The Joey and Toby Tannenbaum Opera Centre, a complex of reconditioned historic industrial buildings at 227 Front Street East in downtown Toronto. It houses offices and rehearsal spaces for the Canadian Opera Company, and in late October will host the inaugural Feature Art Fair. Photo: GTD Aquitaine via Wikimedia Commons.
The Feature Art Fair is due to focus exclusively on contemporary art, and not include any historical work. It is organized by AGAC, an association of contemporary art galleries that is based in Montreal but is expanding its membership outside of Quebec. According to the member list on the AGAC website at press time, 69 per cent of this year’s Feature Art Fair exhibitors are AGAC members.
For the past number of years, AGAC has also organized the works-on-paper fair Papier in Montreal. The last edition of this fair had 44 exhibitors.
The first edition of Feature Art Fair will take place at the Canadian Opera Company’s rehearsal space at 227 Front Street East, two kilometres from the Metro Toronto Convention Centre where Art Toronto happens. It is a group of factory and warehouse buildings that date from the 19th century.
As AGAC director Julie Lacroix told Canadian Art in a recent interview, “[For Feature] we wanted a space that was far away from the usual setting of an art fair, with some cachet. The exhibition space where the galleries will be is not that big: it’s 10,000 square feet; Papier has 16,000, although it has 44 galleries and the booths are very small. For Feature, we decided to make every booth the size of the “Next” section booths in Art Toronto, so 200 square feet minimum.”
In other interviews on Feature, Lacroix also indicated that each exhibitor would be limited to three artists per booth.
Here is the list of the 2014 Feature Art Fair exhibitors:
Battat Contemporary (Montreal)
Birch Contemporary (Toronto)
Clint Roenisch (Toronto)
Equinox Gallery (Vancouver)
galerie antoine ertsakiran (Montreal)
Stephen Bulger Gallery (Toronto)
Galerie Division (Montreal & Toronto)
Galerie Donald Browne (Montreal)
Erin Stump Projects (Toronto)
Galerie Graff (Montreal)
Galerie Hugues Charbonneau (Montreal)
Jessica Bradley Gallery (Toronto)
Laroche/Joncas (Montreal)
Macaulay & Co. Fine Art (Vancouver)
Monte Clark Gallery (Vancouver)
Galerie Nicolas Robert (Montreal)
Patrick Mikhail Gallery (Currently of Ottawa, but with plans to open in Montreal this fall)
Galerie René Blouin (Montreal)
Galerie Simon Blais (Montreal)
Susan Hobbs Gallery (Toronto)
Galerie Trois Points (Montreal)
Georgia Scherman Projects (Toronto)
Republic Gallery (Vancouver)
