Photo Credits Aliza Nisenbaum, Angel, Study & Succulents LA Walk, 2020, Anton Kern Gallery (presented as part of Senses of Brown a 2021 Armory Access: Curated online exhibition)
For the first time in the fair’s history, The Armory Show will bring together three curators with similar fields of curatorial practice, that of Latin American and Latinx art, offering a distinct, unified vision for the fair’s initiatives.
"AS NEW YORK’S ART FAIR, IT IS IMPORTANT TO REFLECT ON THE COMMUNITIES THAT MAKE UP OUR CITY."
Each section offers a unique perspective through which visitors can engage with critical issues and culturally significant themes in the context of modern and contemporary works of art. Following the success of the fair’s inaugural year at the Javits Center, Focus and Platform will once again join Galleries, Solo, and Presents under one roof in a cohesive, integrated floorplan designed to optimize the fair experience for exhibitors and collectors alike.
Photo credits Carla Acevedo-Yates, Photo by Maria Ponce
FOCUS: Curated by Carla Acevedo-Yates, Marilyn and Larry Fields Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago
Focus will be dedicated to solo- and dual-artist presentations that examine the intersectionality of issues surrounding the environment, focusing on personal and political climates as they interact with race and gender.
Encompassing artists that foreground South-South ecologies, the section will introduce a transcultural conversation around art production grounded on abstract, representational, and conceptual approaches.
PLATFORM: Curated by Tobias Ostrander, Estrellita B. Brodsky Adjunct Curator, Latin American Art at Tate, London
Platform will be dedicated to large-scale installations and site-specific works under the theme of Monumental Change. The section will examine how recent revisionist practices, which are part of dramatic cultural shifts occurring throughout the world, are influencing artists’ engagement with sculptural form. In recent years the public has witnessed the dismantling, defacing, and replacement of public monuments as central to de-colonizing strategies that look to revise the commemoration of figures and events related to histories of slavery and racism, the attempted extermination of indigenous populations and appropriation of their lands, and the subjugation of women. These displaced monuments have traditionally been sculptural and figurative in style, depicting their subjects in portrait or allegorical formats. Platform will ask: What subjects might we collectively look to commemorate now? With which materials? And in what form?
Photo Credits Tobias Ostrander, Photo by Ivan Sánchez Hernández
Photo Credits Mari Carmen Ramírez, Photo by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders
CURATORIAL LEADERSHIP SUMMIT: Chaired by Mari Carmen Ramírez, Wortham Curator of Latin American Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
The fifth annual Curatorial Leadership Summit will welcome curators from around the world to a day-long, invitation-only symposium focusing on the differences and affinities between Latin American and/or Latinx art. Noting that these subjects are two complex fields of study and collecting that share many similarities but remain different, the program will acknowledge common misconceptions amongst museum professionals as well as the public-at-large about what each field represents both for the present moment and moving forward. The program will ask: Who is considered “Latin American” or “Latinx”? What are the historical bases for those distinctions? How do they relate to the broader field of contemporary art? How do they relate to current debates about race and gender?
A public keynote presentation follows the closed-door session. In addition to the on-site summit, Ramírez will be chairing the Virtual CLS event in the spring of 2022 leading up to the fair.