The Armory Show returned to the Javits Center, opening its VIP day on Thursday, September 24th. The 2026 edition landed later on the calendar than usual, pushed from its traditional early September slot to later in the month, running through Sunday, September 27th. There was a noted sense of anticipation in the air on the morning of the VIP day, and collectors met the fair with enthusiasm and energy.
Under fair director Kyla McMillan, this year’s edition has grown to 242 exhibitors from more than 30 countries, with expanded Presents and Solo sections dedicated to emerging galleries and solo artist presentations, respectively. A Caribbean thread ran through both the Focus section, curated by María Elena Ortiz, and the Platform section for large-scale artworks, curated by Jovanna Venegas.
A particular crowd-pleaser was Bony Ramírez’s mixed-media assemblage installation La Carta (2026) featuring a doll girl resting on a four-poster bed. Presented by regular norma as part of Platform, La Carta is a consideration of how we meet bad news and will change its configuration every day of the fair. Nearby, El Museo del Barrio staged another highlight, a participatory textile installation by Lulu Varona for the fair’s Spotlight program.
Several new developments accompany this year’s fair. On Friday, the fair will kick off its inaugural Armory After Hours, hosting a carnival-inspired procession, led by a DJ and live percussionists, through the aisles. This year also marked the biggest slate of prizes in The Armory Show’s history, including a new three-way Pérez Art Museum Miami Acquisition Prize and an inaugural Bronx Museum Acquisition Prize, awarded to Zoë Pulley for a work in Superposition’s booth.
Major collectors came out for opening day, including Beth DeWoody, Pamela Joyner, Jason and Michelle Rubell, and Susan and Michael Hort, along with curators Scott Rothkopf and Klaus Biesenbach, among others. Celebrities spotted among the booths included Jodie Foster, Paul Rudd, and Karl-Anthony Towns. Sales reported by galleries on the day were led by a Joan Mitchell painting for over $2 million at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery.
But among the fanfare, the real action really took place within the booths. Here are Artsy’s picks for the 10 best booths from The Armory Show 2026.
Spinello Projects
Booth F1
With works by Elliot & Erick Jiménez
Identical twins Elliot & Erick Jiménez transformed Miami gallery Spinello Projects’ booth into a meditation on transformation with “What We Are Becoming,” their first major body of work since their debut solo museum show in 2025, “El Monte” at the Pérez Art Museum Miami.
Raised in an Afro Cuban household in the U.S., the Miami-based artists debuted photographic works in reliquary-like frames, while the booth’s walls were draped in floor-length deep green drapes. In the booth’s title piece, What We Are Becoming (2026), an archival pigment print shows a shadowy figure with eyes glancing out mournfully. The image is studded with custom silk organza butterflies. Another work, Babalú-Ayé (2026), honors the orisha of healing and disease through a canvas print embedded with found antique metal ex-votos.
Of the works on view, 7 sold within the fair’s first days, each priced between $10,000 and $20,000.
Superposition
Booth P10
With works by Zoë Pulley
Elegance No. 1, 2026
Zoë Pulley
Superposition
For her first-ever fair presentation and first New York gallery show, Brooklyn-based Zoë Pulley built her installation, collectively titled “A Conversation Had on February 27th,” around the archive of her grandmother, Sandra Olivia Moon Hightower. A self-taught fashion designer who staged independent runway shows in early 1980s Philadelphia, Hightower worked entirely outside the industry’s institutional record.
At the nomadic gallery Superposition’s booth, Pulley’s works function as reconstructed garments and alternative archives, incorporating image transfer, collage, and press clippings alongside her own handwritten notes. The presentation is anchored by A Conversation Had on February 27th (Tetraptych) (2026), four lit panels on milk crates, each bearing a line in Hightower’s own words: “I just wanted to put people on the runway who never got the opportunity to be on the runway.”
Another work, Elegance No. 1 (2026), won the fair’s inaugural Bronx Museum Acquisition Prize and sold for $14,000. Other works in the 23-piece booth ranged from $3,500 to $7,500. Including personal family ephemera and adaptations of Hightower’s now-vintage garments, this installation is poignant and playful at once.
