Spotlight on Alumna Sarah Haselwood: Art Fair Director-Designer-Producer

As Managing Director of SPACE | Design + Production, Sarah Haselwood (BA ’06) is involved in every aspect of art fairs, from their inception and design to their public reception. After completing her BA in Art History at FSU, Sarah went on to complete a master’s degree in Arts Administration at NYU. After a brief stint working with an appraiser in New York City in 2009, she began her career as an intern at the PULSE Art Fair. Since then, she has produced and managed over 100 art and design fairs including PULSE Miami Beach, UNTITLED, Collective Design Fair, SOFA Chicago, Art Aspen, and the Affordable Art Fair. She now serves as Managing Director of SPACE | Design + Production, a full-service exhibition and event company in Brooklyn that specializes in the design, planning, management and implementation of art fairs. In a typical day, Sarah is working simultaneously on as many as 15 recurring annual art fairs.

Haselwood is responsible for overall logistics at the fairs, which take place in such varied venues as airplane hangars in Los Angeles, warehouses in New York City, and 80,000-square-foot tents on the beach in Miami. Her rigorous travel schedule takes her across the country to work alongside domestic and international art galleries, ensuring that the presentation of art in ephemeral environments is as similar as possible to permanent exhibitions. Haselwood is particularly sensitive to the public’s experience of art in such temporary spaces. She can be found working on correctly placing a 5,000-pound sculpture one minute, making sure an event pavilion’s air conditioning is functioning properly the next, all the while working directly with galleries to ensure their contribution to the fair is managed as smoothly as possible.

I use my art history degree on a daily basis, speaking to and about contemporary art and artists with a shared visual vocabulary that gives me ‘insider status’ within the greater contemporary art community and art fair world. My background knowledge of the history of art has proven imperative to the success of my company.