The New York artwork honest Unbiased will transfer to a brand new house in 2026. The honest’s Could version will happen at Pier 36 on Manhattan’s Decrease East Aspect, a 50,000-square-foot venue that greater than doubles the dimensions of its earlier house at Spring Studios.
The shift is each sensible and strategic, and is partly meant to accommodate an uptick in gallery participation post-pandemic at its Tribeca location. In 2025, Unbiased hosted 83 exhibitors in areas that included skyboxes and repurposed utility rooms. “Even our coat examine was given over to a particular challenge,” mentioned Elizabeth Dee, the honest’s founder, in an interview.
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The transfer additionally displays a broader recalibration throughout the artwork honest panorama. Pier 36’s location locations Unbiased inside strolling distance of the Decrease East Aspect galleries and in nearer proximity, by way of FDR Drive, to TEFAF, one other honest that takes place throughout the identical week. In response to Dee, aligning extra immediately with town’s spring honest circuit is a deliberate step towards growing each attendance and institutional relevance. Unbiased reported a 25 % rise in foot site visitors in 2025, when the gala’s final coincided.
Based in 2010 and positioned as a curated various to gala’s similar to Frieze, Unbiased has advanced past its roots in up to date artwork. Its present mannequin contains each the Could honest and a separate fall version, Unbiased twentieth Century, devoted to ignored or under-recognized artists from the fashionable period.
Dee pressured, nonetheless, that Unbiased’s core stays unchanged. There can be a variety of “solo reveals, rising artists, and fashionable materials that sheds gentle on the canon or the market,” she mentioned.
The architectural redesign of Pier 36 can be overseen by SO–IL, the Brooklyn-based agency that has additionally designed Kukje’s Seoul gallery and the Amant artwork area in Brooklyn. The honest’s exhibition design can be led by Berlin’s D_P_S. Collectively, they’re tasked with creating what Unbiased describes as a “new mannequin for what an artwork honest could be.”
Whether or not the brand new venue will alter the character of the honest stays to be seen. Dee was emphatic that the change is one in all scale, not course. “If something,” she mentioned, “the main focus has simply deepened.”
