
Experiments remain at the heart of the spirit of the fair, with pop-ups being recently implemented in the Los Angeles pop-up window at the collector’s home in Santa Monica. “It’s important that we have to try the model and how to work together,” Mijares Fick stressed. “When you think about the future, I think you have to think about experimentation and adventure, which is always going hand in hand.” She said they keep reimagining and reshaping what the art fair can and should be. ”
While the founders of Future Fair do not want to scale up, they focus on retaining the curatorial quality of their choice, they do want more fun, smaller, smaller dealers to advocate nationally and internationally. Since last year, Future Fair has actually introduced a curator committee that includes notable names in the New York art ecosystem in 2025, such as PPOW Director Eden Deering, art historian and independent curator Margarita Lila Rosa and Dr. Jenée Daria Strand, assistant curator of the Public Arts Foundation.
Although Future Fair continues to feel rooted in New York, it attracts an increasing number of exhibitors from other U.S. cities and communities. “It's exciting to visit these cities, bring them to the fair and make a sound in New York City,” said Mijares Fick. But this expansion comes with conditions. “If we are going to do something, it has to be real and intentional. If we are going to try models or enter new markets, or if we are developing marketing activities, then this feeling of authenticity and intentionality of the future can be achieved through everything, and that’s done by really entering the community and collaborating on a real level.”
