The New Art Dealers Alliance, in partnership with The Community, will launch a new fair in Paris in October that will serve as a satellite event to Paris+ par Art Basel, which is now in its third edition. Called The Salon by NADA and The Community, the new fair will run October 17–20 in the city’s 10th arrondissement, with the location to be announced later this year.
“The scene there just seems to be expanding so much,” Heather Hubbs, NADA’s executive director, told ARTnews. “The board and I have talked about for a long time, as you know, expanding the fairs to outside the United States and there’s been a lot of conversations about where to go.”
Hubbs said NADA had considered launching in Europe, Asia, and Latin America, and they had polled the group’s membership, with Paris being among the top cities that dealers would like a new fair to launch. The fair’s previous partnership with the German fair Art Cologne, from 2013 to 2016, on a section of the latter’s fair called Collaborations, was also part of the decision-making, as it had brought NADA a “kind of exposure in Europe was really good for the organization.”
NADA currently hosts two US fairs, in Miami and New York, which returned in 2023 after a hiatus beginning in 2018. The Paris fair, which will be by invitation, will be much smaller than the two fairs, with an estimated 50 galleries expected to participate, compared to the 130 or so in Miami and the nearly 100 in New York. Bringing together a mix of exhibitors from the networks of both NADA and the Community, the new fair also plans to eschew the typical layout of art fairs of false walls and roomy aisles.
“The nature of partnering with another group on an event like this is not something that we’ve done in this way before, and The Community has a sort of ethos of their own which is DIY and punk rock,” Hubbs said.
The Community, which has a physical space in the Parisian suburb of Pantin and has also mounted exhibitions around the city for the likes of Tom of Finland and Tove Jansson, had previously hosted two editions of an alternative fair, Salon de Normandy, in 2019 and 2020. (Last October, during Paris+, NADA hosted a party as a soft launch for their collaboration.)
“NADA and The Community are very synergistic, and I think we’re going to build something really cool together, which will be a little bit different than Paris International and, obviously, Paris+,” Hubbs said. “There were a lot of things that kind of came together at the right moment that just felt good.”
