Standouts at The Armory Show 2025
Now in its 30th edition, The Armory Show remains New York’s biggest art world gathering, promising to deliver blue-chip gold alongside rising talents. This year, though, the conversations inside felt different. More than a few gallerists commented that the fair seemed smaller compared to past years. For me, as a first-time visitor, the claim was impossible to verify, but I sensed what they meant. Something in the air was missing—perhaps the usual spark of excitement bouncing from countless directions. Many visitors seemed disappointed that nothing felt utterly shocking or intensely debatable—nothing to dominate conversation or spark a unanimous buzz.
Even so, several booths cut through the drone with work that felt fresh, considered, and innovative. Below are the booths that proved The Armory Show still has the capacity to surprise and excite.
Russell Craig, Carceral Views. Installation view of Clubhouse Gallery, The Armory Show 2025. Photo by Parker Ewen.
Clubhouse Gallery: Russell Craig
Russell Craig at Clubhouse Gallery’s booth is by far the most searing at the fair. Craig’s works unflinchingly tackle America’s carceral system, with portraits and structures referencing cell block doors and the abhorrent but still-timely case of the Central Park Five. His color palette—consisting of jumpsuit orange and institutional blues—pulls viewers in with brightness before revealing its darker implications of rusted time, stolen freedom, and bodies forgotten behind walls.
The works are incredibly arresting with Craig’s material language. With commissary items like ramen packets and chip bags, along with items made with prison labor like belts and bags, the artist calls to the resourcefulness of incarcerated people who craft frames from what’s on hand. Dry ramen noodles become a sculptural medium, narrow prison windows are stretched with burlap, and removable slot covers are chilling reminders of the systematic choice to dehumanize. The work’s scale and texture deliver a heavy impact, with human-scale confrontational portraits veiled by pastel smudges, held captive by numbered doors. These works are intense and telling, yet trying to piece together Craig’s process and methods is mystifyingly captivating. The combination leads to a booth that provokes thoughts hard to face but even harder to step away from.
Robert Martin, various works. Installation view of EDJI Gallery, The Armory Show 2025. Photo by Parker Ewen.
EDJI Gallery: Robert Martin
An Armory debut for both gallery and artist, EDJI presents a transporting booth with Robert Martin from Wisconsin. Here, Martin welcomes viewers to Two Bucks, an imagined ideal of a queer dive bar in the Midwest, the bar’s name referencing both the quietly disappearing two-dollar bill and a homoerotic pairing. Drawing from their uncle Marti, who experienced the regional queer scene in the 1970s and 80s, the artist explores the disappearance of those spaces his uncle frequented.
EDJI’s booth is a space to step into, rather than just showing paintings: a traditional glass bar light reading “Two Bucks” hangs over a mock pool table, and housed in the corner is a humorous yet beautifully engraved glory hole. Along the back wall, vignettes painted on wood panels show visuals of queer nightlife, connection, and joy. Here, humor and honesty coexist. With a poppers bottle enshrined in a rustic floral frame, rural Americana bar aesthetic fuses with queer iconography. As a queer New Yorker, I was reminded of the easy access to nightlife spaces in the city, and while these spaces are disappearing elsewhere, Martin’s work commemorates the community that once frequented them in the Midwest. I found myself questioning the separation of these aesthetics in my mind: with visuals that would normally make me exit a bar upon seeing, I felt in a space for me.
Various works by Elisabeth Perrault, Kritian Touborg, Rachel Mica Weiss. Installation view of CARVALHO, The Armory Show 2025. Photo by Parker Ewen.
