At The Armory Show, A New New York Emerges
Exhibition view: The Armory Show, New York (8–10 September 2023). Photo: Vincent Tullo.
Much has been made of Frieze's acquisition of The Armory Show, billed as New York's art fair. Especially as the first edition to happen after the news broke took place concurrently to Frieze Seoul.
It was hard not to read into the simultaneity—the art world loves a good face-off, if the media's incessant speculation over Asia's next art market capital is anything to go by. And the double booking certainly affected some of the dozen or so dealers who did both fairs.
One dealer manned KIAF and Frieze Seoul booths before flying to New York after the previews to relieve their husband, who described themselves as 'roped in', at The Armory Show (8–10 September 2023). Another was so frazzled from splitting their team that they couldn't tell how either fair was doing.
Celebrating its 15th anniversary, Jessica Silverman, on the other hand, announced notable sales with a solo booth by Woody de Othello at Frieze Seoul; complemented by the artist's monumental bronze sculpture of a rotary telephone leaning on a giant comb at The Armory Show, thought in mind (2023), which sold for USD 400,000.
But really, the issue of timing is a non-starter. As Art Basel Hong Kong tolerated an unforgiving May slot in the beginning until March dates at HKCEC opened up, this overlap is unlikely permanent. Less certain is how The Armory Show in September will fare in relation to Frieze New York in May, though the party line is that New York can sustain both fairs. The U.S. is the world's largest art market, after all. Plus, like Asia, that market is not a single entity, hence different fairs for different audiences.
As one dealer summarised, The Armory Show, which expanded significantly in recent years, is a selling space attracting a huge middle market with around 225 galleries from 35 countries by 2023's count, offering a range of price points (from a couple of thousand up) under the Javits Center's impeccable roof (good riddance to the piers). The Frieze fairs are smaller, more global, of higher quality with higher price points, drawing institutional connections that make up for uneven sales.
With that distinction, perhaps the real story is how Frieze will reshape The Armory Show, if at all, though indications of a redistribution are there. Gagosian, David Zwirner, Perrotin, Pace, and Hauser & Wirth were absent, opting for Frieze Seoul (and presumably Frieze New York), for now. Though Perrotin and Hauser & Wirth were in New York but at the boutique Independent 20th Century fair. (Hauser & Wirth Institute's fantastic presentation was dedicated to the archives of painters Zahoor ul Akhlaq and Mary Dill Henry.)
Yet, as collector Alain Servais pointed out during a spicy panel kicking off Armory Live, these galleries are the minority, even if they dominate the market for artworks sold for over USD 1 million. Servais was referring to a recent Sotheby's report, which found 74 percent of total sales across collecting categories covered were in the one-million-plus market 'despite accounting for only 4% of lots sold' at auction.
That report described the one-million-plus market as 'symptomatic of geographical shifts in global wealth [and of] changing demographics'. Notably: more younger collectors at the top end and Asian collectors composing one-third of placed bids in that band between 2018 and 2022, which 'will inevitably affect artists' markets and collecting categories in years to come'.
Interestingly, The Armory Show reflects this evolution from below that band: a diverse and varied space where the more stimulating art gets shown, anyway, and from where the blue-chips tend to poach.
Responding to Servais, veteran dealer Susanne Vielmetter described the most radical changes she has seen in the art world in two decades. Defined by increasing diversity, this overdue shift, Vielmetter concluded, 'makes traditional positions unstable and insecure'—that's why 'now is the time for celebration and conversation, and for widening our horizon and learning.'
Vielmetter's points were corroborated by gallerists who described the market as harder to read than ever, signalling the development of micro-markets organised around different trajectories, whether geographical, generational, conceptual, and/or formal. They also recalled discussions prompted by Art Basel Hong Kong's 2013 launch—followed by MCH Group's short-lived stakes in Art Düsseldorf and India Art Fair—around Basel's turn to regionalism amid its global expansion.
The Baer Faxt raised a similar topic in its Seoul report, which questioned if local collectors could sustain Frieze and KIAF, and wondered if 'the real question'—beyond 'Could Seoul be the next Hong Kong?'—is whether 'regional art fairs [should] reposition to focus on their regional advantages'.
With that distinction, perhaps the real story is how Frieze will reshape The Armory Show, if at all, though indications of a redistribution are there.
That question proved useful in New York, a much-changed city still finding its post-pandemic feet (like elsewhere), which no longer feels like the centre of the art world so much as one of its many centres. The kind of place that, as with somewhere like the deeply art historical Manila, requires open-minded engagement to meaningfully connect with the context's artistic concerns. (Sure, art is subjective, but it's also contextual.)
Bringing that perspective to The Armory Show turned the fair into an incredible gauge, metrics aside (by all accounts people sold well, even amid an art market slowdown), as to how things are culturally shifting in this part of the world. Beyond the knee-jerk dismissal of all the bad painting Servais ranted over on Twitter. (To demonstrate how subjective judgements can be, one artist Servais lamented was selected by Artsy's CEO as a 'pick'.)
