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Neighbors in Chicago Reimagined the Art Fair as a Gilded Age Cultural Salon

Staged inside a Gold Coast apartment, it was a deliberately scaled, curatorially driven alternative to the market-driven spectacle of larger fairs.

Among the many satellite events bringing fresh energy to Chicago this year, Neighbors stood out for its deliberate lack of commercial urgency and prioritization of exchanges between galleries, institutions and ideas. Founded by young collector and patron Mirka Serrato alongside Jonny Tanna, co-founder of the Frieze satellite Minor Attractions in London and Harlesden High Street, the fair defines itself as an intentionally curated platform—one that facilitates institutional exposure for a tightly selected group of galleries, helping them present their artists and programs to local institutions.

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“The fair was conceived as a platform for dialogue and proximity, and it’s been very encouraging to see that reflected in how both galleries and audiences are engaging with the work,” Serrato told Observer, noting that on opening day, Neighbors welcomed leading institutions, including the MCA and the Art Institute of Chicago. “Chicago showed up for us, and we stood proud, backed by the rigor and narratives all of our exhibitors formed together. There’s a strong sense of attention and exchange across the program, which is exactly what we hoped to create within the context of EXPO week.”

Elegantly staged in a Gold Coast apartment, Neighbors unfolds less like a fair than a lived-in exhibition, where palette, scale and thematic tensions are carefully orchestrated against the backdrop of early 20th-century architecture once tied to Chicago’s culture of private patronage. The result is something closer to Design Miami or Salone del Mobile than a conventional boothed fair: a curated domestic environment in which art, interiors and historical space negotiate with one another rather than compete. You might say Neighbors revived Chicago’s Gilded Age cultural salons for the present moment. Across four rooms of the 1,200-square-foot apartment, galleries inhabited the architecture, their presentations unfolding as a sequence of atmospheres rather than a series of stands.

Neighbors, according to Serrato, originated as a response to the structural tension in the broader art system that had become impossible to ignore. Smaller galleries, which do most of the research, struggle for visibility and institutional access, while institutions hesitate to engage at a more experimental level, unsure how to adapt to a rapidly shifting ecosystem without losing authority. Neighbors stepped in to bridge that gap in a way that’s unapologetically anchored in Chicago’s art scene. “That’s essential,” she emphasized, describing the city not just as a launchpad but as a grounding framework—historical, personal and strategic.

From there, the concept of “neighbors” stretches outward. In returning exhibition-making to a residential scale historically linked to patronage, Serrato cites Peggy Guggenheim as a reference point, noting how she built a platform that bridged two worlds—the U.S. and Europe, institutions and the avant-garde grassroots practices that would eventually define the canon. “She did a wonderful job establishing that through collecting, but I don’t have the means to collect at that level,” Serrato said. Instead, she created Neighbors as a different kind of intervention: one that facilitates circulation—of attention, of resources, of opportunity—rather than accumulation. The aim is to bring together galleries that demonstrate discipline, strong artist representation and prior institutional engagement, presenting them within a context that feels serious, elegant and intellectually rigorous and, crucially, legible to institutions.

After leaving a finance role that no longer aligned with her creative ambitions, she pursued further education at Sotheby’s and spent a year moving through the art circuit, mapping its structural gaps and building relationships. That research underpins the Neighbors model, which privileges intimacy, access and long-term ecosystem building over scale and spectacle.

The curation of the space emerged in close dialogue with participating galleries, as confirmed by Broc Bleve, owner of the Lower East Side experimental space Post Times and one of the fair’s 15 exhibitors. Bleve accepted the invitation precisely because of its intentional format, seeing it as an opportunity to connect meaningfully with both collectors and institutions in the city. Post Times brought Andrew Chapman’s blurred, post-digital, airbrushed panel paintings into the apartment’s living room, alongside Richard Maguire’s intricate drawings examining colonial tensions and the intersections of sexuality and politics. In keeping with the space’s history, Maguire’s series centers on the largely forgotten figure of Ram Gopal, a charismatic pioneer of classical Indian dance credited with bringing the art form to the West in the mid-20th century.

Among the other participants was London-based Gathering, which was concurrently showing at the new Art Cologne in Palma de Mallorca on the same day, presenting Tamara K.E.’s vividly colored paintings in which cartoon-like figures surface as manifestations of the subconscious. Other galleries in the tightly curated showcase included Feia from L.A., presenting the work of Sidnie Jimenez; Tureen from Dallas, spotlighting works by Los Angeles-based poet, painter and graffiti artist John Garcia; Harlesden High Street from London, with works by Chicago-based painter Van Payne and multimedia pieces by Antonio Lechuga; and The Green Gallery from Milwaukee, with prints by Indigenous artist and filmmaker Sky Hopinka in dialogue with ceramic works by Chicago-based Jessica Jackson Hutchins. The fair also drew a dynamic cohort of younger Chicago spaces—Hans Goodrich, Shanghai Seminary, Twelve Ten, Tala, Weatherproof and Good Weather, the latter splitting its presence between Neighbors and EXPO.

Bringing together galleries and project spaces from five different cities and art scenes, Neighbors’ goal was to encourage cross-market conversations within adjacent rooms rather than adjacent booths.

Economically, the model remains deliberately restrained. Galleries pay a fee, and the fair is ticketed, though these function less as revenue streams than as instruments to gauge engagement and collect data, Serrato explained. Building a business structure around the fair signals seriousness—intimacy, she said, does not mean informality. Neighbors’ central ambition, she added, is to foster meaningful connections that can translate into real opportunities for participating galleries, offering an alternative to the scale-driven, transactional logic that dominates major fairs. What emerges is not a rejection of the system but a recalibration that privileges attention over sales volume.

Ultimately, she sees Neighbors as a responsive, community-driven counterpoint within the art ecosystem. This year, the fair was one of several such initiatives. It joined BARELY FAIR—”the 1:12 scale international contemporary art fair” that has become a satellite fixture of Chicago art week. Since its launch in 2019, Barely Fair has redefined what a fair can be with its whimsical toy-scaled booths and miniature artworks creating opportunities for dealers to engage in surprisingly meaningful conversations about their programming.

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SEE ALSO: Curator Juliane Bischoff On Remaining Attentive to the Conditions of the Present

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