The Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority has picked the owner of art fairs in Miami and New York to stage an international arts exposition at Chicago’s Navy Pier in May, a spokesman for the agency confirmed Tuesday.
In response to inquiries, Billy Weinberg, a spokesman for McPier, as the agency is known, acknowledged that a deal was reached with Pfingsten Publishing, an Ohio-based unit of the private equity firm Pfingsten Partners of Deerfield.
Pfingsten Publishing will replace Thomas Blackman Associates, which had produced its Art Chicago at the pier every May for more than a decade. Blackman and McPier severed ties in June, and Thomas Blackman, head of the Chicago firm, said it planned to stage a Chicago show in a tent next July.
Earlier this year, Pfingsten, an art magazine publisher, acquired the Art Miami and Artexpo New York fairs.
Ilana Vardy, the director of Art Miami, is expected to run the fair here. Vardy is a former director of Art Chicago as well as of the Chicago International Art Exposition. She had continued to live in Chicago until moving to the Miami area in July.
“We’re very excited,” Vardy said Tuesday from Miami, shortly after her firm had been told it was selected.
She said the fair will be held, as has been the custom at the pier, around the Mother’s Day weekend.
Pfingsten beat out a group led by Chicago-based Expressions of Culture Inc., producer of SOFA, the international exhibitions of sculpture objects and functional art held at Navy Pier and in New York. Expressions President Mark Lyman said his firm had teamed with DMG World Media, a London-based international exhibition and magazine company (owned by the firm that publishes London’s Daily Mail newspaper).
“I am completely baffled by it,” Lyman said of the choice of Pfingsten, which he called “a company new to the business.”
He said he was told Pfingsten “offered a more lucrative financial deal.”
McPier’s Weinberg declined to discuss the financial terms of the deal.
Blackman said he hopes to announce soon a new site for Art Chicago. “We are confident the show will go forward next year and will be great,” he said.
“Would I have preferred that Navy Pier not recruit a competitor for me? Sure,” he said Tuesday. But he acknowledged that the pier “has to rent that space, and I’m not there.”
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Lyman said his firm and DMG haven’t given up on producing an arts exposition here.
“My group will get together to see what other opportunities there are in Chicago for a fine arts fair in a venue other than Navy Pier,” Lyman said.