Based on the fair's curated sectors, generative evolutions are afoot. The 'Focus' section, curated by Candice Hopkins, spotlighted artists employing different strategies to centre marginalised histories. Presentations included Fazakas Gallery's showing of late Kwakwaka'wakw artist and hereditary chief Beau Dick's distinctive, hand-carved and painted wooden masks, much like those included in documenta 14, which Hopkins served as part of the curatorial team.
Intersections with more recent international exhibitions continued at Peter Blum Gallery, showing a photographic print of In every language there is Land / En cada lengua hay una Tierra (2023), a sculpture by Nicholas Galanin. Presented by Public Art Fund at Brooklyn Bridge Park, the work renders the word 'LAND' in the style of Robert Indiana's 1966 LOVE sculpture, with steel tubing used to construct the U.S.-Mexico border wall.
Galanin had two works in the 2023 Liverpool Biennial, including kʼidéin yéi jeené (you're doing such a good job) (2021), a single-channel video of an Indigenous child being told affirmations like 'I love you' in the Lingít language of the Pacific Northwest. Likewise, Abel Rodríguez's botanical drawings—presented alongside current Videobrasil artist Zé Carlos Garcia's stunning wood sculptures by Galeria Marilia Razuk and Instituto de Visión—connected to those Rodríguez showed in the recent Gwangju Biennale.
Other highlights included maze-like, geometric patterns drawn on cotton textile canvases with pigments from Peruvian flora by Sara Flores at CLEARING, which were recently included in Para Site's three-chapter exhibition in Hong Kong, signals.... Each work presents a mind map rooted in the Shipibo-Conibo tradition, whereby the process of kené translates visions and dreams into linear patterns.
THIS IS NO FANTASY, the first Australian gallery to attend The Armory Show in over a decade, expanded the geographical frame, with screen-prints by Yhonnie Scarce confronting the 19th-century displacement of the Narungga people by British settlers to Australia, and ochre-and-white scale paintings by Johnathon World Peace Bush depicting figures in the tradition of Tiwi body painting.
Anchoring these presentations was Conscientious Conscripture (Art Fair Edition) (2018–ongoing), a standalone installation by New Red Order, a 'public secret society' facilitated by artists Jackson Polys, Zack Khalil, and Adam Khalil. Supported by Creative Time, two poster designs chequered a wall under the slogan 'MISSION ACCOMPLICE'. Composed like ads, one refers to the Land Back movement, with the catchphrase 'Give it Back?' accompanied by the image of a contemporary Uncle Sam. The other offered a 1-888 number to 'Create Indigenous Futures Today!'
Installed opposite was Never Settle: Calling In (2019), a four-minute satirical advertisement screened on a monitor hung on a real-estate 'for sale' frame, promoting the benefits of returning Indigenous land with the language of commercial wellness. Clever word plays abound, including the redeployment of the phrase 'Never Settle' to refer to the settler colonialism that defines American history.
Creating a bridge to The World's UnFair, an immersive installation showing in Long Island City until 15 October, Conscientious Conscripture made good use of The Armory Show to platform an acerbic critique of 'the ultimate public secret hidden in plain sight'—that 'the United States is an ongoing occupation of stolen Indigenous land.' In doing so, it also positioned the fair as a space to confront this history on home ground.
Works by Indigenous artists extended into the main sector. Roberts Projects showcased Sentinel (2020), an arresting cascade of red fringe descending from eye-like pendants by Jeffrey Gibson, the U.S. representative at the 2024 Venice Biennale, alongside Wendy Red Star's unique digital prints from 2023 which pattern isolated images drawn from beaded Apsáalooke regalia.
The booth also included one of Suchitra Mattai's latest tapestries drawing on the artist's Indo-Caribbean roots—found weavings of pastoral colonial scenes worked over with embroidery and borders and colour planes woven from vintage saris—plus, amazing watercolours from 1974 by the inimitable Black American pioneer of assemblage art, Betye Saar.
Armory Show Director Nicole Berry has talked about expanding the artistic canon at the fair, and she has certainly made good on that promise.
The diversity of the Roberts Projects booth was echoed across the fair. In Focus, Arleene Correa Valencia and Stephanie Syjuco confronted the politics of immigration in the United States at Catharine Clark Gallery, with works like Dreamer (2023), a hand-dyed wool rug spelling the work's title on ochre ground by Correa Valencia, a DACA-recipient, which offers deportation protection and work authorisation to eligible youths.
Syjuco's Phantom Flag (2018–2023), a hand-sewn back chiffon rendering of the American flag, extends the artist's research into the colonial relationship between America and the Philippines and the historic roots of the latter's diaspora. That work's last proof (for USD 15,000) was among those the gallery sold, alongside—but not limited to—the last complete suite of five photogravures from Syjuco's 'Afterimages' project' (for USD 24,000), and all of Correa Valencia's embroidered works on paper on handmade amate (for USD 3,500 each).
