{"id":428221,"date":"2026-10-15T04:02:27","date_gmt":"2026-10-15T04:02:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/428221\/"},"modified":"2026-10-15T04:02:27","modified_gmt":"2026-10-15T04:02:27","slug":"art-fair-tampa-opens-thursday-at-tampa-convention-center-with-free-admission","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/428221\/","title":{"rendered":"Art Fair Tampa Opens Thursday at Tampa Convention Center With Free Admission"},"content":{"rendered":"

Art Fair Tampa<\/a> opens Thursday, Oct. 15, at the Tampa Convention Center. The four-day event takes over the 75,000-square-foot West Hall, and the public can walk in free. Only the VIP Collectors Night on opening night carries a price: $50 a ticket.<\/p>\n

Organizers call it the region’s first major indoor fine art fair. The City of Tampa says it is the city’s first art convention.<\/p>\n

Tyler Sirota, 33, built the fair from scratch. He works as an assistant engineering manager and art curator at the Epicurean Hotel in South Tampa. Seven years ago he started the TT Art Collective, a group meant to open doors for local artists.<\/p>\n

Sirota moved to Tampa in 2016 from Syracuse, New York. He volunteered at the Gasparilla Festival of the Arts in Curtis Hixon Park, where weather can ruin an outdoor show. That got him thinking about an indoor event. “I had conversations with important partners, we took the risk and made it happen,” he told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Booth rentals at Art Fair Tampa run $1,000 to $3,000. Compare that with Spectrum Red Dot, a satellite fair of Art Basel Miami Beach, where booths can cost $9,000 to $20,000 and visitor tickets go for $30 to $70. Sirota brought nine TT Art Collective artists there in 2023.<\/p>\n

Then trouble hit. Two weeks before opening, the company that planned to rent out walls for the booths raised its price to six times the original $100,000 estimate. Sirota had no signed contract with that company. Many artists asked for refunds. A day later, he found a new contractor.<\/p>\n

Headliners include the Tesseract, an installation described as “a 3-D look into the fourth dimension.” The fair also shows works by Antonio Pelayo, a master inker for Disney, and his son Isaac Pelayo, a painter known for his work in the hip-hop universe. Visitors can watch live painting and see sculpture on display.<\/p>\n

Clancy Riehm, a Tampa Bay artist, said the fair is “a good middle ground, bigger than the standard indie flea market, smaller than Art Basel.” Chase Parker, another artist taking part, said a four-day show requires people “circulating all four days.”<\/p>\n

Tracy Midulla, founder and director of Tempus Projects, has no part in the fair. She said, “We don’t have the collector base or the infrastructure,” and added that the base is growing.<\/p>\n

Andrew Trujillo, owner of Drew Marc Gallery, will bring some of his artists. “Tampa’s a booming city,” he said. Sirota hopes that in year two the fair will spread across the entire exposition halls.<\/p>\n

Doors open Thursday from 5 to 10 p.m. On Friday, Oct. 16, and Saturday, Oct. 17, hours run from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 18, wraps up from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Find the Tampa Convention Center at 333 Franklin St.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Art Fair Tampa opens Thursday, Oct. 15, at the Tampa Convention Center. The four-day event takes over the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":428222,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[684,135,137,136],"class_list":["post-428221","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tampa","tag-events","tag-tampa","tag-tampa-headlines","tag-tampa-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428221","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=428221"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428221\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/428222"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=428221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=428221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=428221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}