It wasn’t clear on Thursday morning what to expect from this year’s edition of the Armory Show. But by 11 a.m.—the starting bell of Thursday’s VIP preview—queues stretched the length of the Javits Center’s glass atrium. For nearly an hour, the lines never let up, as attendees, wearing outfits running the gamut from traditional blue blazers and flowing dresses to full-dress fashion attire, poured inside.
The turnout was a welcome sign for the art market, after a shaky spring gave way to a summer of gallery closures, lawsuits, and fair cancellations. On Thursday, however, the mood was cautiously upbeat. No dealer claimed that they had the best VIP day of their career, but many told ARTnews that the slower pace was matched by serious interest.
“Yes, the market has slowed down, but there’s still a hunger out there,” David Blum, a director at Peter Blum Gallery, told ARTnews. “We are in New York City, after all.”
The gallery’s presentation was elegant and understated, anchored by recent and historic Alex Katz works. Its centerpiece—and the highest-priced work ARTnews found on offer at the fair—was a tranquil 1962 oil painting, October 2, of an unmade bed beneath a large window. Last seen in the Guggenheim’s 2022 retrospective, the work was listed at $1.2 million. By the end of Thursday, the painting remained available, though Blum said a third of the booth—including works by Nicholas Galanin, Erik Lindman, and Martha Tuttle, priced at values starting at $16,000—had already sold.
By the end of the day, the highest sale reported was by Galleria Lorcan O’Neill, which said it had moved one work for $1 million, though it did not specify which one. Sean Kelly, meanwhile, reported selling a Kehinde Wiley painting for $265,000; James Cohan reported selling a Kennedy Yanko sculpture for $150,000; and Tang Contemporary said it had sold an Ai Weiwei “toilet paper” sculpture for $150,000 to $180,000.
That was the backdrop as the aisles began to fill not just with collectors but institutional figures. Among the who’s who spotted were Don and Mera Rubell, Pamela and David Hornik, Peter and Jill Kraus, Beth Rudin DeWoody, Komal Shah, and Jarl Mohn. From the institutional side, there was Studio Museum in Harlem director and chief curator Thelma Golden, Phoenix Art Museum director Olga Viso, Whitney Museum director Scott Rothkopf, High Line Art director and chief curator Cecilia Alemani, and Pérez Art Museum director Franklin Sirmans, among others.
Their presence was enough to perk up Natalie Kates, cofounder of Kates-Ferri Projects, who noted a dramatic shift from last year’s no-shows as she greeted friends from her corner booth in Presents, the section for emerging galleries under 10 years old. “This year, everyone texted me that they were coming,” she told ARTnews. “And they’re here, so I’m thrilled. Will that translate to sales? I don’t know yet.”
Also in the Presents section was Chinatown dealer Rob Dimin, who told ARTnews that his philosophy for this year’s presentation was, “Keep it simple, stupid.” For Dimin, that meant hanging only three large-scale paintings by Hudson Valley–based artist Emily Coan, all from her “Spider Silk” series, which pairs lush and lyrical forest scenes with lingerie-clad women. By midday, Dimin had sold five paintings (two were in the booth’s backroom) priced between $8,500 and $40,000. “I’m not trying to rewrite the system,” Dimin said.
While this year’s fair is technically the second under director Kyla McMillan, she joined the Armory just two months before last year’s edition. That makes this year the first to fully reflect her vision, which has so far meant an overhauled floor plan and a structure emphasizing curated programming. The curated Focus section was moved to the front of the fair and this year highlights artists from the American South; its organizer is Jessica Bell Brown, the executive director of the Institute for Contemporary Art at VCU in Richmond. Platform, showcasing large-scale installations and sculptures, sits at the center of the floor and has been curated by Raina Lampkins-Fielder, of the nonprofit Souls Grown Deep. There is also a special Solo format interspersed among the regular gallery booths, as well as five large-scale works under the banner of “New York Sculpture.”
In total, 230 galleries are represented at the fair. More than a few are major players—among them Andrew Kreps and Esther Schipper—returning after what McMillan described to ARTnews as a “hiatus.” She added that bringing those galleries back was a major priority. Her pitch, aside from the revamped programming, was simple: Armory still has over 60,000 attendees every year.
“Even if you have a blockbuster show in New York, you don’t get that kind of reach,” she said. That scale, and the mix of serious collectors with those who “don’t even call themselves collectors,” is what persuaded some of the bigger names to rejoin.
The biggest coup is the return of White Cube, which hasn’t done the Armory Show in more than a decade. Count the London gallery—which now has spaces in New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, and Paris—as the first of the market’s upper echelon to participate since David Zwirner in 2022. White Cube’s Alexandra Sterling credited McMillan.
“We know her quite well—that started the conversation—and she had some great ideas for revamping the fair,” Sterling said.
The gallery brought a solo presentation of Tarwuk, the Croatian-born, New York–based duo whose practice reflects their upbringing during the Yugoslav Wars in the ‘90s. Priced between $65,000 and $100,000, the paintings had mostly sold by Thursday afternoon, leaving only works on paper around $10,000 and sculptures priced from $15,000 to $30,000.
