As is the case with many good ideas, the story of Future Fair began with brainstorming—specifically, Rachel Mijares Fick jotting down her thoughts about what an art fair should be versus what she was seeing in the market. “I was originally just toying around with these ideas. I would just put them out and type them onto, you know, a document, and then save them in a folder on my desktop called Future Art Fair, not thinking about it turning into a real business,” she told Observer, recalling the early seeds of the New York City fair now entering its fifth edition. From the outset, Mijares Fick and her co-founder, Rebeca Laliberte, wanted to address the mounting frustration among the small and emerging galleries being priced out of the blue-chip fair ecosystem as they tried to find a foothold during the city’s spring art week.
The two had met years earlier as fellow exhibitors, and they brought deep industry experience that included gallery operations and art fair production. The foundational idea was to create a collaborative platform that granted sustainable visibility to young dealers while courting a new wave of collectors—those seeking a more accessible entry point into an often-obtuse industry. “We wanted to create something highbrow enough and elevated enough to appeal to seasoned clients of the art world, but also be accessible, approachable and exciting for consumers of our generation,” Laliberte said.
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Together, they began sketching out a new kind of show in 2018—one built to serve truly emerging dealers. “It took us two years to bring the in-person show to life because of the pandemic in 2020, which became a big part of the story of Future Fair,” added Mijares Fick.
Telling the right story would be essential to the fair’s staying power. It launched during the pandemic, which sounds ill-timed, but became an opportunity to position the fair from the outset as forward-thinking. “We did a digital show in lieu of an in-person one, and it let us develop a lot of the things that we were interested in even before. We were thinking about digital campaign strategies, questioning how to reach newer audiences on Instagram, thinking about how we can create campaigns around artists and dealers and do storytelling that brings in Millennials and Gen X collectors,” Laliberte explained.
In the early days, they looked at how contemporary brands communicate with younger audiences, offering not just a product but also symbolic value that could be integrated into personal identity. “We asked ourselves: why don’t we build out the experience of living with art… the experience of falling in love with an artist’s practice,” Mijares Fick said. “We’re really proud to have pioneered that in the industry, as I think our generation of collectors is very values-driven.” The result was a storytelling-first model that introduced dealers as relatable, passionate peers, starting with Q&As featuring founding galleries. “We wanted people outside the art world to understand how challenging it can be, but also how it’s a passion project to run a business like that,” Laliberte added. This strategy extended to artists, who were filmed in their studios and put forward as entrepreneurs in their own right. “I didn’t know what a career in the art world looked like until I moved to London,” Laliberte reflected. Part of attracting a new generation of fairgoers involved humanizing the dealers, the artists and the entire art industry.
Right away, Mijares Fick and Laliberte encouraged participating galleries to collaborate with each other by partnering to show together at the fair. “It was a really fun but also very pioneering experiment,” Laliberte said. “Some exhibitors worked closely together; they were sharing shipping costs and even commissions.” It was a way for smaller dealers and dealers from underrepresented backgrounds to thrive together despite rising costs and fierce competition across levels. “Our core has always been this sense of collaboration, which is something that really defines us.” Future Fair has also explored a unique co-op fair model that embraced collaboration by pairing exhibitors across sixteen booths.
That spirit of collective effort wasn’t just encouraged—it was institutionalized. Unlike many fairs, Future Fair doesn’t take a cut from exhibitors; instead, fees are used to cover operations, and it draws profits primarily from ticket sales and sponsorships. Mijares Fick and Laliberte even introduced a four-year profit-sharing model involving the 2020 founding galleries. Future Fair has given out $35,000 in grants to support emerging and diverse exhibitors between 2023 and 2025, and this year, Future Fair is expanding its “Pay It Forward Fund,” which allocates 15 percent of profits to grants for emerging dealers who wouldn’t otherwise be able to participate in a fair in New York that week.
“Having direct experience, we understood the costs involved for all of these small galleries to participate in a fair in New York City,” Mijares Fick said. “We know it’s a significant investment, but it’s also one with the potential for significant returns because New York City is such a unique melting pot of culture.”
This year, Future Fair welcomes a record sixty-nine exhibitors, including international galleries from Canada and beyond and first-time New York fair participants from cities like Detroit, Houston, Santa Fe and San Juan. “We have really good stories of exhibitors that had just opened their doors six months before, were featured in The New York Times, were rapidly able to grow and now have spaces in the city,” Laliberte said. “We are so proud to have participated in all this.” Artlogic is also supporting a new exhibitor grant, while 21c Museum Hotels has committed to sponsoring an acquisition prize.
Experimentation remains central to the fair’s ethos, most recently realized in a Los Angeles pop-up staged in a collector’s home in Santa Monica. “It’s important that we experiment with the model and how we can collaborate together,” Mijares Fick emphasized. “When you think about the future, I think you also have to think about experimentation and risk-taking—this always goes hand in hand.” They are, she said, constantly reimagining and reinventing what an art fair can and should be.”
While Future Fair’s founders are not looking to expand in size—they’re focused on preserving the curatorial quality of the selections—they do want to champion even more interesting, smaller and newer dealers across the country and internationally. Since last year, in fact, Future Fair has introduced a curatorial committee, which in 2025 includes notable names in the New York art ecosystem, such as PPOW director Eden Deering, art historian and independent curator Dr. Margarita Lila Rosa and Jenée-Daria Strand, an assistant curator at Public Art Fund.
While Future Fair continues to feel grounded in New York, it is drawing more and more exhibitors from other American cities and communities around the globe. “It has been really exciting for us to visit these cities, to bring them into the fair and to give them a voice in New York City,” says Mijares Fick. That expansion, however, comes with conditions. “If we’re going to do something, it has to be authentic and intentional. And if we’re going to experiment with the model or maybe enter a new market, or if we are developing a marketing campaign, that sense of Future Fair’s authenticity and intentionality goes through everything—and that’s done by really getting into the community and collaborating on a genuine level.”
