From ABMB to TEFAF and Beyond, Know Your Art World Acronyms

Let’s face it: we’re all pressed for time. One way we economize on our use of that precious resource is acronyms, those handy abbreviations that use the first letters of a multi-word name or phrase. In everyday conversation, for example, when your car breaks down and you need a tow, you call AAA (pronounced triple A), not the American Automobile Association, and it’s NASA, not the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, that sends astronauts into space. 

The art world is no exception, with nonprofit organizations, galleries, advisories, museums, and even individuals being known by acronyms that have become so much part of the way art worlders talk that we may not even think about it. 

Here’s a list of many of the most important art world acronyms you need to know so that you stay in the loop and don’t get caught not knowing an art world abbreviation.

AAM
Founded in the nation’s capital in 1906, the American Alliance of Museums represents art and history museums as well as institutions you might not think of as museums, like science centers and zoos. It has about 4,000 institutional members, as well as more than 25,000 individual professionals and volunteers.

AAMD
A more specialized group than AAM, the New York-based Association of Art Museum Directors represents around 200 such institutions, from the Ackland Art Museum at UNC Chapel Hill to the Yale University Art Gallery in Connecticut.

ABMB
You may be there as you’re reading this! This one, of course, stands for Art Basel Miami Beach, one of the world’s biggest art fairs, with some 285 exhibitors this time around. (It’s related to ABHK, Art Basel Hong Kong, and Art Basel in Basel, but no one really says ABB, so you can skip that one.)

ADAA
The Art Dealers Association of America, established in 1962, is a New York-based nonprofit organization that represents over 200 member galleries in nearly 40 US cities, and organizes an annual New York fair, recently rebranded from the Art Show to the ADAA Fair, at the Park Avenue Armory. 

AIG
Art Intelligence Global is a high-powered advisory with offices in New York and Hong Kong, established in 2021 by ex-Sotheby’s execs Amy Cappellazzo and Yuki Terase. Even amid a market contraction, the firm has been expanding, recently adding Matt Bangser (formerly managing partner of Blum) as senior director and Sotheby’s veteran Sebastian Fahey as chief operating officer in Asia.

AIR
Established in 1972 as the first not-for-profit, artist-directed and -maintained gallery for women in the US, AIR (Artists in Residence, Inc.) counted among its founders stars like Dotty Attie, Judith Bernstein, Agnes Denes, and Howardena Pindell. (You can call it “air” gallery, and you’d be justified, since Pindell originally suggested it be called EYRE Gallery in tribute to Charlotte Brontё’s beloved character Jane Eyre.)

ARCO 
The Arte Contemporáneo fair, in Madrid, celebrates its 45th edition in 2026, with about 200 galleries. German-Spanish dealer Helga de Alvear, who helped lay the groundwork for the fair’s founding, died just this year at 88.

FIAC
This one goes in the fair history column: the Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain was launched in 1974 and was for decades the supreme French art market event, taking place at Paris’s Grand Palais, until 2021, when it was knocked out of its coveted slot by what was at first called Paris+ by Art Basel and is now simply called Art Basel Paris.

IFPDA
Founded in 1987 as the International Fine Print Dealers Association, a New York nonprofit that promotes fine prints as original works of art, this organization rebranded just last month as the International Fine Prints & Drawings Association. Its annual fair, coming in the spring, will include 77 exhibitors, for the first time including some who specialize in artists’ drawings.

LGDR
This one was short-lived, but still has a nice ring. In 2021, New York dealers Dominique Lévy, Brett Gorvy, Amalia Dayan, and Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn formed a gallery to combat the megas. The “R” dropped off when Rohatyn jumped ship after two years to resume operating Salon 94 gallery. The remaining principals dropped the acronym and are now Lévy Gorvy Dayan.

MBS 
Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman al Saud bought the most expensive artwork ever to come to auction, paying $450.3 million for Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi, at Christie’s in 2017. More recently, he has been putting into place his Vision 230, which aims to open the country up from its formerly culturally isolated position; it includes Art Week Riyadh and the Islamic Arts Biennale. There’s also a less-flattering name by which people refer to him after he, per US intelligence agencies’ reporting, ordered the murder and dismemberment of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018: Mister Bone Saw.

NADA
The New Art Dealers Alliance is, like ADAA, a New York-based non-profit that represents commercial art galleries; founded in 2002, it has run closely watched annual art fairs in New York and Miami while also organizing year-round programming in locales as distant as Paris and Warsaw, as well as its Lower East Side exhibition space, LUNCH (Located Under NADA’s Central Headquarters—an acronym that contains an acronym!).

PDS
The newest entry to the list was formed just this month by Arne Glimcher, CEO of global mega gallery Pace, dealer Emmanuel Di Donna, and ex-Sotheby’s private sales expert David Schrader. The joint art gallery will open on New York’s tony Upper East Side in 2026. The founders, in Glimcher’s words, hope collaboration can signal a way out of a “low margin, high overhead arms race” resulting from an “obsession with competition.”

PPOW
This New York gallery based its name (which it styles as P·P·O·W, with dots, not periods) on the initials of the co-founders, Penny Pilkington and Wendy Olsoff (with the latter’s initials reversed, of course). In the East Village, other dealers were starting galleries with unconventional names like Gracie Mansion (winkingly named for the New York mayor’s residence), and Olsoff and Pilkington likewise wanted to stand out. 

TEFAF
The European Fine Art Foundation was founded in 1988 and represents dealers in fine art, antiques, and design. Its flagship event is the TEFAF Maastricht art fair, in that Dutch university city, featuring thousands of years of art history; in 2016 it expanded to offer the TEFAF New York, focusing on modern and contemporary art and design. Both are known for multimillion-dollar offerings and acquisitions by major museums.

ULAE
Founded in mid-century America by Russian-born Tatyana Grosman, Universal Limited Art Editions began when Grosman, who was publishing illustrated books and reproducing paintings by artists from Marc Chagall to Grandma Moses out of her Long Island cottage, was encouraged by a MoMA curator to work with artists to create original prints. Major figures like Helen Frankenthaler, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Cy Twombly were among the first to work with Grosman, and MoMA continues to acquire the first print of every ULAE edition.