The Armory Show 2025: A Curation
The 2026 Armory Show embraced both tradition and modernity this year with the appointment of Kyla McMillan as their new director. McMillan has worked at galleries such as David Zwirner and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, as well as founded the itinerant gallery and consultancy, Saint George Projects. She altered the floor plan and flow of this year’s fair in hopes of putting more emphasis on the artists and galleries themselves, as well as expanded the Presents section, which features emerging galleries less than a decade old. A span of cultures and identities was highlighted through the fair’s different sections. The American South acted as a common theme—Platform showcased large-scale works by Black artists whose practices were shaped by life in the American South, and Focus viewed the American South through a diasporic lens, considering cities such as Miami and New Orleans. McMillan stated that, “The connection to Frieze has really helped us embrace our North American context in a way that feels both authentic and intentional.” The Armory Show joined the Frieze network in 2023, which has greatly helped the fair expand its network.
Devon Vander Voort teamed up with the Greenwich Art Society this year for an exclusive insider’s tour of The Armory Show. This intimate walk-through offered a behind-the-scenes look at market trends, in-demand artists, and the mechanics of collecting today. Our group was given the opportunity to meet dealers, gallerists, and artists shaping the scene. Below is insight into five of the galleries we visited on our tour that are promising movers and shakers of the art world this year:
Wolfgang – F6
Wolfgang Gallery featured Atlanta-based painter Ainekia, who is a current resident in the Studio Artist Program at Atlanta Contemporary. In her new body of work, Traverso engages her filmmaking background to give a “conceptual and material foundation for a phenomenological approach to painting.” Traverso’s paintings spark movement and consciousness and include personal archives such as inherited and found materials reflective of her histories, memories, and fantasies. For example, the largest painting in the booth, Beach Day, 2025, is a reference to Alice in Wonderland and reflects a skilled technique that borders on both realism and abstraction.
Nazarian / Curcio – 206
Nazarian / Curcio organized a group show with Los Angeles-based artist Daniel Gibson, Los Angeles-based artist iris yirei hu, Brooklyn-based artist Reuven Israel, Los Angeles-based artist Ken Gun Min, Los Angeles-based artist Kour Pour, and Brooklyn- based artist Summer Wheat. Devon Vander Voort has had the chance to visit Summer Wheat’s studio to see her labor-intensive artist process where she uses tools like syringes, scrapers, and cake decorating paraphernalia to push vibrant acrylic paint through wire mesh, or she works directly on impastoed surfaces. This technique functions as a conceptual and formal thread throughout her practice, and she draws on ancient art and medieval tapestries to Renaissance etchings and modernist abstraction for inspiration. She uses her layered compositions to reimagine concepts in history, mythology, and folklore, and also touches on the more human experiences that are shaped by labor, leisure, commerce, and class.
RAINRAIN – P29
RAINRAIN presented an intertextual show with artists Kosuke Kawahara and Echo Youyi Yan. These New York-based artists created a beautiful conversation between their works, full of playful dichotomy. Kawahara’s uses materials from living matter—coffee grounds, rabbit skin glue, cotton, wood, beeswax, and paper—to explore interstitial environments such as veins, root systems, bones, connective tissue, and cavernous networks. Yan’s work combines evolutionary biology and eroticism, and she also uses organic and found materials to reflect on humans’ primal desires and ways of submission.
Hannah Traore – P12
Hannah Traore Gallery showcased an all-new body of work by artist James Perkins. Perkins creates what he calls Post-Totem Structures— “minimalist sculptures composed of silk, wood, and stone that are partially buried in distinct landscapes where they remain for months or years, before entering the gallery space.” These structures are exposed to Earth’s natural elements and wildlife, which become active collaborators in the works. Land Art often imposes monumental forms upon the land, but Perkins subverts this, as his works are shaped by the land and do not insert themselves into nature. Perkins places a focus on the “nonsite,” a that term originated with Robert Smithson in 1968, and combines elements from philosophers, minimalist painters, and performance artists. This show debuted an expansion on Perkins’ practice. He introduced velvet as a medium, which produces more concentrated color fields and florid textures.
Patel Brown – P15
Patel Brown exhibited artist Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka in a solo show, Rumination, which celebrated her vulnerability and grace. The Japanese-Canadian artist uses historical craft technologies of her heritage, including ink, natural dye, printmaking, and papermaking. Her artworks also conceptualize the possibilities of environmentally sustainable traditions into the future. Rumination specifically used Japanese sustainable-craft technologies to explore mental health in relation to the natural world. Some of the works feature Hatanaka’s own outline of her body, revealing her personal experiences with bipolar “disorder” and her understanding of the human body’s attunement to nature.
