Celebrating its 30th anniversary, the Armory Show opens at the Javits Center, the first edition entirely under the Frieze umbrella. Presenting at this edition are 235 exhibitors from thirty-five countries, with 50 percent returning from the previous year. A special section curated by Robyn Farrell, senior curator at The Kitchen, celebrates the fair’s history and the experimental spirit of its 1994 founding at the Gramercy Park Hotel, as well as the namesake International Exhibition of Modern Art in 1913 at New York City’s 69th Regiment Armory.
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Yet despite the undeniable historical relevance of the Armory Show as the first art fair in the U.S., our overall feeling after attending the Armory preview day right after Seoul is that this fair needs to find a way to renew its relevance and to justify its presence in an already too-crowded global calendar of September art fairs. The overlap with Frieze Seoul, despite that fair being a sixteen-hour flight away, doesn’t seem to have helped, with many galleries prioritizing the Korean fairs, turning the Armory Show into what seems now a more and more American-focused event, with far fewer international visitors than one might expect. Notably, the usual art week hubbub has been subdued, with mega galleries like Gagosian or Pace moving what would have been their must-see Armory adjacent shows to the following week to focus instead on significant fairs in Seoul and Europe. Additionally, the absence of big galleries from the Armory Show makes it feel disconnected from the global rhythm.
Nevertheless, this year dealers sounded much more positive and happy with the day-one results in the first hours and the level of attendance. After a slow summer, American collectors are back, was a comment we heard multiple times.
One of the museum quality booths of this edition is Victoria Miró, which is presenting a film installation and photographic works from Isaac Julien’s acclaimed series Once Again… (Status Never Die), recently featured in the 2024 Whitney Biennial and linked to two major moving-image works by the artist, Lessons of the Hour and Looking for Langston, currently on view at MoMA. The photos from the series are offered in the booth with prices between $24,000 and $50,000. The gallery also presents new paintings by Yayoi Kusama from her latest series, EVERY DAY I PRAY FOR LOVE, which will be the focus of the artist’s much-anticipated show opening at the London gallery later this month.
Ronchini from London is showing an exciting conversation between two British women abstract artists who worked between the postwar and present: the canvas patchwork of Rebecca Ward (sold for $40,000 in the early hours to an American collector) and the work of Sandra Blow, the subject of a recent rediscovery led by the gallery. Notably, Blow was also the girlfriend of Alberto Burri, and we see some influence and exchange in the works presented, with one previously exhibited at the Royal Academy in London. Blow’s work is already in many museum collections, yet her works at the fair are still reasonably priced at $55,0o0. The dialog between the two artists anticipates a show that the gallery will mount in London in the following months.
Some of the most interesting displays are in the Presents section this year, with emerging galleries bringing solo and duo presentations. Here, Queens-based Mrs. gallery is presenting a solo show of paintings by Slovakian artist Alexandra Barth priced between $3,500 and $10,000—by 4 p.m., the gallery had only four left. Barth’s gentle touch of airbrush on canvas makes everything soft, focusing and isolating details from everyday objects and conveying a more domestic and intimate perception of the reality around us.
At the booth of the Los Angeles-based experimental gallery Murmurs, don’t miss works by Roksana Pirouzmand and intriguing futuristic sculptures by Haena Yoon. Both are among the twenty artists to watch in this year’s New Talents issue of Art In America. Another booth worth stopping by is that of Chicago dealer Monique Meloche, with its solo presentation of framed floral collages by Ebony G. Patterson, priced at $50,000. Monique reported receiving excellent feedback from collectors in the afternoon, leading to several sales. However, as she told Observer, it’s hard for buyers to choose between them “as they’re all so equally beautiful.”
Quite intriguing and notable for its eye-catching curation was Asya Geisberg Gallery’s booth in the Focus section, featuring fascinating photogravures and white ceramic Muecas by Rodrigo Valenzuela, which were rich with Mesoamerican cultural symbolism and references and reasonably priced between $7,000 and $9,000. The ceramics evoke gestures of protest, emerging from the stark vinyl-paneled environment with metal contraptions as a clinical laboratory or gothic and brutalist architecture. The entire booth presentation suggests a reflection on Latin America as a cradle for revolutionary ideas but also a darker place where ideas can turn into distorted distopias.
Fridman Gallery brought work by an artist to watch. Wura-Natasha Ogunji is an American-born artist of Nigerian descent who relocated to Laos with a Guggenheim Fellowship, where she also created the independent exhibition space Treehouse, building a community around performance art as an essential tool of empowerment for local women. Moving between her curatorial, community practice, anthropological observations, performance and visual languages, the artist’s recent works are constellations of architectural traces and body fragments that question the notion of displacement and spatial perception. Some of her works, as she explains, “consider both the geographic and psychic distance between Africa and the Americas to speak about the possibilities that this immense Atlantic separation might allow.” The artist participated both as curator and artist at the Saõ Paolo Biennale in 2022 and was included at the last Sydney Biennale, and her works can be found in significant museum collections such as the ones of the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Smithsonian African Art Museum and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark. Still, her works are reasonably priced at the Armory Show at between $8,000 and $20,000.
