Heading Into Frieze, Los Angeles Is Poised Between ‘Grief and Hope’

As the art market looks ahead to its next major tentpole event, the 2026 edition of Frieze Los Angeles this week, LA is marking just over one year since devastating wildfires ripped through parts of the city. 

“There was really a point where we thought the whole city was going to burn down,” said lifelong Angelena Megan Mulrooney, who opened her eponymous gallery there in 2024, in a phone conversation.

“I had two clients whose homes burned to the ground along with their collections,” said adviser Irene Papanestor, who divides her time between New York and LA. “It was such a profound loss.”

“The town is kind of on its ass in ways that worry even us locals,” said one longtime LA dealer, who didn’t want to be named.

“The fires were really traumatizing in so many ways,” said dealer Anat Ebgi, who has a gallery on Wilshire Boulevard and another in New York’s Tribeca neighborhood. Afterward, she said, “The city was in a big depression, whether or not people realized that. We’re just starting to get out of it.”

As for the mood today, Ebgi said, “It’s a mix of grief and hope.”

It’s also eight months since the city was riven by protests over raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), leading to a police crackdown and the historic deployment of 2,000 National Guard soldiers on orders from President Donald Trump. (The unrest yielded iconic images of riot police outside the Museum of Contemporary Art in front of a Barbara Kruger mural asking questions like “Who is beyond the law?”)

Those wounds came amid so many job cuts in the entertainment industry, which drives much of the city’s economy, that Deadline recently started keeping a running list, including news such as layoffs at Netflix, Amazon, and Paramount—those just in the last several months. This follows two big Hollywood strikes, the offshoring that resulted from the Covid-19 pandemic, and the possible Warner Bros. Discovery/Netflix merger. Market insiders point out that film industry people like producers, screenwriters, directors, and others from related industries, who could long be counted on to support galleries and artists, are feeling very vulnerable themselves. 

The art industry has seen cuts locally too, in keeping with a general market downturn. In 2025, Tim Blum shuttered his LA-based gallery (which was also in Tokyo and New York) after 30 years; New York’s Tanya Bonakdar closed her LA space after seven years; and Sean Kelly, also based in New York, ceased shows at the LA outpost he had opened in 2022. 

“LA takes time,” said Ebgi, echoing the perspective of several market insiders who viewed the LA outposts as just that: outposts of another city’s brand that didn’t really participate in the city’s distinctive cultural landscape. All the same, the closures of Bonakdar and Kelly followed a period between 2023 and 2024 when at least ten galleries, some homegrown, shuttered or retrenched, as Artnet News reported at the time. And the damage from the fires was so great that, as Night Gallery founder Davida Nemeroff noted in a phone conversation, philanthropists and everyday citizens alike are blanketed with appeals for support from various charities, possibly undercutting their willingness to prioritize art collecting.

It’s not all doom and gloom. So many new LA galleries and artist-run spaces have hung out a shingle in recent years that some who live there can barely keep track. Among those are Fernberger, Gattopardo, Gene’s Dispensary, Giovanni’s Room, La Loma, Nonaka-Hill, Sea View, Soldes, and Timeshare. 

“What’s so cool about LA,” said Nemeroff, who opened her gallery there 16 years ago, “is you can never predict what is going to be the chicest gallery.”

“There’s a sense of a new guard,” said Mulrooney, noting that several of those up-and-coming galleries are run by women and are doing things differently, often collaboratively. She’s teaming up on a Frieze-week opening dinner with fashion designer Marfa Stance (whose items she described as artworks in themselves), adding that La Loma is partnering on a show with LA stalwart Susanne Vielmetter, just as Sea View is organizing a party with Sebastian Gladstone. 

There’s also excitement on the institutional front as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art will open its Peter Zumthor–designed building to the public in May. The show “Monuments,” at the Brick and the MOCA Geffen, has earned headlines nationally for bringing together decommissioned Confederate monuments and pieces by Kara Walker and other contemporary art stars, and a Robert Therrien show at the Broad is already going viral on social media, with his gigantic versions of everyday items.

So it is in a unique moment that over 100 galleries hailing from 24 countries convene for Frieze at the Santa Monica Airport February 26–March 1. Notable new L.A. galleries Fernberger and Sea View are making their Frieze debut, as are 15 others. Also on the agenda is the eighth edition of satellite fair Felix, at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, as well as the sophomore outing of Post Fair, organized at the Santa Monica Post Office by LA dealer Chris Sharp, and the inaugural Enzo, bringing nine New York galleries to Echo Park.

Plenty of galleries are staging LA-specific presentations at Frieze. Gagosian will show artists including Chris Burden, Frank Gehry, Ed Ruscha, and Mary Weatherford. Sprüth Magers will show local hero John Baldessari and his students. Pace will bring artists with area history including Mary Corse, David Hockney, and James Turrell. Karma will focus on Norman Zammitt, a lesser-known figure from the California Light and Space movement. 

The wildfires struck so close to the fair’s dates last year that it was up in the air whether Frieze would even happen. All the same, major dealers like Gladstone, Michael Rosenfeld, and David Zwirner had sold works for north of $1 million by the end of the VIP preview, and the general consensus was that the art world rallied to the city’s support in its hour of need. This time around, top galleries are again bringing works in the seven-figure range, or close to it. 

Gladstone (New York, Brussels, and Seoul) is bringing a 7-foot-high Alex Katz painting, Jamian 7 (2026), that’s marked at $1 million. It’s a portrait of artist and sometime gallerist Jamian Juliano-Villani (who, New Yorker readers recently learned, is taking a break from art-making and seeking a day job).

New York’s Michael Rosenfeld Gallery is bringing a wide selection of works on the theme of the intersection of music and art in 20th-century American art, by artists from Benny Andrews to William T. Williams, with eight works in excess of $1 million, including examples by Romare Bearden, Sam Gilliam, Bob Thompson, and Charles White.

The globe-spanning Gagosian is bringing works by Frank Gehry, Ed Ruscha, and Wayne Thiebaud, all tagged in the six- to seven-figure range, among other artists.

Pace will present James Turrell’s installation Carat and Schtik (2021), a never-before-exhibited work from the artist’s “Glassworks” series, exploring the sensory perception of space and color. It’s priced at $950,000.

It remains to be seen whether LA’s straitened market can absorb all those seven-figure works, but for her part, Mulrooney sees a new generation of collectors from the Millennial and Gen Z cohort stepping up, some of them coming from the real estate and finance industries, which may cushion the blow from the downturn in the entertainment field.

“Yes, lots of galleries closed or decided that LA is not for them,” said Night Gallery’s Nemeroff. “But there’s a very strong artist community and people are still here, still making work.”

Despite all the bad news, said Ebgi, “There’s still a hunger for art.”