THE ARMORY SHOW

The fair plays a leading role in the city’s position as an important cultural capital through elevated presentations, thoughtful programming, curatorial leadership, meaningful institutional partnerships, and engaging public art activations.
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.

Carla Acevedo-Yates
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.

Tobias Ostrander
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?

Mari Carmen Ramirez
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?