Perrotin
Booth 100
With works by Kathia St. Hilaire
Artist Kathia St. Hilaire’s richly textured reduction-relief paintings offer a sumptuous start to the fair in a dedicated booth at Perrotin, located right at the fair’s entrance.
St. Hilaire builds her surfaces by carving and printing linoleum blocks onto collaged panels. She then sands away layers, incorporating shredded tires, banknotes, sugarcane bagasse, and even skin-lightening cream packaging alongside more traditional paint.
One work, Saintilus Bois Caïman (2025), depicts the artist as a child witnessing the Haitian artist Jean-Claude Saintilus retell the legend of the 1791 Bois-Caïman ceremony, framed by two caimans (an alligator-like reptile) and vegetation drawn from the artist’s Florida childhood. The gallery reported six works sold on opening day, ranging in price from $5,000 to $45,000.
Carvalho
Booth 133
With works by Élise Peroi, Rosalind Tallmadge, and Anoushka Mirchandani
Brooklyn gallery Carvalho’s booth offered a serene oasis amid the hubbub of the fair, with works by artists Élise Peroi, Rosalind Tallmadge, and Anoushka Mirchandani, offering a masterclass in material sensitivity.
Newly represented artist Peroi, an alum of The Artsy Vanguard 2026, reconfigures gouache-on-silk landscapes by cutting them into ribbons and reweaving them on a tapestry loom. Her Reflet bleu (2026), a translucent panel of silk, gouache, linen, and maple, sold during the fair’s opening hours. Meanwhile, Tallmadge’s Palingenesis (2026) layers mirrored mica over hand-painted silk in a large-scale panel that functions as much as sculpture as painting. Making her debut with the gallery, Mirchandani contributed multivalent, ethereal oil, oil stick, and oil pastel figurative paintings.
JO-HS
Booth P46
With works by Morten Slettemeås
Norwegian painter Morten Slettemeås filled New York gallery JO-HS’s booth with “VEKE” (all works 2026), seven large oil-on-canvas panels—each roughly 79 by 59 inches—drawn from the landscape of Gvarv, Telemark, where the artist grew up.
The title, meaning “week” in Norwegian, nods to the seven panels and the seven days it references, while a recurring horizontal line, evoking a candle’s wick, threads through the compositions as both a visual and temporal device.
Slettemeås moves fluidly between figuration and abstraction, compressing memory, place, and perception into single images where distinct moments seem to coexist. The gallery conceived the booth as an architectural, immersive environment rather than a conventional display. The seven panels were offered at a price on request.
Michael Rosenfeld Gallery
Booth 407
With works by Benny Andrews, Milton Avery, Hannelore Baron, Richmond Barthé, Mary Bauermeister, William Baziotes, Romare Bearden, Paul Cadmus, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Harold Cousins, Jay DeFeo, Beauford Delaney, Melvin Edwards, Claire Falkenstein, Jared French, Sam Gilliam, Nancy Grossman, William H. Johnson, Lee Krasner, Yayoi Kusama, Hughie Lee-Smith, Norman Lewis, Joan Mitchell, Alice Neel, Louise Nevelson, Alfonso Ossorio, Irene Rice Pereira, Jackson Pollock, Fairfield Porter, Betye Saar, Esphyr Slobodkina, Alma Thomas, Bob Thompson, George Tooker, Charmion von Wiegand, Charles White, Jack Whitten, and William T. Williams
While many booths at this year’s fair leaned into single-artist narratives, New York’s Michael Rosenfeld Gallery went the opposite direction, filling its booth with 112 works spanning more than three decades of American art history. The New York gallery’s presentation ranged across works by Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock, Yayoi Kusama, Romare Bearden, Alice Neel, Louise Nevelson, Alma Thomas, and Jack Whitten, among dozens of others. A Joan Mitchell painting from the presentation sold for more than $2 million, the most expensive sale reported at the fair from its VIP day.
One particularly powerful segment of the booth was devoted to assemblage works, including works by late American artist Betye Saar, box assemblages by Holocaust survivor Hannelore Baron, and Barbara Chase-Riboud’s evocative Poet’s Letter on the Shoulder of His Mistress (1994).
