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Installation view of BUTTER 2025 fine art fair in Indianapolis.
BUTTER
The biggest week for art in Los Angeles welcomes a new event: BUTTER LA.
Unlike most of American culture which begins on the coasts and migrates toward the middle, the BUTTER fine art fair originated in Indianapolis in 2021 before making its first expansion this year.
BUTTER upends the traditional art fair model. It belongs to Black artists. Exclusively. Those artists sell direct to consumer–direct to attendees–with no gallery commission or fair markup. One hundred percent of sales go to the artists. Artists–over 40–who attendees can meet and talk to in person.
“America’s equitable fine art fair,” as BUTTER’s organizers state.
Equitable for the artists and the attendees.
“There’s music, there’s DJs, the artists will be there; this is an artist-led fair, so it’s a great way for a collector to meet the people they’re supporting and exchange stories,” BUTTER LA curatorial lead and founder of LA-based ARTLOUDLA Nakeyta Moore told me in a phone interview. “This is going to be a beautiful way if collectors want to know the person they’re supporting and talk about their work with them.”
No chance of that at typical art fairs, like Frieze LA, the gold standard LA art week fair whose title has become interchangeable with the city’s art week. Kerry James Marshall and Damien Hirst aren’t walking through that door to chit-chat with patrons. You’ll be lucky if the gallery booth attendant gives you the time of day.
BUTTER peels the lid off an art world that has historically sought to exclude certain kinds of artists–Black among them–and certain kinds of would-be buyers.
“We’re entering this affordable art movement, so I think BUTTER is right on time,” Moore said.
Affordable and art collecting have rarely gone together, but if “affordability” is the buzzword of the times from housing to health care to childcare and grocery prices, why should the art world be exempt from it?
It shouldn’t, despite that world never having been interested in affordability, even when it comes to just looking at art. General adult admission to LA’s signature art museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, costs $30. Ridiculous. Fortunately, the city’s other headlining arts venue, the Getty Museum and Getty Villa, have free entry, as does UCLA’s Hammer Museum and The Broad.
Tickets to Frieze LA cost over $100. To get in the door. Artworks commonly carry sticker prices well into five figures and beyond.
The fine art world has consciously, for generations, attempted to make itself synonymous with wealth. With privilege. With exclusivity. To hang a velvet rope around the entire enterprise with the intent of keeping working people and middle-class people and the general public out.
At $60 for entry, BUTTER LA is hardly cheap. Under 18’s are free. The fair does at least acknowledge that individuals should be able to participate in art buying and even art collecting without a trust fund, hedge fund, or butler. And while not a discount bin of fine art, sticker prices at BUTTER will be greatly reduced from what might be found elsewhere around LA during art week.
“Artists are scribes of the times. They are telling the truth of what’s happening right now and I’m very appreciative of the decentralization of elitism,” Moore said. “It does take even more intention in building these sorts of practices and building these sorts of fairs like BUTTER to be able to steward the next generation of artists and collectors and ecosystem as a whole.”
Here’s a little secret though: with a good eye and some legwork, great art can be purchased for hundreds of dollars, not thousands. Prints, photography, emerging artists. Smaller scale works, estate sales, buying direct from the artist. Individuals guided more by taste and passion than money and prestige can be equally as satisfied with a $600 purchase to hang in their apartment as a millionaire with a personal art concierge spending $600,000 for a trophy painting in their third home.
BUTTER LA makes for a great opportunity to start or continue that legwork. To train your eye. To develop your taste. To learn. And meet the artists. Meeting an artist, falling in love with a piece, and then buying direct from that artist so they can pay rent, taking a picture together, that makes for a lasting memory.
BUTTER Expands To LA
BUTTER 2025 fine art fair crowd.
BUTTER
BUTTER’s model proved successful from the start. In Indianapolis. Indy’s a sneaky-good arts and culture city, but hardly at the top of anyone’s list of essential American art destinations or markets.
Moore’s introduction to the event came during its 2023 edition; she was invited back in 2024 to guest-curate and left impressed both times.
“Seeing how BUTTER has influenced the city as a whole, what it’s done for the artist community, the opportunities that have been allotted for artists outside of BUTTER because of what BUTTER is and has done, and the care and equity that has gone into this,” she explained.
With BUTTER’s success in Indy, event organizers had expansion interest from locales across the country.
Why LA?
Moore helped in the lobbying effort. As did other BUTTER staffers.
Frieze Week bringing the attention of the global art world to LA in early spring, and BUTTER Indy taking place over Labor Day, allows BUTTER LA to capitalize on existing attention without stepping on the original.
A trial balloon at Context Projects in July 2025 went well.
LA also has the artists.
LA may not equal New York when it comes to buyers of artworks, but when considering the makers of art, nowhere tops LA. Fifty percent of BUTTER’s exhibitors are based in California, 25% from the fair’s home state of Indiana, with the remaining artists selected from cities across the United States and the global Black diaspora.
That too.
BUTTER LA is Black and proud. Inglewood’s Hollywood Park provided a perfect venue.
“Inglewood is a very Black city and with all the things that are happening in and around Inglewood, it’s been reinventing itself in the last couple of years,” Moore said.
Inglewood today is best known as the home of SoFi Stadium where the NFL’s Chargers and Rams play. And Taylor Swift. And the Super Bowl, college football’s national championship game, and WrestleMania. Adjacent to SoFi is the NBA Clippers’ Intuit Dome. The stadium opened in 2020, the arena in 2024.
Hollywood Park, one of the largest commercial development projects in the country, encompasses them both just two miles from LAX airport. The former horse racing grounds also features a casino, homes, office space, and endless retail.
In Inglewood, eat lunch at Dulan’s Soul Food. The fried chicken with mac and cheese, corn bread dressing, and cornbread muffins will do you right. Walk up Crenshaw Boulevard into Leimert Park.
“With the first representation of BUTTER here in Los Angeles, we want it to be very Black,” Moore said. “We want it to be a place where people from all parts of the city can come and interact. There’s so many things happening and it’s really a place that is vibrant and it’s new; it has that fresh LA culture. It doesn’t feel jaded in any way.”
BUTTER LA takes place February 26 through March 1.
Photography And The Black Arts Movement
‘Mom at Work’ (detail) from ‘Family Pictures and Stories,’ 1978–1984, Carrie Mae Weems. Gelatin silver print. National Gallery of Art, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund, 2022.108.1.
© Carrie Mae Weems
Speaking of “very Black,” an upcoming exhibition of photography at the J. Paul Getty Museum qualifies. These are the artists the BUTTER LA artists stand on the shoulders of.
Uniting around civil rights movements of the mid-20th century, writers, musicians, and visual artists explored how their work could celebrate Black culture and promote dignity, hope, and freedom. Their efforts to make and support art rooted in history and identity became known as the Black Arts Movement.
Photography played critical roles in both the civil rights and Black Arts movements. Across the United States and internationally, artists of the African diaspora used photographs as artistic expression, an organizing tool, and a means of building community. “Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955-1985,” on view February 24 through June 14, 2026, considers the many ways photography fostered Black empowerment and propelled social change.
The exhibition brings together works by more than 100 photographers, painters, graphic designers, and multimedia artists who used photographic images in their struggles against inequality.
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