While the art world grapples with fair fatigue, market burnout and the elusive quest for younger buyers, one fair is testing a radically different approach: turning curious enthusiasts into collectors without asking them to spend a dime. After debuting last year in Elizaville, N.Y., during Upstate Art Weekend, Zero Art Fair has arrived in New York City with its second edition at the FLAG Art Foundation from July 10 to 12. The twist? At this art fair, you don’t spend anything on the art, but you can still take it home.
Zero Art Fair lets art enthusiasts take home a selected artwork for free, provided they’re willing to commit to a five-year vesting period before ownership is officially transferred. It’s a truly radical and inventive model—one that upends the traditional gallery system and reimagines how art circulates. Artists pair artwork gathering dust in storage with people who want to live with art but can’t necessarily afford it. Every piece exhibited is offered at no cost through a “store-to-own” contract that transfers stewardship—though not full control—to the collector who might better be thought of as the custodian of the work. Strings remain firmly attached, ensuring the artists retain some rights in perpetuity and a financial stake in the future value of their work.
Originally developed for artist William Powhida by NYU professor Amy Whitaker and artist-attorney Alfred Steiner, the contract includes a five-year vesting period before ownership is automatically transferred to the new holder. During this period, the agreement grants the artist the right to sell the work or borrow it for exhibition. After ownership transfers, the contract entitles the artist to 50 percent of the sale price if the work is sold, along with a 10 percent royalty on all subsequent resales.
“Zero Art Fair isn’t meant to disrupt other fair models. These days, the word ‘disrupt’ often seems to mean finding a new way to extract value from systems that may have actually been functioning pretty well,” Powhida and artist Jennifer Dalton, who together first conceived the fair, told Observer during this year’s opening reception.
The idea for the fair was rooted in both their artistic practices and in the structural gaps they identified in the art market via their own dealings with it. As artists, Dalton and Powhida have long addressed themes of class and hierarchies in the art world. Around five years ago, Powhida received a large shipment of unsold work back from a dealer and realized he would rather have people live with the art than keep it sealed away in boxes if there was a way to retain a stake in its value. That notion led him to collaborate with Whitaker to develop a “store-to-own” contract, which ultimately became the foundation of the Zero Art Fair model. Building on that contract, Dalton and Powhida launched the first edition of the fair over two years through a combination of crowd-sourced fundraising and individual contributions.
The pair was quick to point out that they’re not trying to undermine the commercial side of the art world; they want artists to sell their work whenever they can and acknowledge that fairs offer vital visibility and access to new audiences. “We know from our own experiences as artists and arts workers, as well as the experiences of others in the art world, that there is a lot of wonderful art out there that has had previous chances on the market but has not found a home,” they clarified. Most artists produce far more work than they can sell, resulting in an expensive and unsustainable storage problem. Often, works return from fairs unsold, not because no one wanted them but because no one was willing or able to pay prices kept artificially high through scarcity manufactured by keeping artworks out of circulation and hidden in storage.
The founders acknowledged the growing gap between the rising retail price of art—especially in the U.S., even for young and emerging artists—and the lives of regular working people. “The art market’s dependence on high-net-worth individuals, a tiny segment of society,” they said, has become a powerful limiting condition that actively contributes to the surplus of contemporary art piling up in studios and gallery inventories. Even when work is purchased, much of it ends up in fine art storage or museum back rooms. “The problem of art being warehoused, rather than being seen or lived with, affects nearly every aspect of the art world.”
“We do want to challenge the idea that the high prices of art are justified by scarcity,” they add. “The fair makes artwork available to people who may not usually be able to afford it, which is the biggest barrier when people talk about ‘democratizing’ art.” Too often, Dalton and Powhida argue, that term is just code for “How do we sell art to more people and make a profit?” For the founders of Zero Art Fair, true democratization requires confronting the stark class divide between those who can afford to buy art and everyone else.
Zero Art Fair directly addresses this imbalance at a time when the market is experiencing a sharp downturn in sales and waning activity among traditional collectors. “We see the fair as a bridge between art, artists and working people who deserve to live with art,” Dalton and Powhida emphasize. “We want to challenge people to rethink who and what art is for, beyond news stories about wealthy people buying multi-million dollar Warhols.”
In keeping with this commitment to accessibility, Zero Art Fair is also free to attend. The first three days are open to the public as a preview exhibition, while access to artworks during the final two days prioritizes interested parties who might not be able to afford original art.
Also worth noting is that the initial contract accompanying each artwork at Zero Art Fair grants the artist a 10 percent resale royalty in perpetuity on all future resales—a move designed to counter a glaring lack of material support and moral rights for artists in the U.S., especially when compared to their counterparts in the E.U. who benefit from stronger economic and legal protections. “By the end of this fair, we hope to have facilitated nearly 500 contracts granting those rights to artists in circulation, helping to make them a voluntary, standard part of all art sales and transfers,” the founders explain. The contract also requires that owners track every movement of the artwork, ensuring full transparency around provenance throughout a work’s lifetime. The details are made available online, offering clarity for future buyers and safeguarding the integrity of each ownership passage.
To ensure the quality of the art on view, Zero Art Fair relies on a curatorial committee composed of respected voices in the New York and U.S. art world, including curator Folasade Ologundudu; curator, educator and writer Sara Reisman; curator and critic Seph Rodney; and Jonathan Rider, director of The FLAG Art Foundation.
Zero Art Fair has also been shaped by the insights offered by a growing advisory board made up of artists, curators, legal experts, strategists and arts professionals committed to rethinking how art circulates. Among its members are attorneys Franklin Boyd and Steiner, and Whitaker, whose work laid the foundation for the fair’s contract model. The board includes figures like Postmasters founder Magda Sawon, author and private dealer Edward Winkleman, journalist and podcaster Felix Salmon, John Melick of Blue Medium, Fine Art Adoption Network founder Adam Simon and Manon Slome, co-founder of No Longer Empty. Creative strategist Ani Cordero, Kianga Ellis of Kianga Ellis Projects, Jessica Hargreaves of Mother-in-Law’s Gallery, More Art founder Micaela Martegani, artist Mark Tribe and Lauren Wittels, a partner at Luhring Augustine, have also lent their expertise to advancing the fair’s mission.
To be clear, Zero Art Fair is not trying to replace the art market—it’s a radical experiment designed to create an alternative that exists alongside it. Here, according to the founders, art can circulate safely and fairly, creating value for all parties involved without relying on traditional (and often perversely murky) market structures.
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