Frieze Los Angeles 2026 Takes Over Santa Monica Airport as Ari Emanuel Bets on Live Art Events

SANTA MONICA, Calif. — On a sun-bleached runway at Santa Monica Airport, where private jets once taxied toward the Pacific, white tents and temporary walls now line the tarmac. Inside, a neon sign by Los Angeles artist Patrick Martinez flickers the words “If I Love You” over a stream of VIP visitors, while blue-chip dealers and emerging galleries jostle for attention.

A new chapter under Ari Emanuel

This is Frieze Los Angeles 2026, the seventh edition of the international contemporary art fair and the first to unfold in full under new owner Ari Emanuel, the Hollywood power broker who has made the event central to his latest venture in live experiences.

Running Feb. 26 through March 1 at Santa Monica Airport, the fair brings more than 100 galleries from 24 countries to the Westside airfield. Organizers and city officials describe it as a cornerstone of Los Angeles’ bid to cement its status as a global art center, in a year that also sees the long-awaited Lucas Museum of Narrative Art scheduled to open.

Frieze Director of Americas Christine Messineo said this year’s edition is designed to reflect an art community that is already deeply networked.

“Los Angeles is defined by an enduring, interconnected community of artists, curators, collectors and institutions who show up for one another across generations,” Messineo said in a statement. She said the 2026 fair “reaffirms a shared commitment to celebrating artistic innovation and excellence worldwide,” with local energy that “ripples outward, shaping the global contemporary art conversation.”

A growing footprint—and a shifting ownership landscape

The fair’s footprint has grown steadily since it debuted at Paramount Studios in 2019. It moved to Santa Monica Airport in 2023 and has since turned the contested municipal airfield into a temporary cultural campus each February, anchoring a week of satellite fairs, museum openings and gallery events across the region.

This year’s fair opens as ownership of the Frieze brand itself has shifted west. In late 2025, Emanuel — the longtime agent and former chief executive of Endeavor — purchased Frieze from Endeavor in a deal reported to value the business at about $200 million. He folded it into Mari, a Beverly Hills-based live-events company that has raised roughly $2 billion from private equity firms and sovereign investors to acquire assets ranging from Frieze to major tennis tournaments and classic-car auctions.

The acquisition comes against a softer art-market backdrop. Global art sales fell an estimated 12% in 2024 to about $57.5 billion, according to industry analyses, as economic uncertainty and higher interest rates weighed on top-end transactions. Emanuel and his backers are effectively betting that branded, in-person cultural events will retain their pull even as auction totals fluctuate.

Where art meets film, finance and philanthropy

At Frieze Los Angeles, that bet looks squarely aimed at the intersection of art, film and finance. Deutsche Bank returns as global lead partner and again sponsors the Deutsche Bank Frieze Los Angeles Film Award, a program developed with Ghetto Film School and production company FIFTH SEASON that offers training and cash awards to emerging filmmakers ages 18 to 34.

Emanuel himself has been a conspicuous presence at the fair. Entertainment industry outlets reported that he and his wife, fashion designer Sarah Staudinger, spent heavily during the VIP preview, acquiring works by artists including Sam Gilliam, William H. Johnson, Keith Haring and Alabama quiltmaker Yvonne Wells. The couple also hosted a reception at Chateau Marmont during fair week, underscoring Frieze’s role as a magnet for Hollywood figures.

A dense gallery roster, from global giants to L.A. mainstays

Inside the tents, the exhibitor list mixes international heavyweights with a dense roster of Los Angeles galleries. Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, David Zwirner, White Cube, Perrotin, Pace and Lisson are among the global names on the floor. Local stalwarts such as David Kordansky Gallery, Matthew Brown, Commonwealth and Council, Château Shatto, Anat Ebgi, The Pit and Roberts Projects highlight a city that has quietly built one of the most extensive gallery ecosystems in the United States.

Several presentations make direct claims for Los Angeles and the broader West Coast as an art-historical center in its own right. Gagosian is staging a multigenerational survey of artists associated with the region, placing figures such as Richard Diebenkorn and Ed Ruscha alongside more recent names like Chris Burden, Frank Gehry, Mark Grotjahn, Lauren Halsey, Alex Israel, Mary Weatherford and Jonas Wood.

At the other end of the market, the Focus section — curated for the third year by Essence Harden and underwritten by Italian apparel brand Stone Island — brings 15 emerging U.S. galleries, each founded within the past 12 years. Los Angeles spaces including Make Room, Sea View, Ochi and Murmurs share the section with dealers from New York, Chicago and Minneapolis, many offering solo booths that can make or break an artist’s exposure at this scale.

