Feria Material, a satellite fair to Mexico City’s larger Zona Maco, will change its venue for its upcoming edition in February, moving from Expo Reforma, an event venue in the capital city’s Colonia Juárez, to Maravilla Studios, a historic industrial factory that was recently renovated into an events space in the Colonia Atlampa.
Material, which is scheduled to run February 5–8, informed its 78 exhibitors of the new venue last Friday, just over six weeks before the fair is scheduled to take place.
The last-minute change comes because Expo Reforma is currently host to “Stranger Things: The Experience,” an immersive activation based on the Netflix series. Tickets for that experience are available through the end of February, including during Material’s dates.
The Stranger Things activation is spread across three floors of Expo Reforma’s five floors. Material has typically rented out three floors during Mexico City Art Week: two dedicated to exhibitors’ booths and another for food and beverage options and other projects. Since 2024, Expo Reforma has also been host to the Unique Design fair during Art Week.
In an interview, Material cofounder and director Brett W. Schultz told ARTnews that the fair had been informed of the conflict about two months but that the fair was “hoping to save it up until two weeks ago. … We exhausted all the possible strategies that we could think of to be able to keep material at Expo Reforma, but none panned out in the end.”
He continued, “In general, it’s a very challenging landscape at the moment for midsize fair like ours, and the venue options in Mexico City are really limited. Rental prices have skyrocketed since the whole trend of immersive experiences and brand activations took off.”
Schultz said that Material began searching for a new venue in case its negotiations with Expo Reforma fell through, but most venues quoted them double or triple their current rental fee for about a fraction of the space the fair has at Expo Reforma. Maravilla Studios, however, was able to offer them a similar price.
“The team at Maravilla Studios are sympathetic to independent cultural events like ours,” he said. “Now that the decision has been made, we’re excited about this move because the space is beautiful.”
Expo Reforma did not respond to ARTnews’s request for comment prior to publication.
Maravilla Studios, which is more than a century old and spans over 10,000 square meters (108,000 square feet), is about a 20-minute drive north of the older one, and both neighborhoods are located within the demarcación territorial (borough) of Cuauhtémoc. It has previously hosted Mexico City Fashion Week and the electronic music festival MUTEK. The venue is also near Colonial Santa María de la Ribera, a neighborhood where many artists live.
In its Friday letter to exhibitors, reviewed by ARTnews, Material’s production team said, “We see this move as a real opportunity to offer you and our visitors a better fair experience on every level.”
Among the benefits, per the letter, are that all exhibitors will be located on a single level, with the venue having “generous ceiling heights and polished concrete floors” and access to indoor and outdoor spaces “for expanded food and beverage options, places to rest and meet, and richer public program integrated into the fair.” At Expo Reforma, exhibitors were spread across two floors, the venue had carpet floors, and no access to outdoor space.
Material’s letter to exhibitors also noted that with the venue change, there has been a change to the floor plan and booth sizes. “In almost every case, exhibitors have been assigned the same or slightly more square meters than in their original contract, with some adjustments to formats and proportions that we believe will improve the overall rhythm of the fair.”
A small number of exhibitors, however, have been assigned stands that are “slightly smaller in m2 than the original” contract. Those exhibitors will be refunded the difference, if they have already paid, or their outstanding invoice has already been adjusted. Exhibitors whose booth sizes increased will not be charged for the additional space.
The other main change is that exhibitors will only have one day to install their booths, as opposed to the two days they had previously had. “There is always a bit of a learning curve to produce in a new venue,” Schultz said.
Schultz said that Material had already been considering a venue change, though not for the upcoming 2026 edition. “Space had become a bit of an issue for us at Expo Reforma,” he said, noting that the fair could have added an additional floor of exhibitors, though most exhibitors on the upper floor already felt that they received less foot traffic than those on the ground floor.
The move to Maravilla Studios “also gives us room to grow in the future,” Schultz said. “The last three years at Expo Reforma have helped us to consolidate Material’s position within Mexico City Art Week, and to build our audience at the local and international levels. I think we’re in a good place now to carry that with us into a new chapter.”
Schultz said the fair has seen an “upward trend” in terms of exhibitors’ sales, based on an exit survey it conducts each year. The 2025 edition this past February was also strong. “We didn’t feel the same level of doom and gloom that a lot of the other fairs had been reporting at that time,” he said. “We’re a nicely scaled fair that is intimate and still a fair for discovery.”
Now in its 12th edition, Material has become a must-see stop during the larger Mexico City Art Week, known for its mix of closely watched Latin American galleries alongside emerging spaces. The 78 exhibitors in the 2026 iteration come from 21 countries, with over half coming from Latin America.
Throughout its history, Material has been staged at different venues across Mexico City, with Expo Reforma being its longest-lasting one. Those venue changes, Schultz said, have “always helped us to evolve and grow. We’re all looking at it in the most positive way possible now.”
