Can’t Miss Highlights from This Year’s Edition of Untitled Art, Houston

You may wonder why Houston needs an art fair. Start with the money: the city ranks fifth in the nation for millionaires, behind only New York, the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, and Chicago, according to Henley & Partners’s 2025 USA Wealth Report. Then add a century of serious museums and one of the country’s most engaged collector bases. After an impressive debut in 2025, Untitled Art, Houston returns this week. Opening to VIPs and press on October 1 and to the public October 2 through 4 at downtown’s George R. Brown Convention Center, the second edition gathers 95 galleries, with around a dozen newcomers, representing 20 countries and territories, 16 of them Texan.

“Last year was a really successful proof of concept after three years of development,” says director Michael Slenske. “The 2026 edition feels like the next chapter.” It’s a bigger one, with 16 new Host Committee members, 30 cultural partners, and five new acquisition prizes backed by the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston Grand Opera, Public Art of the University of Houston System, Hotel Daphne, and Park House Houston. “It’s exciting to see the relationships and ideas we’ve been developing over the past few years really beginning to take on a life of their own in Houston,” Slenske says.

Exhibitor Highlights

The fair’s first-time exhibitors come from around the globe. Richard Saltoun Gallery, the London, Rome and New York dealer, arrives with three women artists who take Surrealism somewhere new. CRISIS, which splits its time between Lima and Madrid, looks to the histories of the Amazon’s Indigenous peoples, and Brazil’s Nara Roesler brings Raul Mourão, Abraham Palatnik and José Dávila together to show how Latin American modernism has echoed from one generation to the next. Additional newcomers include Anton Kern, kaufmann repetto, and Night Gallery.

Sixty solo and two-artist booths give collectors a chance to focus. Anton Kern Gallery devotes its space to the Brazilian artist Marepe, kaufmann repetto focuses on the Syrian artist Simone Fattal, and London’s Huxley-Parlour spotlights Tom Hammick. In Nest, the section Untitled underwrites for young galleries and fair first-timers, London’s Chilli brings Naresh Kumar, an artist from Bihar whose Etched In Blood (2026) is built on yellow-pages magazines.

Some of the most compelling booths double as extensions for current and upcoming museum shows. Night Gallery includes Tomashi Jackson, whose work is in conversation with Robert Rauschenberg’s at The Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut. Madrid’s Albarrán Bourdais puts its Latin American artists front and center, with Iván Argote unveiling fresh work connected to his coming solo show at Dallas Contemporary. Houston’s own Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino is back, this time with Julio Le Parc, who is enjoying a moment in London, where Tate Modern’s Light. Colour. Action. stays up through 2027.

Around a dozen exhibitors are from Houston’s local scene, from Moody Gallery, Inman Gallery, and McClain Gallery to David Shelton Gallery and Revolver Galería, a Lima gallery that has put down permanent roots in town. Art car royalty Harrod Blank and Cody Ledvina share a booth with Dallas’s Nature of Things.

Then there are the Special Projects: “Beyond the booths, the fair is very interactive this year with great panels and Special Projects like Dave Muller’s Record Pavilion 2,0 (with Meliksetian Briggs and The Landing), which is a fully functioning record store where you can buy vinyl from Dave’s own collection,” says Slenske. Houston artist Nestor Topchy will paint Houstonians as Byzantine icons, in egg tempera and gold leaf, during live sittings for The Iconic Portrait Strand (Houston), a project he has been building since 2008. Reynier Leyva Novo’s Harvesting Memory hides pictures of Houston’s Third Ward under cobalt blue, letting infrared bring them back, while Mark Flood’s Daily Flood turns his patch of the fair into what feels like an artist’s working studio or a private viewing room.

Around Houston

Houston’s cultural legacy is the ultimate testament to the city’s dedication to the arts. “Houston has one of the most sophisticated collecting communities in the country, but what makes the city especially compelling is the depth of its cultural history,” Slenske says. “There’s more than a century of arts infrastructure here, and you can feel that history in the institutions that continue to shape the city.” The anniversaries tell the story: the MFAH hit its centennial two years ago, the Rothko Chapel turned 55 this year, and in 2027 the Menil Collection and the Orange Show Art Car Parade both turn 40. “These aren’t just milestones,” he says. “They speak to a long-standing culture of experimentation, patronage, and public engagement with the arts.”

“Outside the fair, I think the Dear Daphne show, curated by Megan Mulrooney, Half Gallery, and Seven Sisters, is going to be a big hit with very affordable works on Hotel Daphne stationery that will benefit ArtBound; the Cat Spring Collection show at 4411, curated by Hesse McGraw, is always a must-see; and the current exhibitions with our Houston galleries and institutional partners are obviously a must-see, like the Rafael Lozano-Hemmer show at the Buffalo Bayou Park Cistern,” says Slenske. 

VIP guests also have the opportunity to see the private collections of Marita Fairbanks and Katharine Barthelme, two of the Host Committee’s founding members; the studios of Angelbert Metoyer and Nestor Topchy; programs at the Menil, the Rothko Chapel, the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, the Moody Center for the Arts and Asia Society Texas; and studio visits at Rice University’s Sarofim Hall and the MFAH’s Core Residency Program, with Jamal Cyrus and Delita Martin among the artists to meet.

For Slenske, it all comes back to the people making the work. “What makes Houston particularly alive is that it’s very much an artist city,” he says. “People come for the art schools, residencies, and teaching opportunities and often get hooked on the city’s funky, no-zoning cultural rhythm. Untitled Art is here to shine a light on the depth of this cultural well and, hopefully, contribute a new chapter to it.”

Untitled Art, Houston takes place October 2-4, 2026.