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Art Basel Miami Beach has named the 272 exhibitors that will participate in its upcoming 2026 fair, scheduled to run December 4–6, with VIP preview days on December 2–3.
For its 24th edition, Art Basel Miami Beach has announced a number of changes, including a completely revamped floor plan, fewer exhibitors, and the elimination of the Meridians section, for large-scale works.
“It’s important for the show, now in its 24th year, to stay evolving, to stay dynamic, and to keep these conversations building, between galleries and clients who are very familiar with the show, but also to build them for people who are just now finding their way to Art Basel Miami Beach,” ABMB director Bridget Finn told ARTnews in an interview.
When the fair announced its exhibitor list last year, it had 285 galleries and had not yet announced the addition of the Zero 10 initiative. Without Zero 10, the 2026 fair has 250 galleries with booths on the main floor. The biggest change comes to the Galleries section, which has been slimmed down to 204 exhibitors from 226, or about 10 percent fewer. The Positions sectors lost four exhibitors, while Nova and Survey will each go down by two presentations.
“This reduction is more about refinement than contraction,” Finn said, noting that the fair could have sold more booths if it wanted to. “A long-running ambition of the committee is to streamline, reduce, move forward” so that the fair can “provide the best structure for the galleries that do the show, to improve the pacing of the VIP experience, and to introduce a fair that feels high quality and evolving.”
She added, “The market correction over the last few years has caused some reactionary planning across the board. We are not working that way. We are thinking in advance of what the need is and how to provide a better experience for galleries and their businesses. That has been the critical driver this year.”
Finn described the floor plan change, which will see Art Basel Miami Beach occupy around 12 percent less floor space in the convention center, as coming from “a longstanding conversation” she has had with the selection committee. The committee consists of seven dealers, since Finn joined the fair three years ago, as well as feedback from exhibitors. The reconfigured floor plan has also brought back seven galleries to the Galleries section, including Pilar Corrias, DC Moore Gallery, Alison Jacques, Edward Tyler Nahem, and Mariane Ibrahim.
“It really has been driven by the committee in a sense of streamlining the show, and I think that means a multitude of things,” Finn said. “This was a collaborative process with the committee and galleries of all scales to redistribute many of them in a way that will create just a better flow.”
Finn characterized it as “a more symmetrical and balanced show floor” that will be easier to navigate in terms of going aisle by aisle without getting turned around. “The worst thing you can hear, and dealers say it all the time: ‘My client couldn’t find me,’” she said. “So, we’re trying to address that in a way that is not reactionary, but thinks through the experience, reducing distractions and providing a very sharp, tailored experience.”
Because of the size of the Miami Beach Convention Center and the fact that this iteration of Art Basel is the only one to take place across a single floor, ABMB’s floor plan is the most accommodating to individual exhibitors’ needs. “If somebody says, ‘I need this many square meters,’ we try to provide exactly that, so we also need the floor plan to be able to receive that, and so this reworked configuration allows for that in a way that is a little more forgiving with variation,” Finn said.
The 2025 floor plan consisted of five plazas, which offer areas of rest and food and beverage options as well as a view of several clusters of galleries. The 2026 floor plan will only consist of four plazas, which have been enlarged and rotated “to a configuration that is more architecturally in line with the building,” she said. “We were able to realign [the plaza] entrances so they meet four aisles that work their way across the show instead of just feeding two aisles, allowing for people to move in a bit more of a dispersed way.”
The floor plan changes will also see several blue-chip exhibitors more evenly distributed across the convention center as a way to prompt collectors to traverse more of the fair—and hopefully come across midsize and emerging galleries along the way. While some blue-chip galleries will stay put so they can “continue to hold the space, build their clients, and maintain the relationships with the galleries around them,” the redistribution comes from Art Basel’s “thinking about structures for support in terms of our core Galleries sector,” according to Finn.
By way of example, Finn pointed to which galleries will be relocating, even as the floor plan is still being finalized. Long on the north end of the fair, Hauser & Wirth, David Zwirner, Lisson Gallery, Sprüth Magers, David Kordansky, and Mendes Wood DM have been confirmed as relocating from Plaza A (northeast corner) to Plaza B (southeast corner). Stuart Shave Modern Art, which last participated in ABMB in 2018, will also head to Plaza B. Meanwhile, 303 Gallery, Casey Kaplan, neugerriemschneider, and Lehmann Maupin will relocate from Plaza B to Plaza C (southwest corner).
The fair’s back room, closest to Washington Avenue and the beach, will now consist of the fair’s three focused sections: Nova, for work created in the past three years; Positions, solo presentations by emerging artists; and Survey, for historical presentations. The majority of the more than 30 galleries that will have their Art Basel Miami Beach debuts will be in these three sections, though Arario Gallery (of Seoul) and Galería Casado Santapau (Madrid) will debut directly into the Galleries section.
When thinking about the changes to the Galleries section, “it also seemed like a great time to bring together Survey, Nova, and Positions to the east entrance,” Finn said. “I do think that the changes that we’ve made this year will enliven the entire show floor. It will provide showgoers a new experience.”
Last year, Zero 10 and Meridians shared the south end of the convention center (closest to 17th Street). Now, only Zero 10 will take over this space and there will be more breathing room between that section and the booth portion of the fair. This iteration of Zero 10 will feature 22 projects and be curated by Karen Archey, head of the curatorial department at Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf.
“These are such incredibly valuable projects, and large-scale institutional works are so critical to the show,” Finn said of the works that visitors have come to expect from Meridians. But, when compared to Art Basel’s other four fairs, the average booth size in Miami Beach is on average much larger than what the venues in Basel, Hong Kong, Paris, and Doha can accommodate.
“We have space within the convention center for galleries to bring those kinds of works to their booth,” she said. “It gives galleries the advantage to think about planning for those works within the confines of their booth, because then they are not traversing the show floor to meet their clients. They’re right there, and they’re able to build it into the broader narrative of what they’re presenting.”
Beyond the convention center, Art Basel Miami Beach will unveil a new work by James Turrell outdoors, in conjunction with the Turrell Art Foundation and supported by Pace Gallery. The Public Art Fund will host a series of artist-designed ping pong tables, under the “Between Tides,” in Collins Park, across from the fair. The six participating artists are Moko Fukuyama, Ilana Harris-Babou, Las Hermanas Iglesias, Carlos H. Matos, Amalia Pica, and SUPERFLEX.
Reevaluating an art fair’s existing floor plan has become somewhat of a trend ever since Frieze London announced it would do just that beginning with its 2024 fair, moving blue-chip exhibitors to the back of the fair’s tent so collectors would have to pass emerging and midsize galleries in order to get there.
“Mid-career galleries are the lifeblood of our show,” Finn said of this ongoing trend. “They create such an infrastructure for their artists, so how do we, as fair builders, support them in what they’re doing—making sales and reaching their clients—and optimize visibility for them and their artists? Everything we’ve done with the show this year is working to do that.”