[Issue 03] Four Dealers, Two Hotel Rooms

The Javits Center was built to sell trade shows, not art. Once a year, it becomes one of the most important rooms in the art world anyway, a glass box on the Hudson River that has to figure out, for four days, how to hold paintings instead of pamphlets. Designed by I.M. Pei's firm in 1986 and expanded in 2021 with a green rooftop that now hosts its own wildlife habitat, the building spends 361 days a year hosting trade conventions. For four days, it becomes something else entirely.

The fair takes its name from the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art, which introduced European avant garde work, Picasso, Duchamp, Matisse, to an American audience for the first time. It caused a scandal. It changed everything. Carrying that name into a convention center more than a century later means carrying that history too, whether the building knows it or not.

This year's fair places a special curatorial emphasis on art from the Caribbean and its diasporas. The fair's director, Kyla McMillan, said the fair "has always reflected New York's openness to artists, galleries and ideas from across the Americas and the wider world." The Caribbean as subject matter in contemporary art means diaspora, movement, memory, the ocean as a space that both connects and separates. Pure Tissue Press territory.

Single-artist presentations get more space this year. The Solo section expands to around 25 galleries scattered through the fair, including work by Ayako Rokkaku, Firmino Saldanha and Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju. One artist, one booth, one complete world. The most intimate experience an art fair can offer.

The Armory Show has run every year since 1994, under different names, in different buildings, with different directors. The 2026 edition was its first at the Javits Center under a Caribbean curatorial theme.