Frieze Los Angeles takes flight at a new location in 2023: the Santa Monica Airport

The Frieze Los Angeles art fair has announced a new location for 2023. The event is heading yet farther west, past its most recent home in Beverly Hills to Santa Monica.

The art fair announced Wednesday that its next L.A. iteration, Feb. 16 to 19, 2023, will be held at the Santa Monica Airport. The build-out will include a central exhibition tent — again designed by Why Architecture’s Kulapat Yantrasast with landscape director Mark Thomann — and “additional activations” surrounding it, such as the Frieze Projects program of outdoor art installations and a section featuring local nonprofits. The fair will be held in the open space in the southeast corner of the property.

Frieze Los Angeles had relocated this last February from its former home at Paramount Pictures Studios to a tent next to the Beverly Hilton. But that location was “not an option” for Frieze Los Angeles in 2023, Christine Messineo, director of Frieze Los Angeles and Frieze New York, says in an interview.

“We were so pleased with the Beverly Hilton, but the owners of the space will be breaking ground for a development that’s been planned for a number of years,” Messineo says, “so we can’t stay there.”

The new location, Messineo says, was chosen because of its size and flexibility.

“It’s a large, expansive space,” she says. “It allows us to have the ambitious public programming that’s been a sort of marker for all the Frieze fairs — ambitious and grand scale.”

The Beverly Hilton exhibition tent was 40% larger than in previous years, housing 100 exhibitors representing 17 countries. But some attendees missed the unique, Hollywood feel of the Paramount backlot, which had featured the fair’s walkable Frieze Projects area.

Not to mention the food trucks.

The backlot area had been peppered with multiple food and drink options, but there was curiously not a scrap of food within easy access of the Beverly Hilton exhibition tent. Guests had to leave the fair and trek to one of two restaurants inside the hotel itself.

“This new space gives us the opportunity to have a strong offering of food and beverage on site — you’ll walk through it as you enter the tent,” Messineo says. “We’re still working out the details. But it’ll highlight some of what Los Angeles has to offer foodwise.”

Santa Monica’s cultural affairs manager, Shannon Daut, said in the announcement that “we look forward to working with Frieze to connect the event to local artists and arts organizations, and to continue to leverage opportunities to expand the arts at both the Santa Monica Airport and beyond.”

Shortly before the fair opened this last February, Frieze canceled its free, outdoor sculpture exhibition that was to be held in a nearby Beverly Hills park because of Omicron-related delays. Instead, it showcased a free, “forward-facing” fair area, in the hotel’s Wilshire Garden, called the BIPOC Exchange. It was organized by L.A. artist Tanya Aguiñiga and showcased 10 L.A. nonprofits led by or serving Black, Indigenous, people of color communities — the fair considered it part of Frieze Projects.

It’s too soon to say what the next version of Frieze Projects will look like, Messineo says. But one thing is certain: “the prospects are exciting.”

“It’s a space that allows for there to be this focused, inventive quality,” she says. “It lends itself to this ambitious way of engaging with artists where they can come up with projects that are specifically sited for the space.”