The Armory Show has opened in its new home at New York’s Javits Center. The massive exhibition space of Javits Centre gives the visitor of the fair place to breathe. Visitors will have timed entry with appropriate time to be able to pause and appreciate the work in each booth, have a real discussion with gallerists and artists, and be able to recognize each other from across the halls despite everyone wearing a mask.
In an interview on opening day, Armory Show executive director Nicole Berry said that galleries were reporting strong sales and that collectors were pleased by the fair, which is now taking place in the fall for the first time. “This is the start of a new chapter for the Armory Show,” Berry said. “This is an opportunity to take this fair to the next level. The fair’s new layout, by Frederick Fisher and Partners, is allowing the art to shine.”
The fair features 157 galleries from all over the world. The collectors Estrellita Brodsky, Don and Mera Rubell and Pamela Joyner were in attendance, as were the artist Richard Prince and the actor Rhea Pearlman (whose daughter Gracie DeVito is showing at the fair).
Despite more than half of the 99 galleries based outside of the US were not able to come to New York due to travel restrictions, there is a surprising international presence. Visitors will see many galleries from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Europe and South America who are lucky enough to have staff members with US passports. The other, more complicated route to for exhibitors came with a pit stop, and a two-week quarantine, in Mexico.
There is a notable amount of figurative work offered across the fair, especially pieces that featured or were made by people of colour, a nod to the market’s recent love affair with the human figure and the art world’s broader attempts to become a more equitable place. Marianne Boesky Gallery and Library Street Collective (booth 216) sold the artist Jammie Holmes’s Furs and Concrete (2021) to a museum in China for $65,000.
The picture features a figure, wrapped in a lush fur coat standing in a modest, checkered linoleum floor kitchen and holding a church fan. It is a representation of the self-taught painter’s gift for capturing the beauty of day-to-day life for a Black family in the American South.
Visitors and collectors who were eager to purchase art did so with gusto during the opening, with some booths coming close to or completely selling out of work. Galeria Nara Roesler (booth 201), which has spaces in New York, São Paulo and Rio De Jenario, had a banner day, selling 16 works by 13 different artists including Surfaces: Harlequin, after Pablo Picasso (2021) by Vik Muniz for $60,000 and a work by the artist Fabio Miguez, Untitled from the Volpi series (2020), also for $60,000.
The Lagos and Los Angeles-based Rele Gallery (P3), from the fair’s Presents section, sold all the work on view by their artist Chidinma Nnoli, while New York’s Marc Straus Gallery (F5), which had a booth in the fair’s Focus section curated by Wassan Al-Khudhairi, sold their entire booth of works by the artist Marie Watt, each one with a price tag of more than $100,000. Watts’s textured, layered work shares a theme, at least in spirit, which seemed to trickle through many of the booths at the fair. There was a prevalence of three-dimensional wall pieces, tapestries, embroidery and sculptural works that seem to want to either jump off the canvass or be wrapped around the viewer.