Collectible New York Returns to a Former Cinema with 110 Designers

Collectible New York opens its 2026 edition with work by 110 talents from 27 countries, staged in a former AMC cinema on the Upper East Side through Sunday 8 November. The fair, founded in Brussels in 2017 and extended to New York in 2023, fills a gap in the US market for avant-garde, limited-edition design that galleries serving mainstream collectors rarely touch.

This year the fair moved to a November slot, positioning itself as a counterpoint to blue-chip fair Salon Art + Design and hospitality showcase BDNY. The venue, the old AMC Orpheum 7, will soon convert into an outpost of upscale food market Happier Grocery. Fair co-founder Liv Vaisberg credits the local audience for the fair's foothold: 'The enthusiasm of the community and audience here has affirmed our place in the city.'

What drives this year's exhibitors?

Material experimentation dominates. Across the stripped-back projection booths and screening rooms, designers show sculptural furnishings in clay, stone, wood and metal.

• Streicher Goods, a New York practice, presented a new collection of glazed ceramic pieces.
• Studio Gypsandconcrete, a Georgian practice shown by upstate New York gallery Jamieri, introduced bent stainless-steel mirrors.
• Anjuli Bernstein exhibited pictorial tapestries woven from unexpected materials.
• Boym Partners showed painted bark sconces.
• Louis Filosa designed Scentry, a lamp project containing perfumes that evoke different people.
• Ka'b Juun, New York's first permanent Mexican design gallery, presented works starring materials endemic to Mexico.

What makes a modern heirloom?

A second thread asks what makes a work worth passing down. Coryander Friend, founder of Montana-based gallery Placed, frames today's collectible designers as participants in a fourth industrial revolution who learn skills on their own or through training. Her advice for sustaining a practice: designers 'should be going baroque in order to not go broke'. Placed's showing, titled 'A Future for History', includes Faye Hadfield's toothy ceramics and a chainmail lampshade by Wretched Flowers.

Other exhibitors push the heirloom question through finish and salvage. Item studio, based in New York, showed a meticulously finished lacquer screen with jewel-like finials in a deco-esque register. Brooklyn's Overt Cove, presented by Philadelphia cooperative Dudd Haus, built a room divider from upcycled phone cords. Bunce Studio applied industrial cues in precision-engineered tables, benches and shelves.

How does the fair treat the office?

Alex Tieghi-Walker, founder of downtown gallery TIWA Select, curated a section staged as a 'corporate fantasy'. The vignette, called 'Human Resources', arranges a series of office cells featuring smaller items by designers including Tino Seubert and Adi Asia, subverting the grid's uniformity. Tieghi-Walker said: 'The installation is an invitation to designers to imagine a different kind of working environment. One that makes room for personality, surprise and the unexpected, and where the objects around us might inspire us as much as they serve us.'

For practitioners, the fair signals where the collectible market is heading: one-off material research and salvage-driven pieces command gallery attention, while the November slot gives exhibitors a direct platform against the established Salon Art + Design circuit.