It’s been a couple of years since a labor dispute and cash problems forced Thomas Blackman to sell Art Chicago, the fair he founded and ran for more than a decade, to Merchandise Mart Properties. But evidently he kept a memento: the walls. Blackman has been renting out the variously sized partitions (Merchandise Mart has its own) to fairs around the world, among them Photo LA, Photo Miami, AIPAD Miami and Pinta in New York. Says one dealer, “You can walk into a booth and say, ‘Are those Blackman walls?’ ” It just goes to show what fairs are made of—other fairs.

"If These Walls Could Talk" originally appeared in the May 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's May 2008 Table of Contents.