Art Fairs Inter­na­tional: The gal­leries behind Foun­tain are an intensely inde­pen­dent group. You’ve been described as “in-your-face,” and the name “Foun­tain” is derived from the name of the auda­cious ready­made by Mar­cel Duchamp. All of these metaphors make me ask, where is your Foun­tain Manifesto?

David Kest­ing: We never wrote it. Foun­tain was a reac­tion to where we—Capla Kest­ing Fine Art, McCaig-Welles, and Front Room—were when we started Foun­tain NY 2006. I would rather see our goals achieved then spend time writ­ing a doc­trine of how we are sup­posed to act. What if that doc­trine becomes out­dated, or we no longer agree to what its goals are? I think the pur­pose of the Foun­tain Art Fair is to cre­ate lever­age for the inde­pen­dent gallery and dealer against the tra­di­tional art fair. When we started in 2006, none of the art fairs wanted any­thing to do with us. We couldn’t even get accepted into their fairs, much less come up with the money needed to rent a booth. Now we are on a first-name basis with a num­ber of the peo­ple who run these fairs, and we have venues to solicit the clien­tele who sup­port the con­tem­po­rary art mar­ket in these hotbeds of con­tem­po­rary art. All that gives these gal­leries a lot of free­dom and oppor­tu­nity that we didn’t have before.

AFI: On what level is Foun­tain most dif­fer­ent from other art fairs? Is it the artists’ work that is shown or the dele­tion of selec­tion juries?

DK: I think we are dif­fer­ent for the way we go about pro­duc­ing the fair. The gal­leries that decide to be part of Foun­tain gen­er­ally know each other and their artists have more dia­logue between them­selves dur­ing the process of pro­duc­ing the fair. The gal­leries know that what we are mak­ing is a do-it-together project; they know the rewards we can receive from mak­ing the fair hap­pen and see­ing it done right. The art fairs pro­duce the super major­ity of income for most gal­leries, and a suc­cess­ful fair can pro­vide enough fis­cal free­dom for a small gallery to sta­bi­lize it and its artists for the whole year. The gal­leries we have involved know what the oppor­tu­nity is and are pre­pared to do what’s nec­es­sary to see the project suc­ceed. I think that sense of com­mu­nity is really what sep­a­rates us from every­one else.

AFI: Was there a par­tic­u­lar moment watch­ing the art fair mar­ket that made you deter­mined to orga­nize a new and vastly dif­fer­ent one?

DK: Lin­coln Capla, my for­mer asso­ciate, John Leo, and I all went to Miami in 2005 and the scene was insane. We had been to the Armory and Scope in years pre­vi­ous and had known about the finan­cial ben­e­fits that a gallery can receive by being in a fair, but never before had it been so dis­parag­ingly obvi­ous. That’s when we first heard of gal­leries in the neigh­bor­hood clos­ing their doors because the busi­ness side of show­ing art called for clos­ing the gallery so that the dealer could con­cen­trate on strictly becom­ing an art fair venue. Hon­estly, it was sad. So we approached Melissa McCaig-Welles of McCaig-Welles Gallery Brook­lyn and Daniel Aycock of Front Room Brook­lyn about doing some­thing to grab the atten­tion of the art col­lec­tors, bring them out of the fairs, and try to put them into a friend­lier space some­where between the halls of a con­ven­tion cen­ter and a gallery. We didn’t want gal­leries to pay out­ra­geous fees to par­tic­i­pate in the event, or to fight about where their booth ends and another begins. So we started Foun­tain. I think Ben La Rocca, the critic from The Brook­lyn Rail, said it best when he described art fairs as really the worst way to view art—in a 100-square-foot box where the viewer is over­loaded with visual mate­r­ial. That’s why at Foun­tain we try so hard to main­tain real spaces for the gal­leries. Often when we carve up the fair, we pro­duce exhi­bi­tion spaces in excess of 500 to 750 square feet, larger then the spaces some of the par­tic­i­pat­ing gal­leries have at their year-round loca­tion. It’s more about sup­port­ing the gal­leries and giv­ing them a chance to suc­ceed than try­ing to make rental money off them.

AFI: How did you feel when The Brook­lyn Rail dubbed Foun­tain “a per­fect exam­ple of avant-energetics”? Did you feel that you’d achieved what you had orig­i­nally set out to do for the art world?

DK: Yeah. James Kalm wrote that about NY 2006 and then included us in his review of Miami 2006. I can­not tell you how sup­port­ive our crit­ics have been, from the Kalm arti­cle, to you guys at Art Fairs Inter­na­tional, to Paul H-O at Art­Net, to Jacque­line Lewis at Art­Info, to ArtKrush and Dazed Dig­i­tal. Then Fla­vor­pill listed us the hot spot for Armory Week­end in 2007 and we landed in Urban Eye in The New York Times—there is no way to explain how much sup­port that lends to gal­leries like us, mostly Brooklyn-based spaces like Christina Ray at Glowlab, and Brook and Peer at Out­ra­geous Look, or the Yum Yum Fac­tory. I think the rea­son for the good press really is due to the rela­tion­ships gal­leries and artists develop dur­ing the exhi­bi­tion. I think crit­ics see that and real­ize the authen­tic­ity of what’s hap­pen­ing and they buy into what we are doing in a big way.

AFI: Are there any high­lights you could rec­om­mend to atten­dees at Foun­tain Miami in December?

DK: I can’t let the cat out of the bag, but let’s just say Foun­tain Miami 2007 will be larger than any­thing we have taken on before. We will be keep­ing the gal­leries to about a dozen and we will have more space, more back­ing, and more expo­sure than ever before. We have a lot of return gal­leries com­ing back and every­one knows what their part is, how to do it, and the ben­e­fit that we get from work­ing together.