ADAA Cuts Loose Its Old Fair And Stakes Out A New Future At The Armory

The Art Dealers Association of America is stepping back into the Park Avenue Armory with a clean slate and a different promise. The ADAA Fair, slated for November 12–16, 2026, wipes away the old architecture of The Art Show and steps toward a broader cultural mission the association says it wants to own.

The long-running partnership with Henry Street Settlement is over. For decades, the Armory’s aisles doubled as a fundraising engine for a single Lower East Side nonprofit. ADAA has now rerouted that flow, pointing it toward museums and arts organizations across the country. This is the pivot the organization is calling a new era—mission-first, institution-facing, structurally national.

Inside that shift sits the ADAA Foundation, founded in 1970 and powered mostly by member galleries. It has funded research and exhibitions for more than fifty years, and the 2025 slate runs from Chicago’s DuSable Black History Museum to the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, the Neuberger Museum of Art, Inner-City Arts, and the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art. The new fair becomes the stage where this work is not just mentioned but made visible.

For ADAA’s more than 200 member galleries, the return to the Armory reads as both continuity and break. The rooms are the same. The purpose is not. The fair is now designed as infrastructure—support flowing inward and outward, dealers carrying the charge of propping up the cultural field that props them up in return.

Programming, participants, and partnerships are still under wraps. What stands out now is the speed of the reset. ADAA closed the 2025 edition, cut a decades-old alliance, and rebuilt the fair’s identity around institutional support instead of social-services philanthropy. When the doors open in November 2026, the question will be simple: can a trade association remake a fair into cultural scaffolding rather than a market ritual?

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