Armory Show 2026 Opens With Steady Sales in New York

One could argue that New York’s Armory Show has spent much of the last decade trying to figure out exactly what kind of fair it wants to be. It moved from the charmingly gritty piers on the Hudson River to the sterile but safe Javits Center on Manhattan’s West Side and changed dates. Then, in 2023, it was acquired by Frieze, which already operates one of New York’s other major fairs, down the road at the Shed, without question the worst venue of any art fair across the globe. Next, it changed directors, overhauled its exhibitor list, and changed dates again, to later in September. So perhaps the more useful question on Thursday morning, as the fair opened its 32nd edition, was a simple one: What and who, exactly, is the Armory Show for?

At 11 a.m., an hour after doors opened, the answer wasn’t immediately obvious. The earlier opening time gave the fair some welcome breathing room, though at moments perhaps a little too much. Attendance could look lean, even anemic, depending on which side of the fair’s floor you happened to be standing on. The main convention hall is a funny place: its two halves are effectively divided by the VIP lounge, restaurant and champagne bar, meaning one half can feel deserted while, a few hundred feet away, another is thronging with people.

The partly empty aisles may have been due in part to competition with Independent 20th Century, also opening Thursday morning on the Upper East Side at the Breuer building, now the headquarters of Sotheby’s. More than one dealer was invited to participate in Armory at the last minute, suggesting Frieze had some trouble filling the cavernous Javits Center. But dealer after dealer said the slower pace suited them just fine.

New York dealer Jayne Drost Johnson of JDJ Gallery said it is simply the new reality of a slower art market. “We’ve all noticed that fairs have a different pace the last couple of years,” said Johnson. “It’s more consistent, not just all about one crazy morning, and this way you can have better conversations. Even at [last year’s] Art Basel Miami Beach, which was great for me, I was making as many sales the last day as the first. So a slow first morning is not a sign of how things are going to go.”

New York art adviser Augusto Arbizo, who works at Allan Schwartzman’s firm, was singing from the same hymnal. “I actually found the new dates gave the Armory a much more relaxed energy,” he said. “There was a nice sense of anticipation when I walked in, but without that immediate feeling of being swept up in the frenzy that can sometimes accompany a fair opening.”

By 2 p.m., though, people were arriving at a clip and the fair had taken on the familiar hum of opening day. And despite all the changes, the Armory still performs one function remarkably well: it tells New York that summer is over (or, as cliché lovers call it, back to school). That role was especially apparent this year. When the fair moved to the Javits Center in 2021, it also moved to the week immediately after Labor Day, putting it directly on top of the crush of gallery openings, dinners, and parties that announce the fall season. In shifting to September 24–27, the Frieze brass also gave itself breathing room from their Seoul fair, which ran concurrently. The result, at least on opening day, felt considerably more civilized. Rather than piling another major event onto an already claustrophobic September calendar, the fair actually felt like the beginning of something. VIPs on the scene included First Lady of New York Rama Duwaji, actors like Jodie Foster and Paul Rudd, and New York Knickerbocker Karl-Anthony Towns. Top collectors were also on hand like Beth Rudin DeWoody, Estrellita Brodsky, Komal Shah, Lisa Goodman, Allison Berg, and Jill and Peter Kraus.

Despite the at-times slow pace, some galleries had made sales from emailed previews to clients ahead of Thursday, and others were making sales in the opening hours. First-time exhibitor Kamel Mennour (of Paris and New York) had sold seven of nine paintings by Dhewadi Hadjab by 1 p.m. (with two on reserve) for $110,000 each. The paintings, showing a dancer in various stages of a challenging choreography, are reminiscent of Eadweard Muybridge’s motion studies, the dealer pointed out.

New York gallery Norr Cohan was at its first Armory since longtime partner David Norr became the sole owner. By the end of the day the gallery had sold, among other works, a large multimedia Yinka Shonibare piece to a private collector (in the range of $180,000 to $220,000); two large mosaics by Eamon Ore-Giron (in the range of $80,000 to $120,000); a suite of 25 watercolors by Spencer Finch (in the range of $50,000 to $75,000).

New York’s Shrine gallery had placed about 10 paintings by Canadian-born artist Michelle Paterok, whom gallery partner Marge Rendell found on Instagram, at prices ranging from $5,500 to $11,000 by midafternoon.

Perrotin (with 12 exhibition spaces worldwide) had by 4 p.m. sold six paintings by Florida-born artist Kathia St. Hilaire in the range of $5,000–$45,000. The paintings partly have to do with Haitian history, specifically the brutal reign of dictator François “Papa Doc” Duvalier and the 1960s literary movement Spiralism that grew during his tenure. While they have the look of tapestries, they are paintings created with dozens of layers.

Southern Guild, the Cape Town–based gallery that recently opened in Tribeca, had made numerous sales by 1 p.m., including Zanele Muholi wallpaper works, printed on aluminum, for $52,000 each; paintings on black velvet by Roméo Mivekannin for $56,000 each; and had two reserves on large Muholi sculptures priced at $250,000 each.

