As summer comes to an end and the art world gears up for business, New York’s Armory Week returns to usher in the busy fall season. Named after the heavy-hitting art fair Armory Show, the week will also see the opening of two other art fairs: Independent 20th Century and Art on Paper.
This year, The Armory Show will welcome over 230 galleries from 30 countries to the halls of the Javits Center, including six exhibiting in the new Function section. Curated by Ebony L. Haynes, senior director at David Zwirner and 52 Walker, the section explores how artists engage with design. The presentation will include contemporary and historic quilts by the storied Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers presented by Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, for instance. Along with this new addition to the fair, visitors will find some of the biggest names in contemporary art like White Cube and Victoria Miro, as well as smaller and mid-size dealers like Anat Ebgi and Southern Guild.
With art collectors, curators, and enthusiasts eager to socialize, galleries around the city are staging buzzworthy exhibitions worth a visit outside the fair halls. From a Joel Shapiro tribute show at Paula Cooper Gallery to an intimate look into Nancy Holt’s famous Sun Tunnels (1973–76) earthwork at Sprüth Magers, here are the 10 must-see gallery shows for your Armory Week agenda.
Joel Shapiro
Paula Cooper Gallery
Sep. 4–Oct. 11
In honor of the renowned artist Joel Shapiro, who passed away in June at the age of 83, his long-time dealer Paula Cooper Gallery is exhibiting a selection of his work from the 1970s. Shapiro, a major figure who pushed the boundaries of 20th-century sculpture and the Minimalist genre, was celebrated for his geometric, often colorful compositions that toe the line of abstraction and figuration. In addition to sculpture, Shapiro created public artworks, drawings, and prints that investigate form and color.
The exhibition will focus on more austere works—wood and metal sculptures, and charcoal and gouache works on paper—as an exploration of his early years. Included in the show are cast bronze and cast iron sculptures that sit directly on the floor, just as they were displayed when Shapiro first made and exhibited them with the gallery decades ago.
Caleb Hahne Quintana
“A Boy That Don’t Bleed”
Anat Ebgi
Sep. 5–Oct. 18
In moody figurative paintings on view in “A Boy That Don’t Bleed,” Brooklyn-based figurative artist Caleb Hahne Quintana depicts a somber adolescent boy in moments of quiet solitude. Using stunning jewel tones of blue and golden brown, Hahne Quintana shows the figure in different settings—lying on a couch, drying himself with a towel on waterside rocks, standing in a nondescript room—following him with a diaristic eye. The portraits evoke a sense of introspection and melancholy, as in Boy’s Portrait (2025), an image of a young child whose head and eyes tilt downward towards an unseen floor. More mysterious is the subject in Reader (2025), who leans against a dark brown wall, his face and half of his body obfuscated in the shadows. Joining these figures is a majestic horse that appears to be running through a pond that is speckled with vibrant blue from the night sky peeking through the forest trees. This is Hahne Quintana’s second solo show with the gallery.
Dana James
“Ink Moon”
Hollis Taggart
Sep. 4–Oct. 11
Stop to Listen, 2025
Dana James
Hollis Taggart
She Made Milk & Honey, 2025
Dana James
Hollis Taggart
Brooklyn-based abstract artist Dana James has honed a distinct style of abstract painting, combining patches of pastel colors with bare areas that reveal raw canvas. To these she adds intuitive, bold brushstrokes that enliven her compositions. James at times uses multiple canvases, visibly stitching them together à la Frankenstein. The works still retain a beautiful charm from the soft, appealing colors, seen, for example, in Neon in a Past Life (2025). Made with encaustic, collage, acrylic, and pigment, the different mediums add subtle texture and variation to the surface.
Contradictions appear throughout the artist’s practice—in the form of contrasting colors and differing paces of her brushwork. This adds tension to her work, making it seem at once slow and fast, soft and hard. As the exhibition title suggests, the paintings contain lunar references, a common motif for James. All nine of the pieces in the show were made during the artist’s pregnancy, with the opening likely coinciding with her daughter’s birth. This period of time has had a significant impact on James’s life and work, as she learned to embrace the unknown future and channel her emotions through bolder, more energetic brushstrokes.