Lyndsey Ingram
Booth 138
With works by Stephen Chambers, Kate Friend, Florence Houston, Fumi Imamura, Suzy Murphy, Heidrun Rathgeb, Liselotte Watkins, and Anne-Laure Zevi
London gallery Lyndsey Ingram brought eight artists together around themes of the natural world, identity, and small moments of daily beauty.
Artist Fumi Imamura makes her New York debut with large-scale floral collage and watercolor works, their intricate paper gardens rendered in rich earth tones. Kate Friend released new photographic outtakes from her “As Chosen By…” portrait series alongside a large-scale image from “There Are Always Flowers for Those That Want to See Them,” a series shot at Vatican-approved Marian apparition sites.
Florence Houston’s hyper-detailed paintings of an ornate Victorian jelly, a bar of soap, and a light switch imbued the everyday with unexpected sensuality, while Liselotte Watkins contributed six aerial-perspective compositions balancing decorative beauty with conceptual tension.
Hannah Traore
Booth P20
With works by Kesewa Aboah
New York gallery Hannah Traore gave over its booth to Ghanaian British artist Kesewa Aboah, who uses her own body as a printmaking tool. Aboah presses her fingerprints and limbs into magnesium plates originally designed for 20th-century letterpress printing, then frames the cold metal in warm, grained tulipwood, turning a commercial reproduction tool into a singular record of her body.
The presentation’s most ambitious work, Self Portrait: KA-18.07.26, 1-3 (2026), consists of 15 magnesium plates stamped over and over with her limbs, left deliberately unpolished so the reactive metal could tarnish unpredictably, “like a person,” as the artist put it. The booth sold out entirely within the fair’s opening hours, with works priced between $2,500 and $27,000.
P420
Booth 120
With works by Irma Blank, Adelaide Cioni, Victor Fotso Nyie, Xian Kim, Shafei Xia, Pieter Vermeersch, Riccardo Baruzzi, and Laura Grisi
P420, from Bologna, Italy, mixed generations and media across eight artists. These included works by the late Irma Blank, whose Radical Writings, Abecedarium, 7-2-91, 1991 (1991) trace the rhythm of her own breath across paper and canvas in a private, wordless script, alongside Untitled (1965–66) by Laura Grisi, an Italian pioneer whose 1960s abstractions bridged Pop, Conceptual, and kinetic art.
But the real draw of the booth is the delightful creations of rising contemporary artist Shafei Xia. Born in Shaoxing, China, and now based in Bologna, Xia paints and sculpts, creating playful works that take inspiration from Japanese shunga woodblock prints and 19th-century Chinese erotic painting.
In these works, Xia often casts herself as a tiger, a symbol of instinctual power in Chinese alchemy. Among the works on view were Summer time (2026), a large watercolor on sandalwood paper mounted on canvas, and Little girl (2026), a painted and glazed ceramic sculpture of a girl holding a tiger in her arms like a lap cat.
EBONY/CURATED
Booth 309
With works by Hugh Byrne, Wole Lagunju, Kimathi Mafafo, Senzeni Mtwakazi Marasela, and Lisa Ringwood
Cape Town and Franschhoek, South Africa, gallery EBONY/CURATED made its Armory debut with a five-artist presentation spanning painting, textile, and ceramic work from across the African continent.
Wole Lagunju’s Homage to Eshumare (2026), a large oil painting steeped in Yoruba iconography, anchored the booth and was offered at $38,500. Kimathi Mafafo’s hand- and machine-stitched embroideries drew attention, as did Senzeni Mtwakazi Marasela’s red-thread-on-cotton Waiting for Gebane 1 (year), part of an ongoing series that follows a fictional alter ego through South African history. Lisa Ringwood’s hand-built, delicate, sgraffito-decorated ceramic vessels, meanwhile, were the breakout of the booth. Six of her works sold within the fair’s opening hours, priced between $6,000 and $9,000 each.
from Artsy News https://ift.tt/xp7sNlo
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