PrintFairsUSA, LLC is a venture designed to assure the production in virtual form of the various local and regional print fairs which are a mainstay of the Print Trade. The first Fair, the NY Satellite Print Fair, was produced in October 2020, opening at the time the live fair would have, and running for several weeks. This Fair has been held annually since 2010, running at the same time as the IFPDA’s Fine Art Print Fair, and providing an affordable venue for IFPDA members for whom the larger fair is too costly, and for qualified print dealers who aren’t members of IFPDA. In January there are Print Fairs over three successive weekends at the Portland Art Museum in Portland, Oregon, the Kala Institute in Berkeley, California, and at a venue in Pasadena, California. PrintFairsUSA, LLC will produce the West Coast Print Fair as a virtual alternative to these shows, running from January 22 to February 8, 2021. In April we will produce a virtual Capital Art Fair, and in Summer 2021, we will produce the Midwest Print Fair as a virtual substitute for the shows normally held in Cleveland and Minneapolis. When these Fairs return, PrintFairsUSA, LLC will continue to produce virtual versions which will augment the live shows by making them accessible to a public beyond the geographic location in which they take place.
Born in Belgium, Bernard Derroitte moved to the United States in 1998. After working for Richard Armstrong for 8 years, Bernard took over Armstrong Fine Art in 2006. In 2018 Bernard launched Mesh Art Gallery, an online dealership in contemporary works on paper by independent artists. Through a personal interest in languages, of which Bernard speaks four, he has increasingly developed an interest a plurality of forms of expressions. Always on the lookout for unexpected, scarce, inventive, and finely crafted prints, his passion is for objects that grab his attention, not for name recognition. Bernard has called Chicago home for nearly half his life now, and lives with his wife and two teenage children on the Southside of the city.
Ed Pollack was born in New York City. He is a graduate of Hobart College and of Harvard Law School, and served two years in the United States Army. He worked for the US Department of Housing and Urban Development as a lawyer and administrator, and later was the General Counsel for the Massachusetts Housing Finance Agency.
While engaged in his career in the Public Sector Ed was also very much involved in the worlds of art, antiques, and rare books. He was a partner in a shop in Greenwich Village in the 1960s called The Tunnel of Love (six feet wide, sixty feet long), and in another in Boston called All Our Yesterdays in the 1970s and 1980s. For these shops Ed began to buy books, mostly those relating to art and artists, which led to his becoming a specialist in rare and collectible art reference books, and to membership in the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America (ABAA) in 1992. Ed bought his first etching off a friend’s wall at a dinner party in the 1960s, and began collecting German Expressionist and American prints. He once took a table rack of prints to supplement his books at a Book Fair and found the response so positive that he began to buy prints for resale as well as for his own collection, and eventually joined the International Fine Print Dealers Association (IFPDA).
Ed has exhibited at Print and Book Fairs on the East and West Coasts for decades, and since 2014 has served as the manager of the New York Satellite Print Fair and of the Capital Art Fair in Washington DC, with responsibility for contracting and working with venues, exhibitors, and third party providers, for managing show funds, and for all aspects of promoting the shows to the institutions and the public which support them. When the health crisis of 2020 forced the cancellation of the various shows, Ed and Bernard Derroitte working together on short notice, were able to successfully produce the NY Satellite Print Fair as a virtual event which attracted over 10,000 visitors and resulted in over $300,000 in sales for its exhibitors. With PrintFairsUSA, LLC Ed and Bernard will produce virtual versions of the various local and Regional Fairs which have been a mainstay of the Trade; when the live fairs return, PrintFairsUSA,LLC’s virtual versions will serve to augment them by making them accessible to a much wider audience.