Arrival Art Fair
The inaugural Arrival Art Fair took place last weekend at Tourists Hotel in North Adams, MA. The brainchild of art world influencers Sarah Galendar of Galendar Art Advisory in San Francisco, Boston-based artist Crystalle Lacouture, and Yng-Ru Chen, owner of Praise Shadows Art Gallery, Arrival convened museum directors, curators, artists, gallerists, writers, collectors and art enthusiasts from across the U.S.
Co-founder Yng Ru Chen introduces a panel titled “University Museums and Their Impact on the Now and Future of Art” featuring (from left) Paul Ha, MIT List Center, Dina Deitsch, Tufts University, Veronica Roberts, the Cantor at Stanford University, moderator Maggie Adler, independent curator, and Pamela Franks, Williams College Museum of Art. Photo: Robin Hauck.
Designed as an alternative to commercial art fairs like Frieze and Art Basel, Arrival assumed the vibe of its Berkshire county setting so that participants enjoyed a days-long experience that felt like an art fair posing as a very friendly, very inclusive summer camp.
All weekend a shared sense of community and hope offset the anxiety plaguing artists and arts organizations as the Trump administration pulls funding and attacks LGBTQA+ and immigrant groups. The art spoke loudly but so did the determination of legions of creative workers who refuse to be silenced, isolated or cowed by current threats.
From left Yng-Ru Chen, Jayna Mikolaitis of Praise Shadows and Bay Area collector Pamela Hornik talk art in front of Rachel Frison’s painting and Cathy Lu’s peach pitted sculpture. Photo: Robin Hauck.
The result of years of collaboration and imagination, Arrival continues the surge of collective work elevating the arts in New England. This sense that “Boston is having a moment” has been building since Jill Medvedow and Eva Respini won the ICA Boston’s bid to represent the United States at the 2022 Venice Biennale with a solo show of work by Simone Leigh, the first Black woman to hold that honor. It’s also powerfully embodied by the success of the Boston Public Art Triennial, Jameson Johnson’s print publication Boston Art Review, and the continued prominence of New England art school graduates from the likes of RISD, MassArt, SMFA Tufts, Yale and Williams College, which had a strong showing in North Adams.
Tourists stretches along one side of State Road across from a Stop & Shop and an Urgent Care. It’s a modern take on a motor lodge with chic guest rooms which Arrival gave over to galleries for the mounting of small exhibitions, communal spaces where programming included “Lodge Talks” and networking, and lush green spaces which provided places to sit and consider how completely different this fair was from any other on the international art fair circuit.
Visitors decide which gallery to visit in one of Tourists’ guest rooms. Photo: Robin Hauck.
Artists Jean Shin and Sharmistha Ray with Ray’s painting Drama Queen, 2025. Photo: Robin Hauck.
Arrival’s founders assembled a world class curatorial advisory board which nominated galleries to be invited. Therefore the over 30 participating galleries came from all across the country and represented an impressive range of mediums, size, mission and region.
Galleries from Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Providence, Minneapolis, Dallas, Austin, Kinderhook and Millerton New York joined those from San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston and New York City. Galleries turned Tourists’ guest rooms into mini exhibition spaces. The full list of curatorial ambassadors and exhibitors can be found on Arrival’s website.
Gallery and artist highlights include:
Margarita Cabrera at Jane Lombard Gallery.
Margarita Cabrera lives in El Paso, TX which she calls “an actual migratory crossroad location of peoples, economies and cultures.” Jane Lombard Gallery showed two of her soft sculptures from the series Space in Between which depict plants found in borderlands. Cabrera hosts community workshops with recent migrants to learn about their transborder experiences and teach them Otomi sewing techniques from Mexico. Their embroidery of words and images decorate the plants, which are created from U.S. Border Patrol uniforms. As U.S. military troops remain deployed in Los Angeles in response to ongoing protests against forced deportation of immigrants, this work felt especially poignant and timely.
Installation view of Jane Lombard Gallery’s room at Arrival Art Fair. Courtesy of the artists and Jane Lombard Gallery, New York. Photo credit: Adam Reich.
Chelsea Ryoko Wong at Jessica Silverman
Chelsea Ryoko Wong’s kitschy, endearing painting Let Them Whizz By, 2025 was one of my favorite pieces at the fair. Something about the flat, stylized characterizations of skiers racing, jumping and wiping out behind two lodge bunnies clad in clashy thermals deepened my gratitude for what Arrival’s convening accomplished. Wong is a San Francisco-based painter who creates compositions inspired by her life in the eclectic, diverse and energetic Bay Area. How often do we see representations of skiing depicting racial diversity? The joy, acceptance and humor of Let Them Whizz By is a direct rebuke against the current climate of division and intolerance characterizing so much social and political discourse.
