At Felix Art Fair 2025, the Los Angeles Art Community Unites After the Fires

It’s hard to think of a more crucial moment for Felix Art Fair than right now. Since its debut in 2018, the fair has championed the Los Angeles community with a culture-specific, approachable ethos that feels distinctly of its home city: laid-back, yet fervently engaged. It’s this communal aspect of the fair that is more important than ever just weeks after the devastating Eaton and Palisade fires struck through the nearby Southern California neighborhoods.

As the cost of the fires—which have claimed more than 40,000 acres of land and more than 10,000 homes across Los Angeles County—continues to be counted, the L.A. art scene has shown its resilience and perseverance, as artists, galleries, and institutions united in a series of fundraising and relief efforts. Felix, which sits in the middle of a week of art events in Los Angeles, decided, along with Frieze and the new art fair Post-Fair, that it would carry on with its initial plans. This decision, borne from consultations with local arts stakeholders, underscored its foundational principle: to be a fair for and by the L.A. community.

“The whole idea of the fair is to be welcoming,” Mills Morán, co-founder of Felix and Los Angeles gallery Morán Morán, told Artsy. “This wasn’t a decision we made unilaterally. This was feedback from everyone in the arts community—from art workers to artists, gallerists, and fabricators. Everybody was overwhelmingly in favor of pushing forward with a week like this. This is the first moment where people are going to be together.”

Indeed, on February 19th, at 11 a.m., the fair’s seventh edition attracted an eager crowd to the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel for its VIP day. This year’s edition of the fair hosts more than 60 exhibitors within the poolside cabanas surrounding the hotel’s iconic David Hockney–designed pool and the suites on the 11th and 12th floors. And, while the hotel felt less crowded than last year’s iteration, a steady stream of fairgoers continued to meander in to enjoy cocktails by the pool and browse the galleries throughout the day. Among the celebrity attendees were generational heartthrobs—from pop star Troye Sivan to the timeless Henry Winkler (Fonzie from Happy Days)—who made their way through the booths. Julia Fox was also spotted engaging with several gallerists around the cabanas.

The fair’s emphasis on its locality is immediately apparent as visitors enter the lobby of the hotel, where LA AYUDA Network is presenting “Foundations.” The benefit exhibition features more than 100 artist-made stones and ephemera meant to symbolize local community. These stones are priced on a sliding scale between $125 and $500, and all proceeds will be donated to underresourced communities.

Throughout the fair’s VIP day, presentations from Los Angeles–based galleries were among the busiest booths, with gallerists keen to emphasize the importance of the fair to the city’s art ecosystem.

Among the galleries circling the pool is local stalwart Nicodim. The poolside cabana features a “smorgasbord of our best and brightest,” according to the gallery’s partner Ben Lee Ritchie Handler. At the center of the booth is Isabelle Albuquerque’s sun flower (2024), a delicate bronze flower sprouted from a piece of Pacific live oak. Scattered throughout the booth are humanoid stoneware sculptures by L.A.-based artist Stanley Edmondson. Works in the booth are priced between $5,000 and $45,000.

Sales took off quickly for the gallery. “The vibes are off the charts. Business is great,” said Handler. “We actually had three collectors that we told no holds [on a particular piece by Devin B. Johnson]. We had three people running to the booth at 11 a.m. to come in, and the people that didn’t get the painting they wanted got other things.” Johnson’s sought-after piece, A Curious Shade Fell Upon Thy Brother’s Countenance (2025), sparked a rush of eager collectors, with the first to arrive securing it.

Handler emphasized the importance of recognizing Los Angeles’s resolve as an arts community. “It’s really easy to get jaded in this business, but when something like that happens, it reminds you why we do it,” said Handler. “Everybody that comes here has realized that we don’t need charity. We need energy, and people have really brought that.”

Elsewhere along the pool, West Hollywood’s M+B introduced a group of emerging artists from Brazil participating in the gallery’s residency program, Domo Damo. This initiative aligns with an upcoming exhibition opening on Friday, which features both historical and contemporary artists. The showcase includes works by Gustavo Caboco, Lu Ferreira, Lucas Almeida, Luciano Maia, Mateus Moreira, and Thiago Molon, with prices ranging from $6,000 to $30,000. Above all, M+B founder Benjamin Trigano emphasized the fair’s significance to the city: “It was much needed [after] what’s happened. We needed this energy to come back because everybody was so devastated, and this is a little hope for us,” he said.

Up the elevators, local tastemaker Megan Mulrooney is showcasing work by 80-year-old Los Angeles artist Nick Taggart. The gallerist, who opened her eponymous space last year, underscored how proud she is of the city’s collective efforts to support artists impacted by recent fires.

“Even if we were worried about it being light foot traffic, it felt important to be part of it and show that in solidarity, that we’re still here,” said Mulrooney. “Art unites. It brings people together. It’s a common place to discuss feelings and thoughts and also to lean in and talk about grief.”

Taggart, whose commercial work was mainly conceived in the 1970s and ’80s, is widely influential while being unrecognized by the art world at large. Despite this, he has maintained an impressive archive of his work, providing a vital link to the city’s past. “The nostalgia that people feel while looking at this work is really because this is how they understand Los Angeles without even knowing it,” said Mulrooney, noting that much of Taggart’s career had been spent making similar drawings as “cultural exports” for various magazines and publications. His works on paper, priced between $4,500 and $10,500, are shown along with a standout painting valued at $25,000, Larger Than Life (1987), a painting of a dog in a living room. These works are a snapshot of the city’s history, giving fairgoers a chance to tap into the cultural core of Los Angeles.

“The community is unlike any other,” said Mulrooney. “They’ve come together, raised millions of dollars for those affected in the fire through arts initiatives, through not only the Getty, but all of the museums, [which] have banded together and thought about how they can support artists who have lost not only their houses but their livelihoods.”

As a visitor, Miami-based Nina Johnson made an effort to understand what the local community needed. “It’s always hard as an outsider, coming into a city, but we spoke with a lot of our colleagues that have galleries here and other artists that are in L.A., and the feeling was ‘We want people here. This is the moment to come and rally,’” said founder Nina Johnson.

The gallery staged a group presentation in a poolside cabana featuring the works of L.A.-based artist Tara Walters, who lost her home in the fires. A standout is Blue (For Jack Bendes) (2025), which depicts a giant blue dolphin jumping above the ocean. Walters is known for her process-driven approach: She often pours ocean water over acrylic-painted canvases, allowing the drying patterns to shape her imagery.

The gallery is also showing several sculptural works made with denim jeans by Christy Gast and giant stoneware vessels by L.A.-based artist Jasmine Little. New York–based artist Madeline Donahue also provided ceramic vases, actively decorating the cabana. Each vase is priced at $1,000, and prices for works in the gallery’s booth stretch to $30,000.

After speaking with galleries and artists in Los Angeles, Portland-based ILY2 took a similar attitude and decided to rethink its group presentation at the fair. Instead of its original proposal of rostered artists, the gallery curated a group show of L.A.-based artists Leena Similu, Amanda Ross-Ho, Beatrix Fowler, and Isabel Yellin, with works priced between $4,500 and $30,000.

“We really wanted to talk to the local community, and check out with artists and and see how everyone here felt,” said gallery director Rosie Motley. “The feedback [from Los Angeles] was emphatically like, ‘We want people to show up!’”

In the suite’s smaller room, the gallery also wanted to curate a selection of editions, design objects, and books to “emphasize accessibility” in an art fair setting. Standout pieces include prints by Eve Fowler and stoneware by Martie Kilmer. These works, from a selection of gallery artists, are priced under $600 apiece.