A new event is slated to hit art world calendars next year with the debut of Scottsdale Ferrari Art Week, an art and design fair set to welcome both local and international galleries, dealers, and collectors March 20–23, 2025. Staged in the North Hall at West World of Scottsdale, the fair promises to be a one-of-a-kind experience within the American Southwest.
Michael Plummer, former senior executive at Christie’s and Sotheby’s; founder of TEFAF New York; and art advisory firm Artvest principal has been named the new Development Director of Scottsdale Ferrari Art Week. With a wealth of personal and professional experience working within the art market and art world at large, Plummer along with the fair’s team will leverage the Southwest’s rich, cultural art scene to craft an event of international caliber.
Marking the announcement, we reached out to Plummer to learn more about what drew him to join the project, and what he envisions for the future of the fair.
Courtesy of Scottsdale Ferrari Art Week.
Can you tell us a bit about what led to your involvement with Scottsdale Ferrari Art Week?
When I first brought the TEFAF Maastricht fair to New York in 2016, the excitement was palpable, especially for a city of art insiders who believed that when it came to art events, they had seen it all. I had long felt that New York deserved a fair of this caliber. And the consequence was an extraordinary boost of energy at a difficult moment, in a polarized election year just like what we are in now. Beautiful, imaginative, art fairs have the capacity to do that—unite a community around a common cultural cause. When the founders of Scottsdale Art Week came to me to help launch an art and design fair in this Southwestern “paradise”—quite literally called Paradise Valley—I was prepared to hear their case about that community.
And what was it about their “case” that convinced you?
The desert Southwest has drawn great art world figures from Georgia O’Keeffe, Frank Lloyd Wright, Yves Kline, and Max Ernst to Michael Heizer and James Turrell, visionaries who were so inspired by the local landscape that they either settled here or created monumental land art. And in more recent years, it has become the home to the “wealth of the west,” with an enormous influx of affluent residents. But, lastly, the further I researched the region’s connection to contemporary art by Indigenous artists, I knew this fair would be not only worthwhile for this community, but unique in what it could offer the global art fair calendar.
Courtesy of Scottsdale Ferrari Art Week.
What do you see as the greater significance of Scottsdale Ferrari Art Week—both locally and within the greater art world?
Since the pandemic, the art world has been searching for its new “normal,” especially dealers and galleries, which were so hard hit when the art fairs were shut down for nearly two years. Now that we’ve emerged from that, we have a new challenge—a widespread market downturn, and dealers hungry for new markets outside the well-trodden ground in Europe and the Northeast U.S.
Oddly enough, in contrast to the reports we are getting here in New York City, art dealers in the Southwest seem to be thriving. And that makes economic sense, more of the wealth in that part of the world comes from oil and gas. Here much of it comes from real estate or has been funded from art lending to sources of capital which have been hard hit in the last two years.
How do you persuade a dealer who might be looking to cut back on their art fair commitments in an underperforming marketplace to try a new fair?
We understand in this market that dealers are needing to be more cost conscious, and we’ve taken that into account by charging below-market booth fees, finding lower cost hotel rooms during peak season, and working to lower shipping costs. We know in this climate such things take on far more importance than they would have prior to the pandemic.
Courtesy of Scottsdale Ferrari Art Week.
How has the local and regional art scene informed or influenced the creation of the fair?
Denizens of the Southwest region have a connection to the landscape that dates to antiquity, and it’s a crossroads for many Indigenous tribes, there are 22 in Arizona. The recent emergence of contemporary art by Indigenous artists on the global scene through visionary collectors like the Gochman family, the presentation of Jeffrey Gibson at the U.S. pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale, Melissa Cody’s exhibition at MoMA PS1, and the Jaune Quick-to-See Smith retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, all indicate the growing relevance of contemporary Indigenous art in today’s art market. And we are making this a major theme of Scottsdale Ferrari Art Week, not only in our inaugural year, but for years to come, from dealers who focus on contemporary Indigenous artists to cultural programming and other related events with local museums and institutions. But in addition to this, we will have dealers of American Modernism, 20th and 21st-century design, and contemporary makers.
What goes into staging an event of this magnitude from scratch?
The critical element of launching a successful fair is having an experienced team in place who understands the exhibitor’s priority is to sell art and meet new clients, and what the fair management needs to do to help accomplish that. Secondly, it is understanding the environment visitors need to fall in love with the art or design on offer, is conducive to learning about it, and where that experience can be shared with other like-minded people. In the case of Scottsdale Ferrari Art Week, we have seasoned fair veterans other than myself: Benjamin Genocchio, the previous director of the Armory Show, and Joshua Rose and Logan Browning, two professionals with tons of experience in the community and the region.
Courtesy of Scottsdale Ferrari Art Week.
How long has Scottsdale Ferrari Art Week been in the making?
Since early 2024, the founders and owners Trey Brennen and Jason Rose have been working to enlist the larger cultural community to pull together, through strategic local investors, important sponsorships such as Ferrari, and institutional partnerships. We have also formed a robust advisory board of art collectors and local cultural thought leaders. It takes a village to create a successful art fair.
Are there any exhibitor highlights that you can share with us? Are there any that you are particularly looking forward to?
As with all first-year art fairs, exhibitor conversations are ongoing, but they are progressing at a pace that has astonished me. It is an exciting combination of historical American Art, contemporary art and design, with a special focus on contemporary art from Indigenous artists who often blur the lines between what constitutes art and design. It will be a fair that is not a regional derivative of Art Basel or Frieze, but something that is worthwhile for a New York-, London-, or Paris-based collector to have a one-of-a-kind art fair experience that they will not be able to replicate anywhere else. Just like the art world discovered 20 years ago that Miami was the most beautiful place to be in the first week of December, soon they will discover the same is true for Scottsdale and Phoenix in the third week of March. Join us next year, March 20 though 23, and find out for yourself.
Courtesy of Scottsdale Ferrari Art Week.
Outside of exhibitor presentations, what are some things visitors can expect to experience?
There are so many natural, artistic, and leisure wonders relatively nearby, from the Grand and Bryce Canyons, to Walter de Maria’s Lightening Fields and Michael Heizer’s City, to having one of the highest concentrations of five-diamond resorts and golf courses in the U.S. Also, there is an abundant selection of great restaurants including Southwestern and Indigenous cuisines with seven semifinalists for the 2024 James Beard award.
What type of events or collaborations are slated?
We are currently planning events with all the leading museums and institutions in Scottsdale and Phoenix, including Phoenix Art Museum, the Heard, Arizona State University Art Museum (which is the recipient of our Gala evening event on March 19), Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Taliesen West, the Desert Botanical Garden. Additionally, there will be private studio visits of local artists with international profiles, and house tours of notable art collectors, manifesting how art collecting is reflected in the contemporary desert living.