“Fifteen”
Cristin Tierney
Sep. 5–Oct. 4
Grande Jatte Study, 1969
Diane Burko
Cristin Tierney
To celebrate the gallery’s fifteenth anniversary and its move from the Lower East Side to Tribeca, Cristin Tierney is presenting “Fifteen,” an eclectic group show of artists it has shown and worked with over the years. The diverse range of works on view encompasses paintings, video installations, and sculptures by artists including Joan Linder, Dread Scott, and Judy Pfaff. In line with the gallery’s mission of supporting experimentation, collaboration, and community, the works in the show also include performance, an inherently challenging medium for commercial galleries.
One such piece, Tim Youd’s 100 Novels Project (2012–ongoing), will take place over the course of the exhibition. The project sees Youd retype novels in locations central to the stories (he began with Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas). For “Fifteen,” Youd is on his 85th novel, retyping Bright Lights, Big City, Jay McInerney’s ode to the yuppie party scene of New York in the 1980s, typified by the gallery’s new surroundings of Tribeca.
David Alekhuogie
“highlifetime”
Yancey Richardson
Sep. 2–Oct. 18
Featuring works from David Alekhuogie’s series “A Reprise,” “highlifetime” examines how Western frameworks have shaped the presentation and dissemination of African art and aesthetics. Alekhuogie based this series on photographs taken by Walker Evans in 1935 for the Museum of Modern Art. At the time, the museum commissioned Evans to photograph African sculptures in MoMA’s exhibition “African Negro Art.” These photographs were later exhibited in 2000 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in “Perfect Documents: Walker Evans and African Art, 1935.” Critiquing the tradition of white, Western documentation of African culture, epitomized by Walkers’s perspective, Alekhuogie reimagines these photographs through an involved process: he creates facsimiles of works of African art, like the famous Benin Bronzes, onto paper shapes, which he then photographs, resulting in pieces that combine photography, collage, and sculpture.
Fragmented and fractured, the works question how colonial histories and modernity intersect: Traditional objects are portrayed through supposedly objective photography techniques. Through these acts of rephotographing and reimagining source material, the artist reframes inherited images, opening space for new readings and greater agency for those of African descent to tell their own stories. Alekhuogie, who is based in Los Angeles, has shown at several institutions worldwide, including at the Museum of Modern Art itself.
Caroline Monnet
“Where the Sky Begins”
Nunu Fine Art
Sep. 5–Nov. 8
In “Where the Sky Begins,” Montreal-based artist Caroline Monnet draws on both her Anishinaabe and French heritage in wearable sculptures, works on paper, and wall-based pieces. Often using a minimalist, abstract style with patterns borrowed from traditions like basketry and weaving, Monnet’s compositions at times recall maps and digital codes. She often uses artificial materials associated with construction, such as Tyvek, roof underlay, and polyethylene. By using these house construction products, Monnet aims to critique the systemic inequality in housing for First Nations communities in Canada, reappropriating the toxic materials used in these developments for her artwork.
At the heart of the show are Monnet’s wearable sculptures, also made with materials like floor protector and insulation wool, which incorporate traditional Anishinaabe techniques and patterns. Monnet reclaims these chemically-derived materials to examine post-colonial identity and Indigenous resilience, turning contemporary products of extraction-driven capitalism into traditional Indigenous craftsmanship. Monnet’s work has been shown worldwide, including in the 2019 Whitney Biennial. She is also creating a site-responsive installation for “An Indigenous Present” at the ICA Boston, which will open this fall. In addition to her art practice, Monnet is also an acclaimed filmmaker and has participated in several festivals, including Sundance Film Festival.
Maria Nepomuceno
“Cunhó”
Sikkema Malloy Jenkins
Sep. 2–Oct. 11
“Cunhó” is the nickname given to Brazilian abstract artist Maria Nepomuceno by her mother. It’s also the name of her third solo show at Chelsea gallery Sikkema Malloy Jenkins featuring colorful, mixed-media wall sculptures, made with a range of Brazilian craft techniques, including beading, weaving, and ceramics. Nepomuceno’s multiple media, from fiber art to sculpture result in objects with fantastical, amorphous shapes. Nepomuceno’s visually captivating pieces often incorporate spirals, seen painted and in vibrant beaded patterns and woven serpentine designs.
