Billionaire Paul Allen wants to bring Venice and Miami art world prestige to Seattle -- along with deep-pocketed technology entrepreneurs.
Allen’s investment company Vulcan Inc. is co-producing the Seattle Art Fair, a four-day show with an estimated $250 million of contemporary art on offer that starts Thursday. It’s the only such fair in the Pacific Northwest, a region that has seen an explosion in private wealth as valuations of tech companies surged.
“I’ve been going to the Venice Biennale for at least a decade and always enjoy the stimulation of seeing the work of new and up-and-coming artists,” Allen, who co-founded Microsoft Corp. with Bill Gates, said in a telephone interview. “In 2013 I started thinking, ‘what’s keeping us from doing this in Seattle?’”
With the backing of Allen, a top U.S. collector who owns works by Claude Monet, Georgia O’Keeffe and J.M.W. Turner, the fair has signed up some of the largest galleries that are looking for new clients among the region’s tech billionaires and startup entrepreneurs. A Vulcan affiliate operates the venue where the event will be held, the exhibition hall at CenturyLink Field, the stadium that’s home to the Seattle Seahawks football team (which Allen owns).
‘Pent-Up Desire’
The Seattle fair is marketed as a hybrid commercial trade show with biennale-like citywide installations and onsite projects. The 60 exhibitors include top dealers such as Gagosian Gallery, David Zwirner and Pace. They are joined by local galleries and dealers from Tokyo, Hong Kong and Seoul. Leeza Ahmady, director of New York’s Asian Contemporary Art Week, is producing an interactive exhibition exploring the Pacific Rim through video, sound, installation, and digital technology.
“There’s a lot of pent-up desire for this fair in the larger Pacific Northwest,” said Greg Kucera, whose Seattle gallery is an exhibitor. “There’s a lot of wealth in Seattle. There isn’t an art fair of this scale west of Chicago and north of San Francisco.”
Seattle is home to collectors including former Microsoft executive Jon Shirley and International Software Corp. founder Charles Simonyi, said Allen, whose $17.1 billion net worth ranks him 48th on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Collectors in the region include Jeffrey Brotman, founder of Costco Wholesale Corp. and Howard Schultz, founder and chief executive officer of Starbucks Corp.
New Relationships
About 15,000 people are expected to attend the Seattle show, organizers said. Dealers said they hope to see the key art buyers from Vancouver, Oregon and northern California.