A Sneak Peek at This Year’s Armory Show

The Armory Show is set to take over the Javits Center in less than two weeks’ time, setting off a chain reaction for a season of art frenzy carrying on until the beginning of November. This year, the Armory has expanded to include over 235 participants from 35 countries, packing as much art as possible into the second weekend of September for its momentous 30th anniversary. With so much to take in at every glance, it might be daunting to figure out where you’d like to direct your attention. However, the show becomes much more approachable when you break it down into bite-sized pieces.

Though it might seem like a cacophonous sea of booths, the Armory Show is divvied up into six sections: Galleries, Platform, Focus, Solo, Presents, and Special Presentations. Galleries should be self-explanatory as the show’s core section, rife with solo, dual, and group presentations from domestic and international participants. In this section, the London and New York-based gallery Hales has devoted its booth to new works by artist and scholar Jordan Ann Craig, whose geometric style and dot paintings are informed by Northern Cheyenne design and material culture.

Also coming from London, Pippy Houldsworth Gallery will present work by the late Dutch artist Jacqueline de Jong, emerging textile artist Qualeasha Wood, Dindga McCannon of the “Where We At” Black Women Artists, Inc. collective, and Iranian-American artist Nasim Hantehzadeh, among others. American artist Sahar Khoury will also have a solo presentation including a variety of vibrant, textured wall hangings and dimensional sculpted crowns — all new works shown by the San Francisco gallery Rebecca Camacho Presents.

Running through the central “agora” aisle between booths, the Platform section tends to be the most interactive within the Armory Show. You might remember how Jean Shin’s “Huddled Masses” (2020) took center stage last year as a solemn but curious acknowledgment of electronic waste and the rapid obsolescence of evolving technologies. Writer and independent curator Eugenie Tsai, who recently bookended her 15-year career as the curator for contemporary art at the Brooklyn Museum, has developed Collective Memory for the Armory this year. Focusing on historical reverberations as they ripple through contemporaneity, Tsai’s vision for this section aims to connect viewers with the personal and cultural backgrounds of various artists through scale, form, and media.

“Their approach leans toward the poetic, often utilizing materials that bear the invisible imprints of different pasts to tell compelling stories that might pique the curiosity of visitors,” Tsai told Hyperallergic, describing the featured artists. “At a time when a large percentage of our daily lives unfolds in the virtual world, the palpable physicality of the large-scale sculptures and installations in Platform creates an intense sensory experience for visitors, a reminder of pleasures of the material world.”

Coming from her first year at The Kitchen, Senior Curator Robyn Farrell hit the ground running in New York City as the curator for Passages, in the Armory’s Focus section. Reflecting on 30 years of the Armory Show as a consistent boundary-pusher, Farrell’s Passages consists of 30 booths largely devoted to postcolonial resistance, Indigenous survivance, life through the queer lens, and feminist abstraction among other core ideas.

Standouts in Passages include Shinnecock artist Jeremy Dennis’s layered portrayals of Native American livelihood in Southampton, New York, through Aicon Contemporary, and 18 mixed-media and paper sculptures from Ebony G. Patterson’s ongoing series Studies for a vocabulary of loss through Monique Meloche Gallery. 

The Presents section turns the spotlight onto young galleries — specifically those under 10 years old. Coming from the distant land of Maspeth, Queens, the gallery known as Mrs. will devote its booth to Slovakian artist Alexandra Barth, whose enormous airbrushed acrylic paintings softly highlight the overlooked domestic detailing that connotes both human intervention and absence. On the other side of the coin, the Solo section will highlight French figurative artist Laurent Proux, whose paintings meld the human body with mythological surroundings.

In this year’s Special Presentations, the complimentary booth for a new and impactful gallery went to the four-year-old Blade Study in New York, which will display nine paintings by Paige K.B. with related ephemera. Alongside the prizewinner is a full-site takeover called Spotlight, through which the public arts organization Creative Time delves into its records to highlight 50 years of “art that meets the moment,” including contributions from Kara Walker, Charles Gaines, and Duke Riley.

Having only scratched the surface of this fair through its sections alone is a testament to its growth over three decades. Starting off as a unique, four-person project at the Gramercy Park Hotel in 1994 and evolving the Armory Show within five years at the historic Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue, the New York staple ping-ponged throughout Manhattan, expanding section by section and even splitting into two shows altogether before merging down the line. Now as a part of the Frieze network, the Armory is reinventing itself once again.