This year’s Armory Show will mark the 30th anniversary of New York’s largest commercial art fair. With a new fair director, floor plan and still fresh off last year’s acquisition by Frieze, The Armory Show may be on the brink of a new era in the fair’s three-decade history. Starting with a VIP preview day on 5 September, the fair will last until 8 September.
“While we celebrate 30 years of The Armory Show, this special edition offers intersections of reflection and possibility across its curated sections, special presentations and the main fair,” Kyla McMillan, the show’s new director, said in a statement. “The Armory Show’s team, with the support of our Frieze colleagues, have organised an incredible lineup of talent this year.”
This year’s fair will feature more than 235 galleries from 35 countries, as well as a new floor plan, reoriented fair sections, an on-site theatre for programming and new meeting spaces.
Highlights from the fair’s core section include the London gallery Victoria Miro showing work by Isaac Julien, while Two Palms from New York will show a new series of Tschabalala Self’s silkscreens, collages and three-dimensional paper-cast works.
Chryssa Vardea’s White Plaster with neon N’s (1975-76) Courtesy Blue Velvet, Zürich
The late Greek American light artist Chryssa Vardea will make her solo debut at an international art fair at the stand of Blue Velvet, a Zürich gallery that has selected at least three significant works from each of Vardea’s four artistic periods. Seoul’s Gallery Baton has prepared a 20-year survey of the Korean American artist Suzanne Song’s paintings along with their custom frames that blur viewers’ perceptions of the borders of the canvas.
Almine Rech’s stand will include artists like Sasha Ferré, Ana Montiel, Tia Thuy-Nguyen and Gwen O’Neil, while Sean Kelly has prepared a stand centred around the theme “metamorphosis” with sculptures by Jose Dávila and work by Laurent Grasso. New York’s Kasmin will highlight 20th- and 21st-century artists, including new work by Nengi Omuku and Diana Al-Hadid and paintings from Robert Motherwell’s Persian series. The New York gallery Broadway will show a stand of works by the local artists Meg Lipke, Josh Tonsfeldt, Andrew Kuo, Adrianne Rubenstein, Sky Hopinka, Victoria Roth and the sculptor Lars Fisk, among others.
The fair’s Presents section highlights galleries less than a decade old, with solo and dual artist presentations. Participants this year include Proxyco, a New York gallery highlighting the artist Diana Sofia Lozano’s horticultural sculptures made of braided steel, resin clay, wool and fabric, along with Hannah Traore Gallery’s photographs by Camila Falquez that document the process of passing the first bill that protects transgender and non-binary people in Colombia.
This year’s Gramercy International Prize has been given to Blade Study, a gallery on the Lower East Side. Each year, a New York gallery is awarded a complimentary stand at the fair. Blade Study will show a solo presentation of art by Paige K. B., including paintings, photographs and sculptural works. Last year’s winner, No Gallery, will return to The Armory Show in the fair’s core section with a selection of work by the artists Maggie Dunlap and Todd Lim, both of whom explore Americana myths and icons.
Diana Al-Hadid’s The Caravan and The Lovers (2024) Photo by Wendy Timana, Courtesy Kasmin
In the Solo section, made up of intimate single-artist stands from either the 20th or 21st century, highlights include Charlie James Gallery’s presentation of urban landscapes by Manuel López, and new work by the South African painter Kate Gottgens that explores gender dynamics and domestic suburban life in Smac Gallery’s stand.
The Armory Show’s Focus section is typically reserved for more experimental works that reflect the legacy of the fair’s first 1994 iteration at the Gramercy Park Hotel, as well as its namesake—the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art at New York City’s 69th Regiment Armory. This section will be organised by Robyn Farrell, senior curator at the New York non-profit The Kitchen, for the second year running. For the Focus section, the Chicago heavyweight Corbett vs. Dempsey and the Lower East Side gallery Fierman have teamed up to present a solo stand dedicated to Jimmy Wright’s bold drawings of queer life in New York.
Nightwatch: The Anvil (1975) by Jimmy Wright Courtesy the artist; Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago; and Fierman, New York
Another joint presentation, between Commonwealth and Council in Los Angeles and Mexico City’s Labor, will highlight a video installation by American Artist based on the science-fiction writing of Octavia E. Butler. New York’s Kapp Kapp will dedicate a stand to Louis Osmosis’s multidisciplinary work, while Monique Meloche from Chicago will highlight Ebony G. Patterson’s garden-like paintings reflecting the visibility of class, race, gender and other forms of identity in postcolonial spaces.
The Platform section of large-scale installations and site-specific works designed for the fair will once again be curated by Eugenie Tsai, former curator of contemporary art at the Brooklyn Museum. This year’s works centre around memory, material and spirit, and will feature a new sculpture by Sanford Biggers, whose Chimeras series blends Greco-Roman and African influences, presented by Marianne Boesky Gallery. Also in the Platform section will be a new “shoelace” piece by Nari Ward with Lehmann Maupin, and sculptures by Dominique Fung reflecting public conceptions of Asian wet markets presented by Jeffrey Deitch.
