The 2025 Armory Show opened to VIP attendees on Thursday morning at the Javits Center in New York, marking the first edition fully directed by Kyla McMillian. This year's fair features significant changes including a redesigned floor plan and new sections, generating cautious optimism among dealers who noted fresh energy and strong turnout. While some dealers reported sales of works valued up to $1 million on opening day, the full impact of these changes remains to be seen.
Among the most compelling presentations is Victoria-Idongesit Udondian's solo exhibition at kó gallery, which examines the complex relationship between China and Africa through the lens of trade and exploitation. The Nigerian artist, based in New York, recently completed a two-month residency in Jingdezhen, China, known as the porcelain capital for its significance in ceramics since the 6th century. Her installation features hand-painted porcelain plates and wallpaper reproducing archival images of child miners in the Congo, highlighting how China's trade relationships extract and exploit African resources.
The centerpiece of Udondian's presentation consists of ceramic busts of Africans that were looted from the continent, which she 3D-scanned and recreated. These busts rest on plinths covered with shipping pallet planks, serving as reminders of their journey across continents. Broken porcelain shards from a Jingdezhen market lie beneath the sculptures, while some busts feature cracked plexiglass behind them, evoking the museum vitrines that often house such objects in Western institutions.
Jacqueline Surdell's presentation at Secrist Beach showcases her imposing fiber-based sculptures created from shipping lines and industrial rope. The booth's centerpiece, "Suddenly, she was hell-bent and ravenous (after Giotto)" from 2024, measures 13.75 by 21 feet and takes inspiration from Giotto's fresco at the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. The work's title reveals its shape as an oversized church altarpiece, created through the artist's technique of twisting, binding, and knotting rope in varying degrees of tightness.
Emma Safir's solo presentation at Hesse Flatow offers an interactive experience that encourages photography, typically forbidden in art contexts. When viewers photograph her mixed-media pieces, sections of the canvas appear to vanish as if digitally edited. This effect results from Safir's complex construction process using MDF, upholstery foam, reflective thread and fabric, neoprene, Flashe paint, and silk, onto which she digitally prints archived images. Her work explores themes of visibility and its implications.
Queer desire and community spaces feature prominently in two notable presentations. RF. Alvarez's solo exhibition in the Focus section centers on the 2025 painting "We're Still Here!" depicting a diverse crowd in a dive bar where stolen glances hint at underlying queer desire. The work directly references Paul Cadmus's "The Fleet's In!" from 1934, which was censored by the US Navy and caused a national scandal when it was to be exhibited at the former Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Alvarez focuses on the flirtation between a suited man and sailor from Cadmus's composition, asserting that the circumstances affecting Cadmus as a gay man persist today.
Robert Martin's presentation at Belgium's Edji Gallery creates an imagined gay bar called "Two Bucks" through an immersive installation. The booth features urinal dividers covered in stickers and graffiti, with a painting where a urinal should be, showing the word "GLORY" above a circular cutout containing a photograph of a sexual encounter. The installation includes matchbooks with the bar's logo, a pool table setup, and an ornate bar light, all contributing to the atmosphere of Martin's fictional establishment.
Martin's work carries deep personal significance, as it stems from research into his Uncle Martin's life and the queer bars he frequented. Uncle Martin died in 1994 from AIDS-related complications, months before Robert Martin was born and named. When Martin turned 18, he inherited boxes of his uncle's archives, leading to lifelong exploration of queer bar culture and spaces that provided safe haven but no longer exist. A tender portrait of Uncle Martin smiling appears on an exterior wall, preserving his legacy through art.
Sylvie Hayes-Wallace's presentation at Silke Lindner features "Cage (Mother)," a memorial to the artist's mother who died when Hayes-Wallace was 11. The rectangular wire armature matches the dimensions of a queen-size bed they once shared, adorned with found fabric pieces including items that belonged to her mother. Cut-outs with phrases like "I MAKE BREASTFEEDING LOOK HOT" and "Without you, I'm empty inside" are affixed among twisted fabric strips. The right side corresponds to her mother's personality while the left reflects the artist's persona.
For visitors seeking respite from the fair's intensity, Leonel Vásquez's booth presented by Bogotá-based Casa Hoffmann offers a soothing sound experience. The Colombian sound artist displays works from his "Canto Rodado" series, exploring waterways altered by human intervention. He amplifies the sounds of water running over rocks through wooden needles that scratch surfaces of water and rocks, played through copper horns to create a meditative atmosphere amid the fair's chaos.
André Magaña's presentation at Kendra Jayne Patrick examines power distribution within capitalist structures through sculptures resembling New York's Citi Bike docking stations. The New York-based artist questions whether Citi Bikes represent mere transportation alternatives or symbols of gentrification, asking why financial institutions sponsor such programs when they disrupt neighborhoods. His interventions include adding beer can pyramids and bollards with FDNY custodian locks to prevent docking access, commenting on various levels of access in New York.
Instituto de Visión, sharing a booth with Proxyco, presents paintings from Ana Mercedes Hoyos's "Ventanas" (Windows) series, begun in 1969. The Colombian artist, who received a major retrospective at Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá last year, created these square paintings using bold colors and tightly cropped window compositions that comment on modernism and abstraction history.
The fair concludes with Coulter Fussell's textiles at Memphis-based Sheet Cake Gallery, representing an artist from Water Valley, Mississippi, who has shown extensively in the South but rarely elsewhere in the US. After two decades as a waitress, Fussell dedicated herself to full-time art-making a decade ago and will have her first museum solo show at Mississippi Museum of Art next year. Her large wall-hung sculptures combine donated fabrics to breathe new life into time-worn textiles. The Armory Show continues through September 7 at the Javits Center.
