Arrival Fair Illustrates the Vibrant Arts Scene of the Berkshires

The modern art fair is said to have begun in a hotel: New York’s Gramercy, to be specific, which in 1994 hosted 40 dealers and a refreshment program/art installation offering $2 vodka-lemonades. Anyone trundling through today’s art industrial complex, with its endless cubicles stuffed into airport hangers or convention centers would be forgiven if they longed for a little hospitality with their shopping and networking.

Enter Arrival, the invite-only art fair held from June 12-15 in the tony Tourists hotel, a modernist complex of plywood and glass tucked into woodsy North Adams, Massachusetts. Founded by art dealer Yng-Ru Chen, artist Crystalle Lacouture, and advisor Sarah Galender Meyer, Arrival offered some 36 galleries a hotel room of their own.

San Francisco’s Jonathan Carver Moore rose to the challenge spectacularly, presenting a series of photography exploring the lives of trans African folks. Each gallery had to reckon with Tourists’s signature oversized plywood bed, and Moore draped an extraordinary blanket of hand-dyed textiles and glass beads by Adana Tillman across its foot. Others turned the crisp sheets into milky-white oceans: Cleveland’s Abbatoir gallery floated Virginia Overton’s glass-and-fish netting Untitled (clear buoy) (2023), while Dutton charted a course for a battalion of Robert Rapson’s ceramic ships.

Then there was the inevitable hotel TV, cleverly secreted in a nubby cozy by Arrival and utterly vanished by galleries like Ben Ward, who hung Allen-Golder Carpenter’s Spit Fire (2025), made up of a curtain of plastic inmate property bags, cooking oil, and ashes; and Minneapolis’s Bockley Gallery, which hung a heartbreaking lenticular photograph by Pao Houa Her. In the room of San Francisco’s Catherine Clark, what first like a pair of shirts hung by a guest to dry near a wall turned out to be shirts worn by the children of artist Lenka Clayton that she’d disassembled, run through a typewriter to ink with minimalist patterns, then resewn. In the Lodge, the usual candy-and-chips vending machine was instead stocked with packs of American flags, courtesy of Mel Chin. And the grand tradition of kitsch motel art found resonance in Atlanta-based Wolfgang Gallery’s presentation of a series of beguiling paintings by Jacob Todd Broussard, whose garish colors and queer content fit right in with the erotic charge of a hotel room. That vibe found a sonic form in the soundtrack by the fair’s guest DJ (and Mixtape series founder) April Hunt, who spun Sylvester in the lodge when the pool party got rained out.

Throughout the weekend, Arrival also made temporary homes for itself in other people’s houses—most notably, a program of Chilean and Argentinian artists called “En Tránsito/In Transit”, installed in the gracious house of artist Daniela Rivera and, perhaps in a wink to the hotel, boasting an astonishing series of faux-tourist holiday snaps by Claudia Del Fierro—and in a series of studio visits around the area. In this way, Arrival illustrates the vibrant arts scene of the Berkshires. This summer alone, the area will welcome a slew of buzzy programming. MASS MoCA has two essential shows up right now: Jeffrey Gibson’s multimedia extravaganza “Power Full Because We’re Different,” and Vincent Valdez’s enraging, enervating painting show “Just a Dream.” In July, the Clark Art Institute will debut the Glenn Adamson-curated “Ground/Work” group show, where sculptures and installations by artists including Laura Ellen Bacon and Hugh Hayden will join the kind-eyed cows and dappling trees across the organization’s verdant fields. Over the hill, SO-IL’s graceful new purpose-built home for the Williams College Museum of Art is just about ready to throw open its doors (plans were even on display at Arrival); an hour further south, the landmark hub for contemporary dance begins its 93rd season with a new stage, the Doris Duke Theatre, and a new show from Katherine Helen Fisher, “Hyperreal Futures: Choreographing the Algorithmic Body.”

Which is all to say that artistic futures are sprouting up around the Berkshire pines, fertilized by artistic communities with deep roots and nourished by growing streams of visitors. “We knew that Arrival’s debut would be magical, and that its conversations would be generative,” Galender Meyer says. “But when some 3,500 visitors showed up, what took place exceeded our expectations for the fair. The future is truly exciting, and we look forward to the next gathering in 2027.” Book a hotel room now.