The Armory Show was founded 30 years ago by a handful of art dealers who treated the art fair format as a playful, ironic, even experimental affair. Held at the Gramercy Hotel in Manhattan, artworks were displayed on the beds, and viewers wandered from room to room taking in the cheeky display.
We’re a long, long way from that setup. Now The Armory Show has been swallowed up by a new owner, the multinational Frieze, and the art world calendar is so crowded with fairs that they run simultaneously: Frieze Seoul is underway at the exact moment as the Armory.
This leads to the questions: What do art fairs offer at this moment? Have they passed their due date? Can they assert their relevance?
The current edition of the Armory has approximately 235 exhibitors from 30 countries but stresses its New York roots. Along with global appeal, it’s also trying to recruit new art collectors from cities like Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, and it has hired some storied local curators to organize various sections.
Eugenie Tsai, formerly of the Brooklyn Museum, has curated a stellar group of monumental works along the fair’s median axis, in the “Platform” section, and titled it “Collective Memory.” This group includes well-known artists like Nari Ward, Sanford Biggers, Karon Davis and Nicholas Galanin.
Robyn Farrell, senior curator at The Kitchen, has organized the “Focus” section, which pays homage to the “experimental spirit” of the inaugural 1994 fair, but also the very first “Armory Show” in 1913 (called the International Exhibition of Modern Art), where avant-garde European art shocked and awed American audiences.
And Lauren Cornell, the director of the graduate program and chief curator at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, has curated the “Summit” talks, with people like Isaac Julien, one of the stars of the recent Whitney Biennial, who is also showcased with a characteristically lush black and white video in Victoria Miro’s booth here.
So, does the 30th edition of The Armory Show deliver? Here are some selections that stuck out for me.
Octavio Abúndez at Curro (Booth 221)
New York is a painting town — and not just because collectors here have limited space and favor paintings (although that is an obvious factor). Painting doesn’t have to be all figure-and-ground or ragged gestural abstraction. It can be conceptual and even funny, like the grid of canvases in Octavio Abúndez’s “A Sisyphean History of Humanity” (2024) at Curro, a gallery based in Guadalajara, Mexico. The texts in Abúndez paintings, which nod to the conceptual Japanese artist On Kawara’s “Date Paintings” as well as Gerhard Richter’s “Colour Chart” grids, draw from a range of histories, including colonial invasions and his own education in architecture. Sisyphean behavior becomes universal: A painting dated Aug. 9, 1173, reads, “Construction of the campanile in Pisa begins. Just 5 years later it would already start leaning. They kept going nonetheless.”
Khalif Tahir Thompson at Zidoun-Bossuyt (Booth 115)
Black figural painting is one of the major strains in contemporary art, and there are many fine examples in the fair: They include Titus Kaphar’s “State number one, Marcus Bullock” (2019), a portrait of a formerly incarcerated man turned entrepreneur made with oil tar and gold leaf at Maruani Mercier (Booth 306); the Nigerian artist Collins Obijiaku’s “Yene” (2023) at Roberts Projects (Booth 316); and Kandy G Lopez’s yarn and acrylic works on mesh canvas at ACA Galleries (Booth 121). A standout for me is the American artist Khalif Tahir Thompson at the multicity Zidoun-Bossuyt Gallery. Thompson uses paint, yarn, handmade paper — even pleather — to portray friends and family in a manner that is both casual and ornate.
Dana Claxton at Macaulay + Co. Fine Art (Booth S2)
Moving away from painting, Dana Claxton’s color lightbox photographs show off a medium that was near-perfected in Vancouver, British Columbia, the home of Macaulay + Co. Fine Art, in the work of the photographers Jeff Wall, Ken Lum and Rodney Graham, central figures on that city’s art scene. Claxton’s images borrow the crystalline, high-saturated, large-scale style of those photographers. But she focuses on her Hunkpapa Lakota community, particularly women. She pictures them with their faces covered — a reversal of the anything-goes treatment of Indigenous women by photographers in the past — and lovingly surrounded by objects central to their culture and heritage. The images are captivating, and also offer a strong historical corrective.
Camila Falquez at Hannah Traore (Booth P8)
Some of the more notable photographs are by the Colombian-born Camila Falquez, featured at the booth of the New York gallerist Hannah Traore. (The Toronto-born Traore is herself a new downtown influencer-gallerist, and the subject of magazine profiles as well as Reddit forums discussing her significance.) Traore champions artists of color and queer artists; Falquez, who has photographed movie stars and Kamala Harris for Time magazine, offers portraits of queer and trans folk here, often posed in compositions that recall mermaids, Orishas and other mythical figures.
Joana Vasconcelos (Platform, 11)
The Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos, one of Tsai’s picks in the Platform section (in conjunction with the Baró gallery of São Paulo, Brazil), takes up more space than perhaps any other artist in the fair, with her giant, bulbous forms suspended from the ceiling. Using crochet, fabric and illuminated lighting, Vasconcelos’s “Valkyrie Liberty” draws on both the Statue of Liberty and the Valkyries of Norse mythology to create a new, feminized warrior.
Stephanie Santana at Robert Blackburn (Booth N8)
Art fairs, with their commercial focus, usually make space for nonprofits, and there is a whole section devoted to them here. One of the particularly good ones is the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, one of the longest-running community print shops in the United States. (Founded in 1947 by Blackburn, the son of Jamaican immigrants, the workshop is now run by the Elizabeth Foundation in Chelsea.) The artist Stephanie Santana, a founder of Black Women of Print, has drawn from the Blackburn archives and is showing Betye Saar, Dindga McCannon, Emma Amos and Mavis Pusey alongside her own lithograph, “As Above So Below” (2024), whose upside-down-downside-up figure refers both to Black matriarchal ancestors and the intersections of material and spiritual worlds.
Oliver Herring at Bank (Booth F12)
A wonderfully self-referential presentation here is by Oliver Herring at the Shanghai gallery Bank, part of the Focus section organized by Farrell. Herring was included in the original Armory Show in 1994, and his glitzy, knitted mylar works here reference concerns still deeply relevant in our moment, including queer representation and identity. Herring is also participating in Armory Off-Site with a performance on the Bowery that channels the dancer Rudolf Nureyev, who died of AIDS complications in 1993. With his work often featuring artists whose lives were cut short, Herring’s staying power conjures another relic from that early ’90s moment: Queer Nation’s slogan, “We’re here! We’re Queer! Get used to it!” In fact, the Armory — or art fairs in general — could adopt that phrase. They’re here; get used to it.
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