News

After three decades, New York’s biggest art fair is shaking things up, with a new parent company, a new director and a more global lineup

Osman Can Yerebakan
The Art Newspaper
5 September 2024

The Armory Show’s return to the Javits Center this month (6-8 September) coincides with multiple milestones for the fair. Besides being its first outing completely under the Frieze brand (last year’s fair was planned before the British media and event company acquired it in July 2023), New York City’s biggest art fair is also marking its 30th anniversary and its first with its new director, Kyla McMillan, at the helm.

This year’s multiple special occasions come at a “moment of assessment”, McMillan says. The fair kicks off the city’s autumnal art season, when the “incredibly diverse art community provides so many avenues to engage with and be reflective of New York’s broader cultural landscape, which also includes fashion, music, design and architecture”, she says.

That diversity is also reflected in the 240 participating galleries. The Armory Show had long been seen as a regional fair with a predominantly domestic gallery lineup. Now its exhibitor roster is notably younger and more international, perhaps owing to European and Asian connections facilitated by its new owners.

New and returning faces

Around 60% of participating galleries are holdovers from last year, including Tehran’s Dastan Gallery, São Paulo’s Galeria Raquel Arnaud and Jessica Silverman from San Francisco. As ever, the New York contingent is strong, including 303 Gallery, Kasmin, Sean Kelly and James Cohan, among other regular participants.

This year’s edition boasts at least 55 first-time exhibitors and around 25 galleries returning after a hiatus. First-timers include Chicago’s Corbett vs Dempsey, the Indian gallery Experimenter and Gallery Baton from Seoul, where Frieze’s Korean fair is holding its third edition concurrently. Among the galleries making their return are Shanghai’s Bank, London-based Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, Proyectos Monclova from Mexico City, Rodolphe Janssen from Brussels and the Chelsea mainstay Marianne Boesky.

Robyn Farrell, senior director of the revered New York non-profit The Kitchen, has organised the Focus section, which features one- and two-artist stands and channels the spirit of the fair’s scrappy 1994 debut as the Gramercy International Art Fair. The sector’s 32 galleries include a shared stand by Corbett vs Dempsey and the Chinatown gallery Fierman featuring Jimmy Wright’s drawings of queer New York. The Tribeca gallery Kapp Kapp is devoting its stand to coaster paintings and suspended sculptures by the multidisciplinary artist Louis Osmosis.

Keeping regional connections

Christine Messineo, Frieze’s fair director for the Americas, underlines the fair’s connection to markets in smaller cities. “There are thriving scenes outside of the coasts, especially with cities like Philadelphia, Portland or Baltimore becoming more attractive for artists,” she says. “A collector can see Bockley Gallery and Dreamsong, both from Minneapolis, here, or galleries from Toronto, Albuquerque or Guadalajara, and they can get an understanding of what is happening across the region,” she says.

For the fair’s fourth outing at the sprawling Javits Center, the floorplan has been revised to achieve a “cleaner way to present work”, Messineo says. The main update is the removal of supporting structures between some stands and a consistent three-wall format. The floorplan will still give pride of place to the large-scale works in the Platform section, organised this year by the former Brooklyn Museum senior curator Eugenie Tsai. The sector will include Sanford Biggers’s Chimeras series, which blends traditional Western sculptures with African masks, and the Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos’s colourful, hanging crochet forms.

Flashy firsts and graduating galleries

For its Armory debut, Hannah Traore Gallery is opting for a solo stand in the Presents section for galleries opened within the past decade, where it is showing the Colombian Mexican photographer Camila Falquez, whose work investigates governmental protection of transgender and non-binary individuals in Colombia. The Lower East Side gallery’s namesake founder is a believer in the fair’s promise of exposure. “Even as a visitor, I’ve been able to meet and connect with collectors and art lovers from around the world” at The Armory Show, Traore says.

The Montreal-based gallery Bradley Ertaskiran got a crucial early push from showing in the Presents sector and has moved to the fair’s main section this year. “Graduating to the main show demonstrates the maturation in the gallery’s market trajectory and collector base,” says Antoine Ertaskiran, the gallery’s co-founder. The move “increases our recognition and allows us to engage more directly with local collectors, curators and art enthusiasts who are deeply invested in the regional art scene,” he says. The gallery’s group stand will feature a lineup of Canada-based artists, including seductive figurative paintings by Margaux Williamson, Veronika Pausova and Janet Werner, as well as a geometric abstraction by Shaan Syed and an Azza El Siddique sculpture.

Key entrypoint

A common sentiment among exhibitors is that The Armory Show functions as a key entrypoint to New York’s community of collectors and institutions. This type of brand recognition was the main motivation for the Fine Arts Work Center—a non-profit that organises exhibitions and residencies in Provincetown, Massachusetts—to make its first foray into the commercial space. “We see this as an ideal way to reach collectors and understand the arts ecosystem,” says Sharon Polli, the director of the centre, which was co-founded by a group of artists that included Robert Motherwell and Jack Tworkov. The space’s stand features a salon-style version of its most recent summer group exhibition, which was curated by the centre’s former fellow Matt Bollinger and features works by Lisa Yuskavage, Heidi Hahn, Angela Dufresne and other alumni.

Despite being located about ten blocks south of the Javits Center, the founders of Chelsea’s Berry Campbell Gallery, Christine Berry and Martha Campbell, chose to exhibit at The Armory Show because they see it as a “classic hometown hero of art fairs”. They see their gallery’s mission of championing the work of artists who have been overlooked because of issues of age, gender and race as being in alignment with the fair’s collector profile. “As women business owners and art historians charged with championing women, we think the fair’s curatorial backbone allows us to stay consistent with our programming,” Berry and Campbell say.

As The Armory Show kicks off the final art market sprint in a year that has been defined by instability, its organisers remain bullish about the fair’s importance and New York’s standing as the world’s art market capital. Messineo cites shifts in collector behaviour at Frieze’s other US fairs this year—Frieze Los Angeles in February-March and Frieze New York in May—as evidence that the fair model still serves a vital function. “The fact that more sales have happened on-site as opposed to [via] previews this year shows that people choose to first spend time with the work,” she says.

McMillan adds that her experience as an Armory Show exhibitor (with David Zwirner, where she was previously a director) has provided her with vital context about what collectors are looking for and what dealers need. “We are in the position of facilitating market relationships for galleries on a broad spectrum,” she says. “Knowing what it is to be an exhibitor allows me to build a holistic platform to connect with.”