Once again sold out as at Art Basel Miami Beach was Spinello Projects’ solo booth of works by Puerto Rican painter and master of light Esaí Alfredo. All reasonably priced between $9,000 and $35,000, two works were acquired by the New York-based Hort Family Foundation. Others went to Pérez Art Museum Miami and the Jasteka Foundation of Jeffersonville, IN. Europa’s booth nearly sold out—a beautiful oil pastel on satin by Larissa Lockshin that went for $14,000 was a highlight. Half Gallery sold eleven of fifteen works, including Maud Madsen’s Builder for $26,000.
Toronto-based Patel Brown brought an interesting artistic production of the Native Art Department International, a collaborative project by artists Maria Hupfield and Jason Lujan. First launched in Brooklyn in 2016 and now based in Toronto/Tkaronto, its multidisciplinary practice challenges easy categorizations of indigeneity and Indigenous art through camaraderie, decolonial politics and identity-based artwork. At the Armory Show, they’re presenting a series of colorful paintings and wall carpets (priced between $4,000 and $16,500) from their Woodland Boogie Woogie series, which mocks the famous Mondrian painting while exploring the connections between the Western legacy of abstraction and the Woodland style, or Legend painting, founded by the Anishinaabe artists Norval Morrisseau, Daphne Odjig and Carl Ray, among others.
Garth Greenan’s program is entirely dedicated to Native American artists and presents new sculptures by Cannupa Hanska Luger from his Future Ancestral Technologies series, each priced at $60,000. There are also works by Emmi Whitehorse, currently featured in the 2024 Venice Biennale. Thanks to that inclusion, her highly symbolic and poetic abstract landscapes have attracted the interest of many collectors. They’re priced at $225,000, and the gallery is currently offering works in process due to the high demand.
Harper’s sold feminine meditative abstractions by Finnish artist Iria Leino, both priced between $30,000 and $40,000. The artist is having a solo at the gallery, which just opened this week, and her story is compelling: she launched her career first as a model and then left the jet-set to regain herself, reconnecting with her “wild” feminine creativity with painting.
Kennedy Yanko debuted with James Cohan with a substantial sculpture priced at $120,000 after the recent announcement that she’d joined the gallery. The artist will have a show in April, anticipated with a preview of small sculptures at Frieze London. James Cohan is also showing work by another institutional-level artist, Yinka Shonibare, and a significant work by Kalogirou Nyamai. It also reportedly sold two acrylic paintings by Trenton Doyle Hancock for $80,000 each and two paintings by Eamon Ore-Giron for $50,000 each, along with an embroidered work by Jordan Nassar for $34,000. Guadalajara-based Curro gallery was likely feeling cheerful as it sold a concrete-based work by Alejandro Almanza Pereda in the early hours to an American collector for $16,000 and multiple paintings by Octavio Abundez.
Premier New York cultural institution Creative Time was this year’s Spotlight recipient and celebrated its 50 years by surveying some of the most ambitious site-specific public art they produced from 1974 to today. The booth is presenting photos from their archives of projects with artists like Nick Cave, Kara Walker, Charles Gaines, Pedro Reyes and Jill Magid, as well as iconic initiatives like Art on the Beach, the Sandcastle Competition and Art in the Anchora. To help fund Creative Time’s future ambitious projects, the organization is selling limited-edition posters designed by artists Paul Chan, Red Grooms and André Saravia.
In the Platform section, Sanford Biggers’ monumental Mirror (2024) is one of the artist’s largest marble sculptures ever produced. As part of his ongoing Chimera series, the Biggers created a “conceptual patchwork” merging elements of traditional African masks, European busts and classical figures to explore historical representations of the body in connection with their myths, archetypes and power dynamics.
Curated by Eugenie Tsai, the section also has other large-scale works and site-specific installations that speak to the fair’s overarching theme of art-historical reverberations echoing in the preset. One example of this is Dominique Fung’s Marketplace, 2024, presented in the section by Jeffrey Deitch: a wooden market stand filled with potentially valuable found antique objects from China, such as bird and cricket cages, as a reflection of how the perception/misconception changed over the pandemic toward Chinese markets and goods.
As the fair closed its doors at 7 p.m., people flocked to the various gallery openings in the area, including Gina Beavers’s show at Marianne Boesky, Joanna Pousette-Dart at Lisson Gallery and Liza Lou at Lehmann Maupin, among many others.
Observer will share further updates as the fair develops. The Armory Show runs through September 8 at The Javits Center.