Nearby, Patel Brown's Focus presentation paired sell-out paintings by Marigold Santos referencing aswang, a shape-shifting figure from Filipino folklore, alongside those by Rajni Perera, the 'Focus' sector's debut USD 10,000 Sauer Artist Prize winner, which fuse science fiction, fantasy, and manga into Indian miniaturist-inspired figures.
An otherworldly, larger-than-life-sized red-clay figure raising their body from the ground, made collaboratively by Santos and Perera, recalled the gallery's description of Perera's world as a diasporic place where 'Black and Brown heroines rule, claiming their space between binary identities and viewpoints'.
Space between binaries was likewise conjured in Apalazzo Gallery's powerful showcase of hair-focused works by Sonia Boyce, a leading figure in the Black British Arts movement who won the Golden Lion at the 2022 Venice Biennale. The 2005 video Exquisite Tension shows a young Black woman and white man entangled by their hair—a restaging of a performance Boyce enacted with artist Richard Hancock, in a fraught and confrontational study of lived co-existence.
Such negotiations circle back to Vielmetter's observation of a radical shift in art. Just as Sotheby's found younger collectors emerging from a more diverse geographical spread and with evolving interests, so The Armory Show is demonstrating the same for artists and dealers who are coming into their own—or in some cases persevering, bearing in mind recent closures—in order to redefine the landscape.
The 'Presents' and 'Solo' sectors expressed that dynamism across a constellation of works. From LaKela Brown's white epoxy resin sculptures of collard greens honouring Black American community at New York's 56 Henry, which sold out bar one by Friday; and Cathy Lu's widely acclaimed 'all-Asian-American "cry-in"' Peripheral Visions (2022) at Micki Meng, of giant ceramic eyes shedding onion-dyed tears into stacks of plastic buckets; to Sharjah Biennial 15 artist Mary Sibande's bronze miniatures at Cape Town's SMAC Gallery, of the artist's alter-ego in vibrantly coloured Victorian-style dress.
In the non-profit sector, the artist-led, community-driven, Cincinnati-based initiative Wave Pool stood out, with three 'Welcome Editions' created by artists like Baseera Khan and Sheida Soleimani in collaboration with Cincinnati-based refugees and immigrant artisans. In the case of Lorena Molina, tapestries showing sites where Republican governors have turned migrants into political pawns, were produced with Latin women from domestic violence shelter La Casa de Paz.
Armory Show Director Nicole Berry has talked about expanding the artistic canon at the fair, and she has certainly made good on that promise. Another example is Eva Respini's curated 'Platform' section, themed around rewriting histories, with large-scale sculptures and installations like Barthélémy Toguo's Urban Requiem (2015), awarded the fair's USD 25,000 Pommery Prize.
Commissioned for Okwui Enwezor's 56th Venice Biennale, All the World's Futures, ladder-shaped shelves carry abstract wooden busts that appear like rubber stamps. At their base, political keywords, slogans, and phrases have been carved, including 'No man is an island'. That refutation of an isolated mentality speaks to The Armory Show's key message in 2023: America must not exist in cultural isolation, whether internally or globally, and its art market is capable of supporting this position.
Similar sentiments were echoed in a captivating, free-wheeling conversation on the historical and contemporary significance of degendered fashion for Armory Live, with writer and performance artist Alok Vaid-Menon and Brooklyn Museum curator Matthew Yokobosky.
Among the subjects discussed, from the queer origins of make-up to the gayness of flowers, Yokobosky brought up Rollerena, a stockbroker known to have rollerskated in gowns around New York in the 1970s. Rollerena is one of the many figures who embody the city's heritage as a place for people to push the boundaries of creative expression. Amid an intensifying LGBTQ+ backlash, that heritage continues, Yokobosky noted, just as fashion, Vaid-Menon pointed out, remains a potent medium for resistance in the face of identarian subjugation.
Tellingly, Vaid-Menon challenged the dismissal of fashion due to its commercial nature, asking how different the discipline is compared to the art on sale at the fair—taking place concurrently to New York Fashion Week, no less. That point recalled another talk at Independent 20th Century on Warhol's commissioned portraits, which were showcased by Vito Schnabel at the fair.
Throughout, anecdotes from Warhol's contemporary, former Interview editor Bob Colacello, humanised an artist who has become as iconic as the figures he portrayed. In doing so, Colacello illuminated Warhol's engagement with the market as a relatable desire to create the conditions to be true to his artistic self.
Warhol is emblematic of New York's place within an ever-expanding field of art history, where freedom of identity and expression became entwined with the market culture this city, forever its capital, spawned. The Armory Show encapsulated this unique, context-rooted dynamic in 2023 as it signalled the groundswell of an electrifyingly new New York to come.
That thought came to mind watching Shahzia Sikander's Reckoning (2020). The Persian miniature-inspired animation of warriors disintegrating into a celestial landscape was screened in partnership with The Armory Show and Sean Kelly for Midnight Moment, the world's largest and longest-running digital public art programme that takes over Times Square's billboards nightly. It's the kind of thing you have to see for yourself. —[O]
8–10 September 2023 The Armory Show 2023: In Photos By Charles Roussel, 13 September 2023 View More
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