Rosewood invites Dallas hotel-room fair to London's former U.S. Embassy

A hotel-room art fair founded by Dallas dealer James Cope is expanding to London this October, with Rosewood Hotels hosting the event inside the former U.S. Embassy in Mayfair.

The fair runs October 15–18 at The Chancery Rosewood. The luxury hotel opened last year inside the Eero Saarinen-designed former U.S. Embassy at 30 Grosvenor Square, which served as the embassy until 2017.

Roughly 15 galleries will occupy a floor of the hotel during Frieze London, which runs October 14 through 18 in Regent's Park, Cope said in an interview Monday. Eleven or 12 exhibitors are confirmed, and the list reaches beyond the fair's Dallas roster of young galleries.

Private dealer Jim Kelly plans to show new works by Ed Ruscha, Cope said. Private dealer Charles Asprey, who participated in the original Gramercy International Art Fair that inspired Cope's model, is also exhibiting.

"In Dallas, it's been younger galleries, but for London, we're mixing them in with established galleries and private dealers," Cope said.

New York galleries participating include Broadway, Lomex and Europa, Cope said. Gathering and Vardaxoglou will show from London, and a new Miami gallery, Andrew Reed, is participating. Cope's own Dallas gallery will exhibit.

Cope founded the Dallas Invitational in 2023 as a satellite to the Dallas Art Fair. He is joined for the London edition by Jessica Nowitzki, a Dallas-based art consultant and collector who had connections with the London hotel's staff.

The two met more than 20 years ago working for the Goss-Michael Foundation, the Dallas arts organization founded by collector Kenny Goss and the singer George Michael, and both spent stretches of that job working in London, they said.

"I work as an art consultant, and I collect and support endeavors like this, so it was an easy one for me to step in with James," Nowitzki said.

Cope, who has run his Farmers Branch gallery for 12 years and shown at fairs including Art Basel, Frieze and the Armory Show, traced the Invitational to Art Basel Miami Beach around 2012 or 2013.

He said other dealers at the time noted the high cost, in money and labor, of participating in mega-fairs.

"We're away from our families for two weeks in this massive convention center with 300 other galleries," Cope recalled them saying.

The first Dallas edition, at the Fairmont hotel, was assembled through Cope's network. "There was no website, there was no press, there was no kind of branding, there was no nothing, it was all word of mouth," he said.

Dallas collectors later pushed Cope to move the fair to the Rosewood Mansion on Turtle Creek, he said. Rosewood Hotels & Resorts was founded in Dallas in 1979 by Caroline Rose Hunt, who converted the former mansion of Texas cotton magnate Sheppard King into its first hotel the following year.

The move to the Rosewood Mansion proved instrumental for the growth of Cope’s model. The hotel format cuts costs by using rooms that need no built walls, he said, and most galleries sleep in the rooms where they exhibit, eliminating lodging bills. Smaller works mean lower shipping costs, and that math changes what a gallery can afford to sell.

"If you do one of these big fairs, you can't sell things at $5,000, at $10,000," Cope said, adding that emerging galleries at the Invitational can sell works priced from $3,000 because overhead is lower.

"If you're a younger gallery and you get into Basel, you pretty much have to sell out, which is a massive win, just to break even," he said.

A major fair is a gallery's make-or-break event aimed at giving galleries as much as six months' worth of revenue to get by, Cope said. But that cushion comes at a human cost.

"If you have a family, you've got kids to feed and come home after two weeks on the road, totally ragged out and sick, what's the point?" Cope said. "There has to be a better way, a holistic, more human way to do these things."

And sales from larger fairs don’t convert into repeat customers.

"You sell to someone, and you never hear from them again," he said of the larger fairs.

Asked whether an intimate fair pressures visitors who are not buying, Cope said the opposite is true, describing 30-second interactions with dealers at transactional mega-fairs and a Miami Beach convention hall where "there's 500 galleries, like, this is so overwhelming, where do you even start?"

"You walk into someone's room, and the dealer is sitting on the sofa drinking a Pepsi, talking to somebody else—it's just more of a relaxed, welcoming approach," he said.

"You can do it in like an hour, two hours," Cope said of a floor of 10 to 15 galleries. "Then you go have coffee at the bar, bump into a friend, have a chat."

The founders said they host welcome dinners, collector breakfasts and collection tours for participating galleries, with local patrons hosting some events.

Nowitzki acknowledged the format's limits, including room sizes that constrain sculpture and large-scale work. The founders said they may seek permission to use the garden across from the hotel in Grosvenor Square for outdoor works in future editions.

"There are some galleries that have some really established blue-chip artists,” she said. “You're looking at six-figure works, and then there are some galleries that will bring more emerging or mid-career artists that are much more affordable.”

There is no application process or fee, Cope said. Galleries are invited and then work with the founders to determine what might sell best, a process he contrasted with that of major fairs.

"Everything is curated now," Cope said. What the Invitational means by the word, he and Nowitzki said, is selecting galleries whose programs differ from one another and advising each on what to bring.

Cope said large fairs hire curators for special sections to "balance the heavy mercantile nature of these fairs with a curatorial presence," and offered his read on what those sections ask of galleries.

"They might be like, ‘Okay, we want you to dump a giant pile of sand in your booth and stick a neon tube in it," he said, noting that such curated sections are generally thematic.

Tickets are required and available through the fair's website. A press and VIP preview is scheduled for October 15, with public hours Friday through Sunday.

"I want people to come to Dallas and London, have a nice time, meet new people, reconnect with old friends, do some business, and go home feeling, like, not totally ragged out," Cope said.

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