Art Fair Fever, Auction House on the Brink

If you’re heading to the San Francisco Art Fair, curator and educator Mara Gladstone shared what not to miss at the 14th edition of SFAF, presented by Art Market Production. The fair brings together 88 exhibitors and 46 regional cultural partners, plus talks, large-scale sculpture, and immersive installations. Gladstone is also behind an ambitious public project there: “The Sun Beneath,” featuring paintings by Filipino interdisciplinary artist Jon Cuyson, framed as a sneak peek of what’s planned for the Philippine Pavilion at the forthcoming 2026 Venice Biennale, where both are tapped to participate. Her booth picks include Cult Aimee Friberg, first-timer Black Art in America, exhibited.at’s Lomakin solo “Watching Cartoons,” Oakland’s Gallery Century, and Parallel +, where she bought a piece by Pat Frades.

Staying in market news, Artnet recaps a busy few days of headlines around Sotheby’s in “Sotheby’s Debt, Delays, and the Drahi Playbook.” A New York real estate broker filed a lawsuit alleging it’s owed a ten dollars million commission tied to the sale of Sotheby’s longtime Manhattan headquarters—an allegation Sotheby’s disputes. At the same time, a new restaurant, Marcel, has opened at Sotheby’s Breuer Building outpost. The piece also spotlights a delayed-payment program: sellers who wait six months to cash out are offered 7 percent interest, a setup reported by the Financial Times. Against that backdrop, Sotheby’s is trying to refinance debt early by issuing about eight hundred twenty five dollars million in five-year bonds, largely to replace a seven hundred sixty five dollars million debt due in 2027, per a Moody’s memo.

At Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archives, a major retrospective is reframing the reach of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, whose work moved restlessly across mediums while probing history, exile and diaspora, and the slippery nature of language. The exhibition, “Multiple Offerings,” is described as BAMPFA’s most comprehensive Cha retrospective to date and closes Sunday. Curated by Victoria Sung, it pairs more than 100 works by Cha with pieces by 10 other artists across generations, including mentors, contemporaries, and younger artists influenced by her. The show traces Cha’s life and work from 1969 to 1982, moving through UC Berkeley, France and New York, and her return to South Korea. Highlights include Untitled (Poem to Mother and Father), performance scores and texts, and works like Monologue (1977) and Aveugle Voix (1975).

Back in New York’s media-and-museum swirl, Hyperallergic’s “Art Talk With Rama Duwaji” centers on an in-person conversation at Gracie Mansion between editor-in-chief Hakim Bishara and artist—and New York First Lady—Rama Duwaji. It was her first interview with a journalist since her husband, Zohran Mamdani, took office on January 1. Bishara describes the meeting as a standard studio visit, with Duwaji surrounded by drawings and ceramics, and as an encounter with an artist who refuses to use celebrity for “easy career gains.” The piece also notes the interview’s wider pickup, tied to Duwaji’s apology for “foolish teenage tweets” resurfaced by a far-right publication. The newsletter-style roundup also flags arts news including LACMA’s new building opening, Guggenheim fellowship recipients, and SPCUNY shutting next February.

Links to all four stories are in the show notes—come back tomorrow for another round of art-world reality checks and revelations. Until then, I’m Barnaby Quibbleton, and that’s The Daily Art Download—Chinga la migra

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