For the 2023 Armory Fair in New York, Kavi Gupta presents a selection of new and historically important works by some of the most influential artists working today, including internationally acclaimed, Pittsburgh-based painter Devan Shimoyama: interdisciplinary Seneca artist Marie Watt: abstract painter and critically beloved stand out of the 2022 Whitney Biennial, James Little: Japanese-American painter and sculptor Tomokazu Matsuyama: AFRICOBRA founder Gerald Williams: and renowned conceptual artist and 'per-ceptual engineer' Willie Cole: along with new works bymany of the vanguard, emerging artists in our program, including Miya Ando: Alfred Conteh: Michi Meko: Nikko Washington: and Armani Howard.
Celebrating four years since its inception in Washington, DC, Devan Shimoyama's Barbershop Project returns as part of Kavi Gupta's 2023 Armory presentation. In its original manifestation, Shimoyama created a fully-functioning barbershop inside a blue shipping container. The space was filled with custom furniture adorned with an assortment of flowers and rhinestones, and featured paintings by Shimoyama on the walls. The paintings showed an array of people getting haircuts, suggesting a welcoming environment where all people could feel at ease and express masculinity and femininity, spotlighting cultural traditions and expectations within Black barber shops that cause non-binary, LGBTQ+ and/or gender non-conforming individuals not to feel safe or welcomed. Shimoyama's barbershop is a space inclusive of everybody.
Shimoyama's new barbershop paintings reflect the changes he witnessed recently when revisiting the barbershop he used to go to when he started the series.
'They've done a whole renovation, and there are women working there. It feels like a more inclusive environment,' he said. 'It's been nice to see how things have grown and expanded.'
Complementing her indigo paintings in the Kavi Gupta booth at the Armory Show, Miya Ando's monumental public installation Flower Atlas will continue to be on view in the Winter Garden of Brookfield Place through out Armory week, until September 14, 2023. Consisting of 72 cloth banners suspended in the building's glass atrium, Flower Atlas tracks flowers in bloom around the world, as described by the 72 seasons in the Japanese Kō calendar.
Ando's work is rooted in an examination of natural processes. She is half Japanese and half American, and her works are often titled in both Japanese and English. Her ideas revolve around her experience of living between two cultures: one that is profoundly based on a spiritual and societal connection to the natural world, and one that is remarkably less so. Flower Atlas is illustrative of this concept, juxtaposing the four seasons recognised in the United States with a cultural viewpoint in which there are a minimum of 72 distinct and observable seasons.
'Making art is a function of thinking,' Ando says. 'I endeavor to stay on a focused train of thought from one piece to the next, each completed work begets the next work. It's a continuum of thought and the works are a residue of that thinking process.'
Dates
Thursday, September 7 | 2023 VIP Preview: Invitation Only
Friday, September 8 | 11am–7pm
Saturday, September 9 | 11am–7pm
Sunday, September 10 | 11am–6pm
Location
Javits Center Crystal Palace Entrance
429 11th Avenue, New York, NY 10001
Tickets
Limited full-price general admission tickets are now on sale.
People
The Armory Show announces its curators for the 2023 Platform and Focus sections and the Curatorial Leadership Summit:
Eva Respini, Deputy Director and Director of Curatorial Programs at Vancouver Art Gallery, will curate the Platform section; Candice Hopkins, Director and Chief Curator of Forge Project, will curate the Focus section; and Adrienne Edwards, Engell Speyer Family Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Whitney Museum of American Art, will chair the sixth annual Curatorial Leadership Summit.