The curated sections both look to the Caribbean Sea and its surrounding regions. Platform is overseen by Jovanna Venegas (curator at New York’s SculptureCenter) and features large-scale installations, while Focus, organized by María Elena Ortiz (curator at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth) is for solo- and dual-artist presentations. Tern Gallery, from Nassau, Bahamas, had sold three Kachelle Knowles paintings for $5,000 each and two Gio Swaby paintings for $18,000 apiece by the end of the day.

Brazilian gallery Nara Roesler, which also has a space in Chelsea, had by the end of the day sold works including an Abraham Palatnik painting for $60,000 and a Marco A. Castillo relief sculpture made from museum board for $50,000.

Armory director Kyla McMillan thinks the later date has helped on the business side, too. Collectors are back from summer holidays, she said, and conversations with galleries ahead of the fair felt “a bit more intentional this year.” Even still, she considers Armory “a kickoff for the season.”

But the more interesting question is where Armory fits within an increasingly crowded hierarchy of fairs. This year’s edition brings together roughly 230 galleries, about the same number as last year, but a substantial portion of the fair is devoted to younger dealers and solo presentations: Presents has expanded to 55 galleries, while Solo numbers is at 25.

For Lara Björk, a veteran New York art adviser, that evolution may be the point. Armory, she said, has spent the past six to eight years “trying to regain its footing and place in the New York fair and art market,” as it cycled through locations, dates, and exhibitors along the way. Frieze’s acquisition initially surprised her. On the one hand, she said, its not New York’s fair, the organization’s slogan, anymore; on the other, she said, it might be what the fair landscape needs. “They’re capitalizing on the lower priced, more ‘red-chip’ leaning artists and galleries,” she said. “Perhaps that’s just what the art market needs.”

McMillan describes the strategy somewhat differently, but arrives at a similar idea: Armory’s value may lie less in competing head-on with the market’s biggest fairs than in offering something they don’t. “This fair has always been one about discovery,” she said, pointing to its expanded young-gallery section and curated Focus and Platform sectors. Even established dealers, she said, can use Armory to introduce an artist to New York or mount a presentation that “might not be the priority at another fair.”

Björk put it more plainly: “In a market that has many markets and layers there is in fact room for everyone.”

Sean Kelly, whose gallery sold six works by early afternoon, had an even simpler explanation for the fair’s place in New York. “It’s the beginning of our season,” Kelly said. “Everybody wants to get back at it. And this is them getting back at it.” What mattered, he added, was that “people are spending money; they’re in here doing it. For me, that’s what the fair is for.”

And clients were spending at his booth. The gallery sold Janaina Tschäpe’s large oil painting Picking Flowers Quietly for $170,000 and Sam Moyer’s marble and plaster work Magic Number for $125,000. Other sales included works by Laurent Grasso for €60,000, Jose Dávila for $65,000, and Magdiel García Almanza and Lindsay Adams for $28,000 each.

The Azerbaijan-founded Gazelli Art House, which just this week expanded to New York with a 10,000-square-foot gallery at the Chelsea location that formerly housed Marlborough, is participating in the Armory Show for the second time. On offer, perhaps most ambitiously for the Armory Show, are paintings by Abstract Expressionist and Color Field painter Alice Baber, starting at $200,000. Canvases by fellow Ab-Exer Grace Hartigan start at $130,000. (Her 1945 Frustration bears a fake signature, “Jachens,” that the artist adopted to pass her works off as being by a male artist.) By 3:30 p.m., the gallery had sold a large historic Lilly Fenichel, whose estate the gallery recently began representing, to a major European private museum for about $200,000.

Elsewhere, the numbers were smaller but the pace could be considerably faster. A Hug From the Art World had sold out its booth of paintings by Camille Fishel before noon, with works priced between $18,000 and $24,000. The colorful, graphic canvases, populated by elongated female figures bending and twisting against saturated backgrounds, come from Fishel’s new “Bending Over Backwards” series.

Fishel had already received an unusually glamorous warm-up to the fair. Two nights earlier, the gallery hosted a preview at Zero Bond attended by the likes of Karl-Anthony Towns, George Condo, Rashid Johnson, Keegan-Michael Key, Gayle King, and her partner, Michael Rubin, the founder of Fanatics and a leading collector.

Gavlak, meanwhile, reported six sales totaling between $150,000 and $200,000. They included Lita Albuquerque’s mixed-media Coronation for between $85,000 and $120,000; Marilyn Minter’s photograph Dazed for between $30,000 and $50,000; and T.J. Wilcox’s Taglioni’s Nocturnal Dance for between $30,000 and $35,000. Two paintings by Jessica Cannon sold for a combined $40,000 to $60,000, while a painting by Alexis Teplin went for between $18,000 and $20,000.

At Dimin, the deals were smaller still, and arguably more illustrative of the breadth McMillan, the Armory Show director, was talking about. The gallery sold four paintings by Kelli Vance for between $14,000 and $20,000, along with a Taj Poscé work for $3,500 and Michelle Im’s ceramic sculpture The Auctioneer, an idol (or effigy) of Sotheby’s enigmatic it-girl auctioneer Phylis Kao for $4,800. While Kao might not be auctioning off many of the works currently on view at the Javits Center, the Armory Show seems to be banking on the fact that maybe one day she will.