The Armory Show will take over the Javits Center in less than two weeks, setting off a chain reaction for an art season that will last through early November. This year, the Armory Show has expanded to 235 participants from 35 countries to cram as much art as possible into the second weekend of September for its memorable 30th anniversary. With so much to take in at any one time, it can be daunting to figure out what to focus your attention on. But the show becomes much more accessible when you break it down into bite-sized chunks.
Although it may seem like a cacophonous sea of booths, the Armory Show is divided into six areas: Galleries, Platform, Focus, Solo, Presentations, and Special Presentations. Galleries should be self-explanatory as the core area of the show, full of solo, double, and group presentations from national and international participants. In this area, London gallery Hales has dedicated its booth to new works by Northern Cheyenne artist and scholar Jordan Ann Craig, whose geometric style and dot paintings are informed by Cheyenne design and material culture.
Also from London, Pippy Houldsworth Gallery will present works 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, textural wall hangings and three-dimensional crown sculptures—all new works shown by the San Francisco gallery Rebecca Camacho Presents.
55 x 33 1/2 x 11/2 inches (~140 x 85 x 4 cm) (Photos by Robert Divers Herrick, courtesy of Rebecca Camacho Presents)
The platform area, which runs through the central “agora” walkway between the booths, is typically the most interactive within the Armory Show. You may remember how Jean Shin’s “Huddled Masses” (2020) took center stage last year, as a solemn but curious acknowledgement of electronic waste and the rapid obsolescence of evolving technologies. Writer and independent curator Eugenie Tsai, who recently ended her 15-year career as a curator of contemporary art at the Brooklyn Museum, has Collective memory for the Armory this year. Tsai’s vision for this section focuses on historical repercussions that permeate the present and aims to bring viewers closer to the personal and cultural backgrounds of various artists through scale, form and media.
“Her approach tends toward poetry, often using materials that bear the invisible traces of different pasts to tell captivating stories that could arouse visitors’ curiosity,” Tsai said. Hyperallergicdescribes the featured artists. “At a time when much of our daily life takes place in the virtual world, the tangible physicality of the large-scale sculptures and installations in Platform creates an intense sensory experience for visitors, a reminder of the pleasures of the material world.”
After her first year at The Kitchen, Senior Curator Robyn Farrell immediately started working in New York City as a curator for Passages, in the focus area of the Armory. Farrell’s look back at 30 years of the Armory Show as a consistent border crosser Passages consists of 30 booths mainly dedicated to post-colonial resistance, indigenous survival, queer living and feminist abstraction, among other core ideas.
Outstanding achievements in Passages These include Shinnecock artist Jeremy Dennis’s multi-layered depictions of Native American life in Southampton, New York, through Aicon Contemporary, as well as 18 mixed media and paper sculptures from Ebony G. Patterson’s ongoing series Studies for a vocabulary of loss by the Monique Meloche Gallery.
The “Presentations” section will shine the spotlight on young galleries—specifically those under 10. The gallery known as “Mrs.” hails from faraway Maspeth, Queens, and will dedicate its booth to Slovakian artist Alexandra Barth, whose huge, airbrushed acrylic paintings gently highlight the overlooked domestic details that signify both human intervention and absence. On the other side of the coin, the “Solo” section will spotlight French figurative artist Laurent Proux, whose paintings merge the human body with mythological settings.
In this year’s special presentations, the free stand of a new and impressive gallery went to the four-year-old Blade Study in New York, which features nine paintings by Paige KB with accompanying ephemera. In addition to the award winner, there is a complete takeover of the website called Headlightsin which public arts organization Creative Time searches its records for 50 years of “art that speaks to the moment,” including contributions from Kara Walker, Charles Gaines and Duke Riley.
That the fair has been looked at so superficially is a testament to its growth over three decades. It began in 1994 as a one-off four-person project at the Gramercy Park Hotel, and within five years evolved the Armory show into the historic Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue. The New York institution traveled throughout Manhattan, expanding section by section and even splitting into two shows before later merging them. Now, as part of the Frieze network, the Armory is reinventing itself once again.