Though abstract, each work contains hints of biological forms like wombs and cells. Playfully embedded in these sculptures are ceramics, gourds, and vessels, sometimes containing beads, giving the assemblage-like compositions the feeling of a galaxy or cornucopia. The artist is fascinated by the idea of infinity, and based this show around the idea of abundance. Nepomuceno’s work is in major collections worldwide, including the Guggenheim Museum, and it was featured in “Panorama,” a 2024 roving exhibition across four small Italian hilltop towns, organized by ITALICS.
Shara Hughes
“Weather Report”
David Kordansky Gallery
Sep. 4–Oct. 18
Known for vibrant landscape paintings with fantastical flora and fauna, rising American artist Shara Hughes furthers her exploration of this genre in her solo show “Weather Report” at David Kordansky. Each of the nine new large-scale works contains hints of motifs typical of Hughes’s practice—bodies of water, meandering trees, geological elements, and hovering moons–painted with rich, saturated hues and lively brushstrokes. While still incorporating familiar features, the scenes at times verge on otherworldly, often achieved through distorted perspectives. In Rift (2025), a seemingly endless fracture in the ground creates a snake-like canyon. The mountain cliffs surrounding the rift blend into a rainbow sky, blurring any sense of a horizon. Leaving her subject open-ended, Hughes offers viewers space to find their own meaning in these psychologically charged compositions. Hughes’s work was shown in the 2017 Whitney Biennial and is in collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Nancy Holt
“Echoes & Evolutions: Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels”
Sprüth Magers
Sep. 5–Oct. 25
Late artist Nancy Holt had an impressive practice in photography and experimental film. Yet the American multidisciplinary artist is best known for ambitious earthworks, outdoor installations, and public sculptures. Among her most famous earthworks is Sun Tunnels (1973–76), four austere concrete cylinders laid in a cross and installed in the remote Great Basin Desert in Utah. The work is a remarkable achievement: The cylindrical tunnels are carefully oriented to perfectly frame the sun rising and setting in the winter and summer solstices. Additionally, the large-scale concrete tubes have smaller holes in the surface through which light from the sun and moon casts the constellations of Capricorn, Columba, Draco, and Perseus. One of the major projects of Holt’s career, Sun Tunnels illustrates how far the artist could push the definition of art, as well as the setting in which it can be viewed.
In “Echoes & Evolutions: Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels,” photographs, sculptures, drawings, and collages on view offer insight into Holt’s feat in making Sun Tunnels. The process of arranging and installing the cylinders, which took three years, is documented in remarkable detail, shedding light on Holt’s pioneering experimentation and meticulous process.
Tiona Nekkia McClodden
“PURE GAZE”
Sep. 2–Oct. 18
Working in film, sculpture, and installation, multidisciplinary artist Tiona Nekkia McClodden explores identity, queer politics, Black selfhood, and African spirituality. In “PURE GAZE,” McClodden uses kinbaku-bi, a traditional Japanese bondage practice as a way to examine power, air flow, and the concept of relinquishing control. Part of her “NEVER LET ME GO” series (2023–ongoing), the sculptural paintings on view consist of leather canvases bound with ropes arranged in kinbaku-bi techniques. McClodden hand-dyed the canvases to mimic bruising, each one bearing scars and marks of pressure. In this presentation, McClodden approached the series with a detached perspective, prioritizing aesthetics and the beauty of kinbaku-bi binding, while nudging at the boundaries of physical containment.
McClodden’s work has been exhibited widely, including at the Kunsthalle Basel and the New Museum, and in 2019 she received the Whitney Biennial’s Bucksbaum prize for her video and sculpture installation I prayed to the wrong god for you (2019) that shows her personal ritual to the Afro-Cuban deity Shango.
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