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Here’s What You Missed Off Frieze at Felix, BUTTER and Beyond

The proliferation of artist-led and boutique fairs reflects a maturing, decentralized market beyond the main tent.

Art week in L.A. isn’t just about Frieze but also the gallery shows and parties, as well as the ever-increasing number of satellite fairs offering artwork at a price that won’t break your bank account. This year, these included Post-Fair, Other Art Fair, Felix Art Fair and, making its inaugural appearance, BUTTER L.A.—part of the longstanding Indianapolis-based BUTTER Fine Art Fair, which showcased the work of African-American artists at Hollywood Park in Inglewood.

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“We have emergent all the way through blue-chip artists, something for everyone: museums and institutional collectors, also corporate collectors,” curator-organizer Nakeyta Moore told Observer. “We have limited-edition works as well, and are covering all the bases when it comes to the type of art collector we’re inviting. Even though this is a Black artist-led fair, the collector base is very wide. It’s for anyone and everyone.”

Selected after roughly 30 studio visits, participating artists included former L.A. Dodger Micah Johnson, Autumn Breon, Cortney Herron, Micaiah Carter and April Bey, representing a blend of 50 percent Californian artists, mostly from L.A., 25 percent from Indianapolis and the rest from places like New York, Chicago and Miami.

Preview night featured live painting by Mr. Wash (formally: Fulton Leroy Washington), who daubed away on a piece he’s been working on since the late 1980s that includes people like Trump and Elon Musk. “It talks about immigration and a lot of what we’ve all been experiencing for the past couple of years,” Moore said, adding that most of the work is apolitical despite the frenzy of our current era. “We’re kind of living in the storm right now, and from an artistic standpoint, you need to process what’s going on before the works start to roll out. I do think in the next few years we’ll see a bit more work that’s politicized, but people are a little bit scared.”

Meanwhile, the Other Art Fair visits Brooklyn, Dallas, London and Chicago, in addition to L.A., where it achieved record-breaking results last September. For the recent iteration, numbers weren’t as high but did result in the second-highest of all time for an L.A. edition of the fair, up 41 percent year over year from February 2025. The average transaction saw a jump of 16 percent year over year, as well as a jump in volume, up 21 percent.

Visitors to its new space, 3Labs in Culver City, enjoyed “The Art of Ping Pong: Play it Forward” cohosted by Altadena Brick by Brick, a local nonprofit dedicated to rebuilding homes destroyed by the Eaton Fire. For a small donation, visitors could play on custom-designed ping-pong tables that doubled as artworks. Among other highlights, The Goodbye Line was an interactive phone booth where people left anonymous voicemails saying goodbye to those they never got the chance to. And the Faux-To Booth offered analog hand-drawn likenesses in lieu of automated snapshots. Also featured was Thank You, an inflatable installation by French-Australian artist Linus Gruszewski constructed from 1,500 repurposed polyethylene take-out bags. The immersive geometric structure filtered sunlight, creating a shimmering environment that transformed everyday waste into fields of color.

“We appreciate that we’re not presenting an encyclopedic, didactic fair for people. We don’t aspire to be heavy-handed,” fair director Nicole Garton said of the show, which features displays mounted by individual artists, not galleries. “We’re called the Other Art Fair, and that means we’re not trying to be an alternative to the traditional arts space, but to expand it and bring other people in.”

As it has since 2019, Felix Art Fair took up residence in its usual haunt, the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, adding 22 new exhibitors, including New York Life Gallery, L.A.’s Feia and SOM GALLERY from Tokyo while welcoming back 20 galleries, including Brigitte Mulholland from Paris, Corbett vs. Dempsey from Chicago and New York’s Uffner & Liu.

Set in rooms and cabanas around the historic hotel pool painted by David Hockney, this year’s edition of the boutique fair featured a room by textile artist Channing Hansen, whose immersive fabric maze confused and delighted visitors. Also not to be missed was Tierra del Sol’s all-female show of artists with disabilities. Six were selected from 150, among them Jenna Greene, who incorporates ASL in her work. She sold nearly all her pieces on the first day, contributing to the gallery’s early sales, which eclipsed their 2025 showing, according to curator Jenny Rask.

“Felix has turned into a discovery fair,” co-founder Mills Morán told Observer, noting their newly instituted application process has attracted “younger and newer galleries, galleries that are more recently opened… Slip House is just a year old,” he added, name-checking the Greenwich Village-based gallery. Slip House gallerist Ingrid Lundren reported selling half their inventory on day one, at prices ranging from $1,400 for works by Emily Clair Murdock to $54,000 for a large-scale work by Keisuke Tada.

Morán doesn’t track sales for the show, only for his own gallery, Morán Morán, which he runs with his brother Al. “Right now is a mixed sales environment, and I see that continuing,” he said. “We’ve been stronger in the lower price points and mid-price points. The shows we’ve done have been really affordable, and they sell out.”

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SEE ALSO: Art Genève Courts Galleries With a Different Market Logic

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