Nicolas Bellavance-Lecompte takes my call from Abu Dhabi, where he’s running a stretch of meetings before NOMAD’s next move. I haven’t been to one of his fairs yet, but I know the shape of what he’s built. NOMAD is the design fair that refuses to behave like a design fair. No convention hall, no exhibition booths, no taxonomy that separates art from design from jewelry. He prefers a villa, a terminal, a monastery. Something that already has a point of view before you walk in.
The Watermill Center campus, which Robert Wilson rebuilt with architect Richard Gluckman and opened to the public in 2006. The compound has run year-round artist residencies and an annual summer benefit for decades, drawing the New York art world east each July. Photo by Maria Baranova, courtesy of The Watermill Center
This June the argument moves to Water Mill, New York. From June 25 to 28, NOMAD lands at the Watermill Center, the ten-acre laboratory Robert Wilson founded in 1992 on the site of a former Western Union research facility, on Shinnecock ancestral land. Robert Wilson died last July at 83. The Hamptons edition will be the first major cultural event there since his passing.
Nicolas and his co-founder Giorgio Pace started NOMAD in 2017 at Villa La Vigie, the Monte Carlo cliffside villa where Karl Lagerfeld spent 10 consecutive summers in the 1990s. Since then, he’s taken the fair to a 15th-century palazzo in Venice, a Capri monastery, and during COVID, virtually through Pierre Cardin’s Palais Bulles on the Riviera. Last November he landed in Abu Dhabi, taking over the decommissioned Terminal 1 at Zayed International Airport, the Arab Modernist landmark Paul Andreu designed in the late 1970s, the same architect who did Charles de Gaulle.
“I really wanted to create a unique experience that was a proper dialogue between art, design and architecture,” he tells me. “To engage with visitors into a daylight experience that generates some emotional factors in their visits.”
From left: Pompon, Râ, and Eye, three 2024 bronzes by French artist Nicolas Lefebvr. Photo courtesy of his London gallery, Tristan Hoare
He’s blunt about what he’s reacting against. “It’s very different than going to very large art fairs who have now 50,000 or 100,000 visitors in an exhibition hall. It’s not an experience at all. It’s pure trade. And what we offer is a pure experience.”
Alexander Calder, La poire, Le fromage, et Le Serpent (The Pear, the Cheese and the Serpent), 1975, from the Bicentennial Tapestries series, hand-woven wool and silk by Atelier Pinton Frères, edition of 200. Photo courtesy of Boccara Gallery
I ask him whose work feels aligned with what he’s doing. He runs through a quick map: 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, the leading platform for art from the continent and its diaspora, holding its Marrakech edition at La Mamounia hotel. Design Miami / Paris, which since 2023 has taken over the Hôtel de Maisons, an 18th-century mansion in Saint-Germain-des-Prés that was also a Lagerfeld home. PAD launching its first Saint-Tropez edition this July in the Maison Jean Despas on Place des Lices. Independent in New York during its Spring Studios years in Tribeca, which he says had something specific about the way you discovered galleries inside that old building (Independent moved to Pier 36 this month).
Then a parallel that isn’t a fair at all. Fondazione Dries Van Noten, which opened in April inside the 15th-century Palazzo Pisani Moretta in Venice with “The Only True Protest Is Beauty,” more than 200 works across fashion, jewelry, design, photography, glass, and ceramics. He went last week. “If you would remove maybe the fashion aspect, that was exactly what I’m saying, to our format of what we did in Venice,” he tells me. “Obviously it was not a commercial show, but it has a sort of similar vibe.”
The Hamptons pitch follows the same logic, that buildings carry arguments collectors can feel before they see a single work. Putting collectible design inside Karl Lagerfeld’s villa or an Arab Modernist terminal or Robert Wilson’s laboratory isn’t decoration. It’s the curatorial premise.
NOMAD Hamptons runs June 25 -28 at the Watermill Center, 39 Water Mill Towd Road, Water Mill, NY. Preview by invitation, June 25.
