9 Highlights to Look Out for at This Year’s Armory Show
The historic New York art fair returns this week, featuring over 230 international galleries from more than 30 countries
As the languid pace of summer comes to an end, New York City undergoes a major transformation as fall art week kicks into gear. The buzzy week is anchored by The Armory Show, the historic New York art fair founded in 1994, which returns to the Javits Center from September 5 through September 7. (There is also a VIP Day on September 4.) Under the new leadership of Kyla McMillan, who was named director in July 2024, the fair offers moments of reunion for the art world as well as exciting opportunities for new discoveries.
This year’s edition features over 230 international galleries from more than 30 countries, with dynamic presentations taking place throughout the main Galleries section. The special curated sections are always a highlight. The Solo section, a perennial favorite, is dedicated to intimate presentations of work by a single, visionary artist. Presents spotlights galleries founded in the last ten years, offering a crucial platform for emerging voices and providing collectors with a look at what’s new and next. Platform, meanwhile, showcases large-scale sculptures, installations, and site-specific works at the center of the fair. This year’s section is titled My Art Is the Evidence of My Freedom and is curated by Raina Lampkins-Fielder, Chief Curator of Souls Grown Deep Foundation, which is dedicated to promoting the work of Black artists.
Function, a new section this year, explores the intersection of art and design in a special presentation curated by Ebony L. Haynes, senior director at David Zwirner and 52 Walker, examining how artists engage with design principles and practices.
“This year’s edition of The Armory Show will be an energetic kickoff to the art world season,” says McMillan. “Led by a resurgence of New York-based exhibitors, the fair is further solidifying its vitality in the global art market. The Armory Show is a fair for discovery, and we take pride in our accessibility. The 2025 iteration offers our audiences the opportunity to explore a breadth of high-quality presentations by a broad scope of exhibitors from the U.S. and across the globe.”
Below, we highlight 9 presentations that are not to be missed.
1. Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers presented by Nicelle Beauchene Gallery
In the inaugural edition of the Function section, Nicelle Beauchene Gallery will exhibit vibrant textiles by three artisans, Eddie Mae Pettway, Tinnie Pettway, and Creola Ramsey, from Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers, a group of women from Alabama’s rural Black Belt, whose quilts are considered some of the most significant artistic contributions to American art history. There are also striking, large-scale works by this group presented in the Platform section. It marks the group’s return to New York after their work was first displayed at the Whitney Museum of American Art some 20 years ago.
2. Thornton Dial presented by Hauser & Wirth
In the Platform section, don’t miss Thornton Dial’s large-scale paintings and assemblages, which masterfully combine elements of painting and sculpture into a single work. The late artist is celebrated for his unique style of assemblage that was influenced by yard shows in the South; an allegorical style that is both abstracted and narrative, with personal symbols woven throughout.
3. Kennedy Yanko at James Cohan
Also in the Platform section, James Cohan is debuting a monumental sculptural work by the buzzworthy young New York sculptor Kennedy Yanko, who is known for working with “paint skins” and found metal—often sourced from junk yards—manipulating and modifying their form to striking effect. Titled Because of its blues (2025), it comes from her latest series celebrating the color blue, exploring both its visual power and psychological resonances. This presentation follows a well-received multi-part gallery presentation at James Cohan’s gallery in Tribeca and Salon 94 earlier this spring.
4. Tarwuk presented by White Cube
White Cube is returning to the Armory for the first time since the show’s inaugural edition in 1994 with a solo presentation of new paintings, sculptures, and works on paper by the Croatian-born, New York-based artists, Tarwuk. The works have all been conceived especially for the fair, including seven paintings and five sculptures. Considering time and memory as materials, Tarwuk processes and manipulates them using performance and video to blur boundaries between the personal and the political in a powerful way.
5. Jammie Holmes presented by Marianne Boesky
At the Focus section of the fair, which is curated by Jessica Bell Brown this year, and highlights artists and galleries from the American South, Marianne Boesky is presenting a monumental, 13-foot painting, A Few Great Men (2024), by Jammie Holmes, an L.A. based rising-star painter who portrays poignant scenes of Black families, communities, and traditions in the American South. Here, Holmes incorporates a series of symbols and motifs that appear throughout his practice.
6. Ming Fay at Storefront for Art & Architecture
Storefront for Art and Architecture is an independent, non-profit art and architecture organization located in SoHo that is committed to the advancement of innovative positions in architecture, art, and design. This year, they are presenting a solo booth by the late New York artist Ming Fay, who was known for drawing, sculpture, and public installations to comment on the symbiotic relationship between humans and nature. His multidisciplinary practice reflects an enduring commitment to art in public space.
7. Doron Langberg at Victoria Miro
Victoria Miro, with galleries in London and Venice, is presenting a solo display of new works by Doron Langberg that were completed over the past two years. Akin to diary entries, the works are far smaller and more intimate than the large-scale works he’s most known for. Painted directly from observation, often in a single sitting, they capture the artist’s current state of mind as he moves between his New York studio, Fire Island, and Israel, where he was born.
8. Joel Gaitan at The Pit
Another highlight presentation in the Focus section, the Pit is showcasing a solo presentation by Miami-based artist Joel Gaitan, a first generation Nicaraguan artist living and working in Miami. His sculptures, often crafted with glazed terracotta, explore themes of solitude and self-transcendence, the home, spirituality, life and death, and his Nicaraguan heritage.
9. Honor Titus’s Collaboration with the Queens Museum and Gagosian
Outside the fair walls at the Queens Museum, a collaboration with Gagosian features a monumental banner reproduction of Honor Titus’s tennis painting Louis Malle Practice (2025) on the institution’s facade. The piece depicts a male tennis player caught in a moment of leisure, watching a game of tennis that is out of frame.