An install view of Massey Klein’s solo presentation of works by Kate McQuillen at the Armory Show.
Courtesy of Massey Klein
McMillan’s biggest impact might be in the galleries new to the fair. Fifty-five are participating for the first time, about a quarter of the overall exhibitor list.
Chinatown’s Massey Klein was among them. Cofounder Garrett Klein told ARTnews that he and his cofounder Ryan Massey felt it was “worth the financial risk” to do the Armory this year, after successfully navigating NADA New York in May for the first time and making several institutional contacts. On Thursday evening, he said the gallery had sold the largest piece in its solo presentation by Kate McQuillen, for more than $13,500, to a collector new to the gallery.
“There’s a bit of a changing of the guard,” Klein said of the influx of new exhibitors. “We felt we had to capitalize on that. We decided this is our chance. Let’s do it.”
Also debuting this year is Austin-based Martha’s, in the Focus section, with a suite of paintings by RF. Alvarez that blend Southern machismo with queer life. Priced between $4,500 and $20,000, all but one had sold by the end of the day. “We’ll have more in a few weeks, and we’ll sell those to the waitlist,” Martha’s cofounder Ricky Morales told ARTnews, noting with a laugh that the artist had to stop painting ahead of the fair due to a shoulder injury.
The main section seemed split between seller’s pragmatism, and an eye toward institutional acquisitions.
London blue-chip Victoria Miro dedicated most of its booth to diaristic en plein air portraits by Doron Langberg, made in both Fire Island and Israel. The works, 41 in total, were priced between $22,000 and $35,000; director Glenn Scott Wright noted that both the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum had recently acquired pieces by Langberg. The other part of Miro’s sprawling booth was a more traditional grab bag of the gallery’s program, featuring works by Hernan Bas, María Berrío, Secundino Hernández, Kudzanai-Violet Hwami, Yayoi Kusama, and Flora Yukhnovich.
Chelsea’s Garth Greenan similarly brought a cross-section of its program, from Rosalyn Drexler—who died Wednesday at 98—to Gladys Nilsson, who has a retrospective at Sacramento’s Crocker Art Museum next summer. The centerpiece of the presentation is one of Cannupa Hanska Luger’s “sovereignty suits,” made to protect Indigenous space travelers and last seen at the Hammer Museum in “Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice.” That work, góodex, is listed at $175,000; a large-scale hole-punch work by Howardena Pindell, Untitled #20 (For Masa: Lavender Lotus), is on offer for $875,000. Neither had sold at press time, though assistant director Julian Corbett told ARTnews there has been “lots of interest” in both.
On the other side of the floor was Chicago’s Secrist | Beach, which centered its booth on a show-stopping 1,200-pound woven wall sculpture by Jacqueline Surdell, who the gallery announced representation of in August. Listed at $300,000, the work, Suddenly, she was hell-bent and ravenous (after Giotto), references early Renaissance religious painting and was constructed in the gallery over three months in 2024. Smaller works in the presentation ranged from $12,000 to $50,000.
London’s Saatchi Yates, in its Armory debut, brought a solo presentation by Tesfaye Urgessa, who represented Ethiopia in the 2024 Venice Biennale. Prices for the large-scale paintings ranged from $135,000 to $200,000—on the higher end for the gallery, which primarily supports emerging artists. Smaller works were priced between $7,000 and $25,000. Director Alison Ball told ARTnews that she was eager to get his work in front of the New York institutional audience.
“I was working on an acquisition with the Brooklyn Museum for six months, and as soon as that was confirmed, I was like, it seems like New York likes Tesfaye,” Ball said. “It felt like the right city and the right moment.”
Rumination, a 2025 hand-carved, handprinted linocut on handmade kozo Tosa Washi paper by Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka.
Devan Patel, cofounder of Toronto’s Patel Brown, also cited institutional momentum as part of his reasoning for bringing a series of large-scale hand-printed linocuts on traditional Japanese Tosa Washi paper by Canadian Japanese artist Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka. Hamilton College’s Wellin Museum and the Dallas Museum of Art have both recently acquired works by Hatanaka, and she will open a show later this month at the Canadian Embassy in Japan.
The standout in the booth was Rumination, a 12-foot-long piece stretched on a wooden beam made specifically to fit the dimensions of the booth. “More and more, we’re tailoring our presentations to the booth and the fair,” said Patel, whose gallery typically participates in 10 to 12 fairs per year. While that work, priced at $36,000, had yet to sell, Patel said that six others sold, priced between $5,800 and $15,000.
The most instructive business strategy, however, may have come from a joint presentation by David Nolan and Marc Selwyn. The booth was lined wall to wall with works on paper by names both canonical and current, from Andy Warhol to Robert Mapplethorpe. Prices ranged from $5,000 to $100,000, with each work marked by a sticky label with the artist’s name and year. It made it possible, in theory, to walk out with a Philip Guston work for less than a month’s rent in Manhattan.
Most buyers these days want a name they know at a price they can stomach. It’s often that simple.
