The city is on the verge of becoming a global art destination, said Ann Berchtold, who has worked in the San Diego art scene for the past 15 years. The founder of Art San Diego hopes its Contemporary Art Fair at the beginning of next month is part of that growth. “We have a great potential here and we have a great canvas to mature into,” Berchtold said. “I think we’re at a really interesting time in San Diego right now, where we’re swelling with a great mass of artists. We have world-class exhibitions in this city.” The art fair will be held Sept. 2-5 at the Hilton San Diego Bayfront Hotel downtown, kicking off with a VIP opening night on Sept. 2. The main focus of the fair is the 50-plus galleries — including art from Los Angeles, New York, Japan and Mexico City — whose presence create a one-stop shop for collectors and browsers. “One of our goals was to really establish a process for cultivating the strongest and most cutting-edge galleries,” Berchtold said. “We put together a curatorial advisory group this year, which was comprised of some leading art experts in the U.S.” This is the second year of the art fair, but this year it has a new name and location. In 2009, it was known as the Beyond the Border International Contemporary Art Fair and drew 3,000 at The Grand Del Mar. “We looked at the first year as mainly a test of the market,” Berchtold said. “It exceeded our expectations. We sold out our show and had maximum capacity as far as attendance.” That success allowed Art San Diego to bring the fair downtown, where Berchtold hopes double the space leads to a doubled attendance of 6,000. She said Art San Diego’s goal is to bring in 30,000 people to the fair in five years. “Our big goal is to become the premier contemporary art fair on the West Coast,” Berchtold said. “We hope this event can generate strong ancillary revenue to the community and play a major role in making San Diego an important arts destination.” In addition to galleries featuring painting, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, videos and multimedia artworks, the art fair will host different programs during the weekend. The Art in the City conference will be held Saturday, Sept. 4 and art films and conversations with artists, including Larry Bell and Maurizio Serachini, will take place on Friday and Saturday. “That conference will really bring world-class leaders in to talk about what success they’ve had and how we can do that here in San Diego,” Berchtold said. “There are some phenomenal speakers coming.” The less-experienced collectors will have a chance to brush up on their skills at the Art Collectors Boot Camp from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 3. During boot camp, Los Angeles art critic and writer Jori Finkel will offer the ins and outs of collecting art and provide campers with play money to spend in the galleries. Berchtold said the fair will be fun and unintimidating. “Galleries can sometimes be intimidating — you walk in and you have this person behind a desk and you have to interact and engage,” Berchtold said. “Our fair is really loose. You have the ability to walk around with a cocktail in hand and network and meet a lot of the artists.” In conjunction with the art fair, Art San Diego is coordinating with 20 different art organizations around San Diego to create art labs that will run at each location for the entire month of September. For more information about the fair, visit www.artsandiego-fair.com.