Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in On Balance, the ARTnews newsletter about the art market and beyond. Sign up here to receive it every Wednesday.Last week, during the second edition of the Atlanta Art Fair, one question filtered through the humid Southern air: What would it take for Atlanta to become a national arts hub, something like Dallas, with its billionaires and spacious museums, or Chicago, with its scrappy artist-run spaces and university backbone? The money is already there: sports fortunes, the film industry’s tax-break boom, a bourgeoning tech industry, and a scattering of wealthy Southern families. What’s missing is harder to pin down.The Atlanta Art Fair has staked its identity on Pullman Yards, the sprawling 27-acre former rail works in the Kirkwood district. Once a repair shop for Pullman sleeper cars—and before that, a World War I munitions plant—the red-brick complex carries more than a century of industrial history. For decades, the site sat largely derelict, a canvas for graffiti and a backdrop for film shoots, until a redevelopment push in the late 2010s began transforming it into a cultural district. Today, the same cavernous sheds hold music festivals, reality competition tapings, and immersive exhibitions like “Imagine Picasso.” In 2022, former President Barack Obama spoke at a rally for Senator Raphael Warnock in one building while an episode of Dancing with the Stars was filmed in another.In opting for Pullman Yards, Atlanta’s fair skirted the typical convention center or hotel ballroom setup. The buildings there are symbols of reinvention: they still wear their history. But during the fair, at least, these buildings also carried banners and spotlights that signaled new use. The unusual venue suggested that, with this fair, a future in which Atlanta is the American South’s arts hub has to include the city’s past.The opening day was buzzy, but not with your typical art fair clientele. There were as many high school and college students there as people in Gucci loafers. Falcons jerseys and T-shirts outnumbered blazers three to one. Both attendees and staffers alike were in good spirits. “Hey y’all, welcome, enjoy!” the person who scanned my ticket said as I walked in the fair. Would that ever be said at Frieze or Art Basel?At the center of it was Kelly Freeman, the fair’s director, who, on the Friday that I attended, looked more like a PA than an impresario. Wearing a grey T-shirt, with walkie talkie at the ready, she darted her eyes around the fair as we spoke. “We’re teaching a city how to use an art fair,” she said. The 80 or so dealers under her watch are encouraged to stand in the aisles, pull people into conversation, and make sure no one feels like they’ve wandered into the wrong room.She compared the experience to visiting a bespoke tailor for the first time. If the questions about cuffs and fabrics feel alien, most people will flee to Brooks Brothers and buy off the rack. An art fair, in her view, has to offer both—the accessible experience for newcomers and the custom fit for those willing to learn the language.Sales matter, of course, but she had a longer horizon in mind. “I want sales,” Freeman admitted, “but I’ve done my job if someone drives to Savannah because they saw something here.” In other words, the fair succeeds when it pushes people beyond its own walls.And yet, she insists, the future isn’t hers to dictate. “It’s all about the city deciding to embrace it,” she said. The fair can build the stage, invite the players, and cue the lights—but Atlanta’s art community has to keep showing up.Across the floor, San Francisco dealer Jonathan Carver Moore framed the question differently. In two years, he has hauled his gallery to 11 fairs—Expo Chicago, Untitled, 1-54 New York, the Cape Town Art Fair, and more. This one offered him the opportunity to take new collectors on a journey. “Maybe they’re entering at the $5,000 level today,” he said, “but years from now they might be some of my top collectors.”Installation shot of Jonathan Carver Moore’s booth at the Atlanta Art Fair.Still, it was Atlanta that stopped him short. “I’ve never been to a fair where the majority of people looked like me,” Moore said. For a Black-owned gallery, that was no small thing. The recognition in the room, the cultural resonance of certain works, the shared experiences created an atmosphere he hadn’t encountered elsewhere. (“The hot comb in the kitchen,” he said with a laugh pointing at a delicate portrait of an elderly Black woman doing her hair in the kitchen, a mirror propped up on the stove, “that resonates with people across generations. Even I was surprised.” ) It was a reminder that for Atlanta to become a true hub, it might not need to copy Dallas or Chicago at all—it could lean into what only Atlanta can offer.Then there was Marcia Wood, a dealer who has run a gallery in Atlanta for more than 40 years. She has seen enough to know the obstacles: perception, sprawl, traffic, and a collector base accustomed to outsourcing their art buying to New York. “They’ve had it spoon-fed to them,” she said. But she also pointed out that the building blocks are there—population, sophistication, money. The challenge is translating all that into a sustained culture of collecting.For younger dealers like Alexander Hawkins, who runs the tiny but ambitious Hawkins HQ gallery, the answer is clearer: education. At last year’s fair, he recalls, plenty of visitors asked if he had made all the art in his booth himself. That kind of confusion doesn’t come from malice but from a gap that starts in schools. “We’re 49th in arts funding,” he said, “only ahead of Florida.”Adviser Lara Bjork said the problem is structural: collectors and galleries alike need more education about how the art market actually works. Without that education, fairs risk becoming trade shows rather than cultural engines. What Atlanta requires is not just more galleries, but the right ones—spaces that connect to the local scene while also bringing in perspectives from New York, Los Angeles, and beyond.“There has to be a connection between the north and the south,” she said. If Dallas has oil and Chicago has universities, Atlanta’s path will come from bridging its Southern identity with the larger American art market. She sees Atlanta as the only city in the region capable of carrying that weight. “Some city has to do it. It’s not going to be Charlotte, it’s not going to be Charleston. It has to be Atlanta.”Balentine Prize finalist Roscoe Hall, Thank You!!!! (2025) from Sheet Cake galleryAtlanta does already have strong institutional anchors in the High Museum, the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, and Atlanta Contemporary. And the fair is a good start as well. But these institutions and the fair can’t carry the load alone.Pullman Yards is doing its share by offering housing, studio space, and stipends to artists like Anthony Akinbola, Robert Choe-Henderson, Elfreda Fakoya, and Atlanta’s own Adana Tillman. The program promises not just to host artists, but to open their studios to the public, creating a pipeline between international practice and local audiences.The fair itself has partnered with regional players to establish the Balentine Prize, a purchase award recognizing emerging Southern artists, which this year went to Caroline Allison. And smaller galleries like Hawkins HQ continue to give space to artists who might otherwise slip through the cracks, often in unlikely venues—from motel rooms to warehouses.Taken together, these pieces suggest an ecosystem beginning to form. (So too does is the fair’s attendance: some 13,500 people came this year.) What Atlanta now needs is connective tissue strong enough to hold museums, schools, galleries, and collectors together.“I think that Atlanta in time can replicate what Dallas has done,” said Lauren Kennedy, founder of the Memphis-based gallery Sheet Cake. “What it took in Dallas was the collectors to come in and set the tone. The powers that be have to put in the time, energy, and resources into making it happen. All of this is a long game, you know? But it can happen.”