[1][2][3][4] Wim van Krimpen founded the Art Fair Foundation with Martijn Sanders and was the first director;[5] he was succeeded in 1989 by Jacob Witzenhausen, and then a year later by Erik Hermida.
In 1996, it merged with KunstRAI, and under Anneke Oele, the former curator of the Arnhem Museum of Modern Art, who became director in 2002, participation was reduced to a smaller number of galleries selected by a committee.
[10][13] Hoping to raise the prestige of the fair and fit it better into the international art calendar, for the 27th edition in 2012 the organisers reduced the number of participating galleries from 135 to approximately 90, over one third of those from outside the Netherlands.
They moved the time of the fair from May to September, and relocated it from the RAI Centre to the Kromhouthal, an event space in a former factory at the Nieuwendammerham in North Amsterdam.
[16] At the 2012 KunstRAI, international press attention was attracted by an artwork by Bart Jansen consisting of his dead cat, Orville, converted into a radio-controlled helicopter, the Orvillecopter.