Boston's Affordable Art Fair Returns With More Than 400 Artists

The Affordable Art Fair is back in Boston for a second year, and the roster has real scale to it: upward of four hundred artists, drawn from forty-five countries. For a fair built on the premise that a first purchase should be within reach, that is a wide field to walk, and a reader who covers houses for a living will recognize the appeal at once. Walls need something on them, and a new owner furnishing a Beacon Hill townhouse or a Back Bay apartment is exactly the buyer a fair like this is designed to meet. The format rewards looking rather than knowing: work is priced to be bought on the spot, and the pleasure is in finding the piece that will hang over the mantel for the next twenty years. That the fair has come back for a second edition says the city answered the first one. For a market title, the arithmetic is the story: four hundred-plus makers, forty-five flags, one American city, and a weekend in which a good deal of art will find a home.

With reporting from Surface.