Courtesy of AMP
If last year’s event is any indication, the 2026 Atlanta Art Fair will be a weekend to remember. Held from October 1 to 4 at Pullman Yards in Kirkwood, the fair hosts contemporary art galleries from across metro Atlanta, the Southeast, and beyond. Inside their booths, these galleries sell works from hundreds of artists around the globe. This is no craft fair: Past events have offered pieces from blue-chip stars such as photographer Nan Goldin and painter Jasper Johns, as well as local heavyweights, including painter Fahamu Pecou and sculptor Curtis Patterson.
“We saw that Atlanta didn’t really have a central gathering space for contemporary art and for art galleries,” says Kelly Freeman, director of Atlanta Art Fair, which is run by Art Market Productions (AMP), a creative-events firm that hosts fairs in other cities, from Seattle to New York. “That was one thing we thought we could bring to the equation.”
AMP launched Atlanta Art Fair in 2024. More than 12,000 people packed Pullman Yards for the inaugural event, which grew the following year to 13,500 visitors. “It feels like we’re in this really special groove coming into year three,” Freeman says.
Courtesy of Victoria Dugger and Sargent’s Daughters
For the arts community, Atlanta Art Fair—the city’s first such fair at this scale—offers not only an opportunity for artists and galleries to sell their works, but also a place for the entire art scene to commune. “An art fair does what many marketplaces do: It brings everybody together, allows them to jostle up against one another,” says Sarah Higgins, executive and artistic director of the local arts publications Art Papers, who has helped to curate the fair’s programming since its first year. “It becomes a town center for the arts in Atlanta.”
Courtesy of Victoria Dugger
This year’s iteration leans into Atlanta’s global connections while celebrating the city’s American South roots. A “Global South in the South” section will showcase several African galleries, and East Point–based Tila Studios is showing work that emerged out of an artist residency in Portugal. On the local end, Higgins is curating a special exhibition exploring cultural critique through absurdism, featuring three Georgia-based artists. Among them is Victoria Dugger, a mixed-media artist out of Athens whose work explores themes such as disability and Black womanhood. Dugger often travels to New York, where she’s represented by a gallery, but she says opportunities like Atlanta Art Fair help build a foundation for Southern artists to bloom where they already are.
“To have an art fair that wants to nurture the art community here and uplift artists in the South,” Dugger says, “that’s extremely exciting.”
This article appears in our September 2026 issue.