Public-facing projects and political visibility

Frieze Projects, the fair’s non-selling program of commissions and interventions, spills out across the airport grounds. The 2026 edition, organized under the title “Body & Soul,” includes installations by artists such as Amanda Ross-Ho and Polly Borland.

Martinez’s neon work sets the tone at the entrance. Known for pieces that address policing, immigration enforcement and urban change, he has previously made signs referencing Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids and police shootings. Here, his phrase is more ambiguous, but the choice of artist signals an effort to put political and social themes in front of the fair’s international audience.

Several projects link that visibility to specific community initiatives. The collective AMBOS (Art Made Between Opposite Sides) has installed “Botánica AMBOS,” modeled on spiritual and healing shops common in migrant neighborhoods. Proceeds support a trauma-informed ceramics program in LGBTQ+ shelters and a scholarship prize for undocumented community college art students, according to organizers.

Minneapolis gallery Dreamsong is debuting a “Mutual Aid Coloring Book,” with sales directed to an Immigrant Rapid Response Fund in response to stepped-up enforcement actions by local and federal agencies.

Acquisition funds extend the fair’s reach

The fair’s social footprint extends into municipal and state institutions through a web of acquisition funds. The California African American Museum in Los Angeles is using a dedicated Frieze acquisition fund for the second year to add work by Black artists with California ties to its permanent collection. The museum’s executive director, Cameron Shaw, said recent purchases at the fair by artists Zenobia Lee and Jessica Taylor Bellamy were “our mission in action,” building a collection that reflects “the Black California and diasporic experience.”

A joint fund known as MAC3 — linking the Hammer Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art — is also active at the fair. Backed by philanthropists Jarl and Pamela Mohn, the fund is focused on emerging or under-recognized Los Angeles–based artists and has acquired works this year by Clarissa Tossin, Zenobia Lee and ceramicist Sharif Farrag.

At the city level, Santa Monica’s long-running Art Bank program is using the fair to expand its holdings of Southern California artists, whose work is displayed in civic buildings. A jury including Arts Commission members and Frieze leadership selected Erica Mahinay’s 2025 painting “Unfetter (Blue Gaze),” presented by Make Room, for the city’s collection.

“Creativity lies at the heart of Santa Monica’s identity and is vital to the strength of our local economy,” Mayor Caroline Torosis said, calling the partnership with Frieze an extension of the city’s commitment to emerging talent and to keeping the arts “a vibrant, enduring pillar” of community life.

Libraries, wildfire recovery, and climate themes

The fair is also debuting Frieze Library in Los Angeles, an initiative that asks participating galleries to donate artist books and publications to public institutions. This year’s contributions will help build a new contemporary art collection at the Pacific Palisades Library branch, which reopened in January after closing in the wake of a destructive wildfire in 2025 that damaged thousands of structures and temporarily shut down major cultural sites.

Climate and resilience surface in the artworks as well. One of MAC3’s acquisitions, Tossin’s “LA Weeds: First Harvest (2026),” uses urban plants as a metaphor for survival in a changing environment.

Awards and attendance

Frieze is awarding its 2026 Impact Prize to Napoles Marty, a Cuban-born, Connecticut-based artist whose charcoal drawings, paintings and charred wooden sculptures examine the human body as a vessel for spiritual and historical memory. The prize, established at the first Frieze Los Angeles in 2019, includes $25,000 and a solo presentation at the fair.

Diana Nawi, curator of special projects in contemporary art at LACMA and a juror for the prize, said Marty’s work shows “dynamic expressiveness throughout his practice that conjures an inner world made tangible.”

While attendance figures for this year’s edition were not immediately released, the 2025 fair drew about 30,000 visitors from 85 countries and more than 150 museum and institutional representatives, according to Frieze. Hotels and restaurants in Santa Monica and surrounding neighborhoods again report a surge in bookings during the week, even as some residents complain about traffic and road closures linked to the event.

An uncertain airfield, a temporary cultural campus

The future of the Santa Monica Airport site itself remains unsettled; city leaders have long debated plans to close the airfield and convert portions of it to parkland and other public uses. For now, Frieze’s tents offer a preview of what a cultural campus on the property might look like.

When the fair’s structures come down in early March, much of the activity will move elsewhere — into museum storage, public libraries, civic buildings and community programs that now carry works or funding linked to the week on the runway. Organizers and city officials say that, taken together, those quieter legacies will do as much to shape Los Angeles’ place in the global art landscape as the high-profile sales that play out under the tents.