Let Them Whizz By reminded me that life can be sweet and is full of colorful adventures that make our time on earth extraordinary. I’ve had some of my best life moments on the ski slope with friends. Thank you Jessica Silverman and Chelsea Ryoko Wong for reminding me of those moments and how art powerfully captures them.
Chelsea Ryoko Wong, Let Them Whizz By, 2025. Acrylic on canvas. Photo: Robin Hauck
Detail, Chelsea Ryoko Wong, Let Them Whizz By, 2025. Acrylic on canvas. Photo: Robin Hauck
Sharmistha Ray at Praise Shadows
Sharmistha Ray is an artist, professor at Carnegie Mellon University and one half of the feminist artist collective Hilma’s Ghost. Ray’s artistic practice “delves into the complex inheritance of multiple cultures through their queer identity and modes of historical and contemporary abstraction.” The artist’s paintings dominated the Praise Shadows’ exhibition with their bold colorscapes and compositions. Ray channels ancient mystic traditions, fractal geometries and quantum physics to design complex canvases. Signaling cosmic forces, the works encourages viewers to think beyond language, time and place to dimensions where rational thought dissolves and spirituality connects us.
Next time you find yourself in Grand Central Station be sure to leave time to admire the massive mosaic installation Ray installed with Hilma’s Ghost.
Jean Shin Glimmer of Hope with Powerhouse Arts
Three miles down the road from Tourists, Hotel Downstreet hosted an opening for Jean Shin’s show Glimmer of Hope.
Jean Shin creates public installations and sculptures by accumulating detritus—athletic trophies, vinyl records, cell phones, copper roofing, buttons—and transforming them through intensive collective labor into works of emotional, environmental provocation. Glimmer of Hope, curated by Eric Shiner, included sculptures from the Tidal Witness series featuring vintage mother of pearl buttons sewn individually onto metal and branch armatures. The show also included a Powerhouse Arts Patron Collector print Tidal Reflections (2025).
Paul Ha, Director of MIT List Center, artist Jean Shin, a collector and artist Eva Lundsager at Shin’s exhibition. Photo: Robin Hauck.
Jean Shin, Truth Lasso, 2025. Mother-of-pearl shell buttons, rope, and Hemlock branches from Olana State Historic Site. Photo: Robin Hauck.
Dee Clements at Library Street Collective
The Detroit Gallery Library Street Collective used Arrival as an opportunity to show work by Dee Clements for the first time. Clements makes woven sculptures reminiscent of baskets, vessels and matts, composed of natural fibers dyed using the Japanese method Shibori. Elevating craft traditions to museum quality art, Clement recently started making hand-thrown ceramic bases for some sculptures and creating wall-mounted works on gouache-painted canvases, stretched over bars to resemble looms. Clements’ colors and forefront of process was a striking counterpoint to the thickly painted canvases of Paul Verdell in Library Street’s two person show.
Dee Clements, Lace Ruff Vessel, 2025. Ceramic, bronze glaze, dyed reed reed, polyurethane.13h x 15.5 in diameter and Loom Painting, 2025. Gouache on canvase, dyed reed, polyurethane18h x 20w x 1d in. Photo: Robin Hauck
Dee Clements, Bloom Vessel, 2025. Ceramic, reed, dye, polyurethane.15.5h x 19w in diameter. Photo: Robin Hauck
From Austin, TX, Martha’s Gallery brought work by Ana Villagomez, Cindy Elizabeth, Elizabeth Maria Hudson, and Moll Brau that explored “flow and movement between materials and life.” Via acrylic, watercolor and photography, these artists captured moments of domestic intimacy and emotional release. The room became a quiet respite from the busy fair thanks to careful curation. Molly Brau’s The Giver especially, expressed a humanity and care so necessary for the present moment.
Moll Brau, The Giver, 2025. Acrylic on Linen. 20 x 16 inches. Courtesy Marthas Gallery.
Elizabeth Maria Hudson, Firmament 2, 2025. Watercolor on paper. 21 x 17 inches framed. Courtesy Martha’s Gallery.
Cindy Elizabeth, Release, 2019. Inkjet Prints on Archival Matte. 19.5 x 15 framed. Courtesy Martha’s Gallery.
Arrival Art Fair set out to create an inclusive environment in which art and artistic discourse could thrive. In all ways it accomplished that. To be in the Berkshires with people committed to creative freedom felt motivating given the current political mood. Driving out of North Adams on Saturday we passed a long, energetic line of protesters participating in the Berkshire County "No Kings National Day of Defiance" in solidarity with thousands across the country. The vision gave us a powerful sense of punctuation on a triumphant weekend, enough to keep us energized until the next Arrival in 2027.
*Hero Image: New designs for the Williams College Museum of Art displayed in the bathroom of the Williams College exhibition at Arrival Art Fair. Photo: Robin Hauck.