CARVALHO: Elisabeth Perrault, Kristian Touborg, Rachel Mica Weiss
CARVALHO presents one of the fair’s most balanced groupings, with genre-defying, multidisciplinary, yet cohesive approaches in ceramics, textiles, and fiber practices. At the center of the booth, Elisabeth Perrault’s suspended ceramic flowers dominated. Large, heavy ceramic blossoms bend onto the ground, all while suspended by velvety ribbons. The stems of the flowers, spiky throughout, call more to spines than they do to thorns. With wavy, wilted petals that feel like the beginning of tendrils, the sculptures intriguingly read more creaturely than botanical—there is a ferocity despite the emphasized fragility.
Surrounding the installation were works by Kristian Touborg and Rachel Mica Weiss. Touborg’s lush abstractions swirled, similar to liquid resin, despite being made of silk and textiles. Weiss’s meticulously laddered threads form a satisfying logic in bright colors. The three artists converse about balance, battling order and weight with freedom and airiness. With Touborg’s solo exhibition with the gallery coming up, CARVALHO seems to be one to look to for thoughtful, discipline-blurring installations.
Works by Romeo Mivekannin, Zanele Muholi, and Madoda Fani. Installation view of Southern Guild, The Armory Show 2025. Photo by Parker Ewen.
Southern Guild: Manyaku Mashilo, Romeo Mivekannin, Zanele Muholi, Zizipho Poswa, Madoda Fani, Amine El Gotaibi, Mmangaliso Nzuza
Southern Guild, which has built its reputation championing contemporary African and diasporic art, brought together artists working in vastly different ways, but proved to be a carefully-tuned assemblage. On the left side of the booth, figures by Manyaku Mashilo, Romeo Mivekannin, and Zanele Muholi demand presence with commanding gazes, grounding the space with confrontation. Most notably, Mivekannin’s assertive painting on black velvet struck many passersby to come closer and decipher his challenge of the Western art canon, clearly calling to John Singer Sargent’s work. On the right side of the booth, airy works by Amine El Gotaibi and Mmangaliso Nzuza call to earth and wheat, giving the booth an atmospheric lift.
The tangible difference created an experience in the booth of a thoughtfully curated exhibition as opposed to a thrown-together market made to sell. Ceramicists Zizipho Poswa and Madoda Fani stood out particularly for their technical skill, but balanced meticulousness with fresh vision in form. There is deserved applause for so many artists to stand out on their own within a big grouping, but also to the gallery for meshing works so successfully.
Kukuli Velarde, Santiago Mata Indios (left), pieces from A Mi Vida (center), La Linda, Shipibo-Konibo (right). Installation view of RoFa Projects, The Armory Show 2025. Photo by Parker Ewen.
RoFa Projects: Kukuli Velarde
Peruvian-born artist Kukuli Velarde brought an anti-colonial rush to RoFa Projects’ booth. Her works highlight the violence of the Spanish conquest of Peru through ceramics and reimagined self-portraits that inhabit historical iconography. In one painting, Santiago Mata Indios, the patron saint of Spain, is mid-slaughter, but the forefront victim wears the artist’s face. Ceramic forms nearby echo Inkan vases, and the large piece, Illapa I, references Inkan mummies. The piece teases a hidden head within the vessel with braided hair peeking out the back, again strongly calling to the suppression and erasure of Indigenous culture and people. The booth’s golden walls nod to the pillaging for Peruvian gold, another compelling highlight of loss.
There is an oscillation between rage and mourning, but also resilience and survival. Respect paid to the illapas is intertwined with the fear instilled by colonial violence. By resurfacing pre-Columbian and precolonial visuals with modern narratives, Velarde scrapes away layers of forced aesthetics to reveal enduring origin. Velarde’s work, with emotive infantile figures and beheadings, demands the remembrance and reckoning of colonial wounds. The artist refuses passive viewings.
As expected, The Armory Show provides hours and hours of things to see, and even more hours of conversation to have. While this year’s fair may have felt scaled down to some, these booths proved that sharp curation can cut through. Even in a crowded, sometimes tired marketplace, visionary art can mesh, confront, and transport.
The Armory Show runs at the Javits Center from September 5 to 7, 2025.
