Tony Adams (L) and Tyler Sirota at CLTV studio in Tampa on Sept. 10, 2026. Credit: Palm Tree Content for CLTV
“Why dream small?”
That’s the attitude of artrepreneur Tyler Sirota when it comes to realizing his dream: Art Fair Tampa, billed as “the region’s first major indoor fine art fair.”
The project is nothing if not ambitious: 300-plus artists in 200 booths, showing over four days, starting Thursday with a VIP Collectors Night, and at a mammoth venue—the 75,000-square-foot West Hall at the Tampa Convention Center.
It’s certainly the biggest art event Sirota has tackled—and he’s organizing it while also handling a day job as assistant engineering manager and art curator at the Epicurean Hotel in South Tampa. The former role involves “keeping everything looking proper” maintenance-wise; the latter allows him to connect local artists with the hotel, hanging their work there on a revolving basis. It’s one of several relationships he’s forged through the TT Art Collective (the TT stands for Tampa’s Top), which he founded seven years ago to create opportunities for local artists. JW Marriott, the Hyde House co-work spaces, and Water Street Tampa’s Night Market are among the venues where he’s brought artists and businesses together.
Sirota, 33, moved to Tampa in 2016 from Syracuse, New York with his fiancée (now wife) “to escape the weather.” But the weather isn’t always conducive to outdoor art shows, as he discovered while volunteering for the Gasparilla Festival of the Arts (GFA) in Curtis Hixon Park. He started wondering, “Why not bring something like this indoors?”
He got serious about his dream last year. “I had conversations with important partners, we took the risk and made it happen,” he told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay. He visited major art fairs like Art Basel Miami Beach and its satellites, including Spectrum Red Dot, to which he brought nine TT Collective artists in 2023.
Those fairs, of course, operate on a much more established—and expensive—level than what Sirota’s organizing. For one thing, a booth rental at Red Dot can cost anywhere from $9,000 to $20,000. Art Fair Tampa is charging $1,000-$3,000. And where visitors’ tickets to Red Dot run in the $30-$70 range (and where Miami Art Basel itself charges hundreds or even thousands for passes), admission to Art Fair Tampa is free (with the exception of the VIP Collectors Night, which will be $50 a ticket).
Miami’s fairs are known for record-breaking art sales and boundary-pushing artworks (like Maurizio Cattelan’s infamous duct-taped banana). While no multi-thousand-dollar bananas are slated for Art Fair Tampa, Sirota has rounded up some headliners that sound like fun—Instagram-ready installations like the Tesseract, “a 3-D look into the fourth dimension,” and works by the L.A.-based duo of Antonio Pelayo, a master inker for Disney, and his son Isaac, a painter known for his work in the hip-hop universe.
Sirota has already encountered the kind of last-minute dilemma that can plague a project as big as this. Two weeks before opening, he got a call from the company from which Art Fair was planning to rent walls for the artists’ booths. Their message, he says, was a “huge shock”: They wanted to jack up the price six times from the original estimate of $100,000. Sirota prefers not to name the contractor, someone he trusted and had worked with before, because “there are going to be some legal matters involved.” He did not have a signed contract with the company.
At first this seemed like it might have been “my worst nightmare,” said Sirota. He contacted artists right away to warn them about the situation, and many started requesting refunds. Artists did not sign contracts with Sirota, but had expected walls to be provided.
But he didn’t stop looking for a solution. “I was calling everyone from here to Timbuktu to put the pieces back together,” he added. A day later, he found a new contractor. In a follow-up text to the artists, he informed them that “our team worked around the clock and secured a new partner who has confidently stepped in to deliver our walls as promised.”
The news was “a huge relief,” participating artist Clancy Riehm told CL. “I’m happy to have a nice way to display everything.”
Clancy Riehm at Dave Decker Photography in Ybor City, Florida on Jan. 12, 2026. Credit: Dave Decker / Creative Loafing Tampa Bay
Riehm is one of many Tampa Bay or Florida-based artists in the show. Featured in CL’s Emerging Artists Issue earlier this year, Riehm’s colorful work fuses graphic design and fine art practices. A winner of design competitions sponsored by the Lightning and the Rays, she applied to Art Fair Tampa after seeing calls for applications on Instagram.
She’d considered Red Dot, but it was too expensive, adding, “This is like a good middle ground, bigger than the standard indie flea market, smaller than Art Basel.”
Worst case scenario? “I guess, like, no one shows up — giant empty space,” she added. “That wouldn’t be good.”
That’s also a concern of Chase Parker, who was recently featured in Dunedin Fine Art Center’s “Wearable Art” show.
Parker is known for striking works in which sculptural elements—most often, butterflies—burst from the frame. He sold his first butterfly piece out of a show at the Epicurean. He has shown at the GFA and at fairs in Miami and Austin.
“I want to see Art Fair succeed because I want to see Tampa succeed,” he told CL. “But a four-day show is a lot. You need people circulating all four days…. You can’t have a bunch of artists sitting around complaining.”
That’s not a big concern of Tony Adams (aka @ArtXTony).
“Even if no one comes,” he said during a recent, sponsored, CLTV podcast, “I’ll make connections with other creatives. But listen, people are coming! There’ve been people in my home town that haven’t seen my work!”
The ebullient Adams had been painting only for himself to de-stress from his pool cleaning business until he attended one of Sirota’s shows at the Epicurean. Since then, his painting career has taken off; he’s shown at the hotel and other venues (he was one of the nine artists TT Art Collective brought to Red Dot) and now his dynamic, eclectic works will be on view at Art Fair Tampa.
He’s excited about introducing Tampa Bay collectors to artists “who have been in their back yards, just kinda under their noses.”
And he dreams of bigger things.
“During art week in Miami, the entire city is lit up,” he said. “Having an art explosion in the Tampa area would be very good for the city.”
Tracy Midulla has some doubts about that. The founder and director of Tempus Projects and director of curatorial and community affairs for the Kress Contemporary complex in Ybor City, she doesn’t see the fair expanding into something like Miami’s Art Week.
“We don’t have the collector base or the infrastructure,” she said.
On the other hand, she says, that base is growing—perhaps helped by Tempus panels like their recent “Go Ahead Buy Some Art.”
And while she is not involved with Art Fair Tampa and hasn’t worked with Sirota, she said, “More power to him — it’s an admirable beast to try and tackle to the ground.”
Andrew Trujillo knows from buyers. He’s the owner of Drew Marc Gallery, the elegant contemporary gallery in South Tampa, and he’s bringing a selection of his artists to Art Fair Tampa.
“We’re really excited about it,” he told CL. “Tampa’s a booming city. There’s a huge influx of people moving here. If they market the fair correctly, it’s going to pull a lot of collectors.”
Which is no doubt what Tyler Sirota hopes will happen. The fair, which will also feature attractions like live painting and sculpture, will need to make a big splash this year if his next dream is realized: “Make it bigger, better, badder in year two,” he said, “and take over the entire exposition halls.”
But for year one, he’s got a simple request: “I want people to come in with no expectations and be ready to be wowed.”
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Full disclosure: Creative Loafing worked on advertising for the event, which has also garnered support from Visit Tampa Bay, among others.
This article appears in Oct. 08 – 14, 2026.
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