The Best Booths at the 2025 Armory Show

The Armory Show opened to VIPs Thursday morning at the Javits Center in New York, not far from Hudson Yards.

This year’s edition of the Armory Show is the first fully headed by Kyla McMillian, and it involves several notable changes, including a new floor plan and some new sections. Dealers seemed to respond to those shifts—and the large turnout—with cautious optimism, describing a fresh energy at the fair.

Whether all this will translate into sales still remains to be seen, though some dealers said they did find buyers for works valued at up to $1 million on opening day. But for now, the fair does offer some strong art, particularly in the Presents section for galleries in operation for fewer than 10 years.

Here’s a look at the best booths at the 2025 edition of the Armory Show, which runs through September 7 at the Javits Center.

• Victoria-Idongesit Udondian at kó

  
  Image Credit: Christopher Garcia Valle/ARTnews

  The process of transporting artworks to a convention center isn’t usually what people think about when they visit an art fair. But lines of trade become hard to ignore at ko’s solo presentation for Victoria-Idongesit Udondian, a Nigerian artist based in New York. Udondian recently completed a two-month residency in Jingdezhen, China, which is often called the “capital of porcelain” for its important role in the form since at least the 6th century. For this presentation, Udondian highlights the relationship between China and the African continent, particularly the ways in which China’s trade relationships are aimed at extracting and exploiting the resources of Africa. On a series of hand-painted porcelain plates and wallpaper on the back wall of the booth, the artist has reproduced images from various archives, with a focus on child miners in the Congo.

  In the center of the booth are a series of busts of Africans that were looted from the continent, which she had 3D-scanned and fabricated in ceramic; beneath these busts are shards of broken porcelain from a Jingdezhen market. These busts rest atop plinths that Udondian has covered with planks from shipping pallets, a reminder of how they traveled from one continent to another. Two of the busts have broken pieces of plexiglass behind, recalling the vitrines that these objects are often encased in once they have been put on display in Western museums. Within the context of a commercial enterprise, this booth strikes a chord.

• Jacqueline Surdell at Secrist | Beach

  
  Image Credit: Christopher Garcia Valle/ARTnews

  The notion of transportation is also core to Jacqueline Surdell’s imposing fiber-based works, which are made from shipping lines and industrial wefted rope that she twists, bounds, and knots—sometimes loosely, sometimes tightly—to create fascinating sculptures that appear to be abstract. But the booth’s centerpiece, Suddenly, she was hell-bent and ravenous (after Giotto), a 2024 work measuring 13.75 by 21 feet, was inspired by Giotto’s fresco for the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. Upon reading that title, it becomes apparent that this work is shaped like an oversized church altarpiece.

• Emma Safir at Hesse Flatow

  
  Image Credit: Christopher Garcia Valle/ARTnews

  It’s usually a big no-no to take a photo of an artwork with flash on, as repeated exposure to the harsh light could have long-term effects on the work. But for Emma Safir’s solo presentation, taking an image of her mixed-media pieces is encouraged. When you snap a photo, a section of the canvas seems to disappear as if it’s been digitally edited out. That’s due to how Safir builds up her works, which are constructed via a complex arrangement of some combination of MDF, upholstery foam, reflective thread, reflective fabric, neoprene, Flashe paint, and silk, onto which she digitally prints images from her archive. Safir is interested in visibility and all that it entails.  

• RF. Alvarez at Martha’s

  
  Image Credit: Christopher Garcia Valle/ARTnews

  The focal point of RF. Alvarez’s solo presentation in the Focus section is a 2025 painting titled We’re Still Here! In it we see a rowdy mix of people in a dive bar, where stolen glances hint at the queer desire that pulsates through Alvarez’s oeuvre. The work directly references the composition of Paul Cadmus’s The Fleet’s In! (1934), which was to be exhibited at the now defunct Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. as part of a 1934 group show. The US Navy censored the work, believing that some of the female figures in it represented sex workers, and a national scandal ensued. Alvarez focuses his attention on the flirtation between a suited man and a sailor from Cadmus’s painting, and in re-presenting them in 2025, Alvarez asserts that the circumstances that afflicted Cadmus, a gay man, have not gone anywhere.

  The booth is rounded out by small tableaux showing vignettes of other scenes you might find in the bar seen here. The standout is Piss Break (2025), in which a man is shown from behind as he urinates into a toilet bowl.  

• Robert Martin at Edji Gallery

  
  Image Credit: Christopher Garcia Valle/ARTnews

  Queer desire in a dive bar is also the subject of Robert Martin’s solo presentation on the other side of the Javits Center. At the booth of Belgium’s Edji Gallery, there are two urinal dividers in one corner, both covered in stickers and graffiti—a buck on one partition, a buff man holding his erect penis on another. But where you might expect to find a urinal is a painting by the artist with the word “GLORY” above a circular cutout showing a photo of a man receiving a blow job.

  This installation imagines a gay bar that Martin has called Two Bucks. Matchbooks with the bar’s logo rest inside a ball rack atop a table covered in green felt so it mimics a pool table. Above the table is an ornate bar light with “Two Bucks” emblazoned on it. A pair of white mesh Calvin Klein briefs are tied around one of the light’s chains. This pair of underwear belonged to the artist’s Uncle Martin, who died in 1994 from AIDS-related complications, just months before Robert Martin was named. (“Martin” is actually the artist’s middle name, which he has adopted as his surname for his artistic work.) Martin inherited boxes of Uncle Martin’s archives when he turned 18, leading him on a lifelong exploration of his uncle’s life and the queer bars he might have once attended, many of which no longer exist. This research led to the conception of Two Bucks, a composite of queer bars that once provided safe haven.

  Elsewhere in the booth, Martin has created paintings conjuring the exterior of Two Bucks, as well as interior vignettes, from the innocuous (men sipping cocktails) to the highly charged (men in the throes of sexual acts). On an exterior wall is a tender portrait of a smiling Uncle Martin, whose legacy the artist aims to preserve.

• Sylvie Hayes-Wallace at Silke Lindner

  
  Image Credit: Christopher Garcia Valle/ARTnews

  At the center of this booth is a rectangular armature made of wire fencing with the dimensions of a queen-size bed. To this fencing, Sylvie Hayes-Wallace has added pieces of found fabric, some of which belonged to her mother. Among these tied and twisted strips of fabrics, she has also affixed cut-outs with humorous or poignant phrases, like “I MAKE BREASTFEEDING LOOK HOT” or “Without you, I’m empty inside.” Titled Cage (Mother), the work is a memorial to the artist’s mother, who died when she was 11 and with whom she once shared the bed. The scraps on the righthand side of the bed, where her mother slept, correlate to her mother’s personality, while those on the lefthand side, where Hayes-Wallace slept, correspond to the artist’s persona. On the wall are a series of typed letters; to create them, Hayes-Wallace asked people close to her to write them as if they were coming from her mother, written just before her death. Reading the letters is almost too much to bear, but if you spend time with all this writing, it will move you to tears.

• Leonel Vásquez at Casa Hoffmann

  
  Image Credit: Christopher Garcia Valle/ARTnews

  Looking for a moment of calm during your visit to the Armory Show? Allow me to suggest this booth by Leonel Vásquez, whose work was brought to the fair by the Bogotá-based Casa Hoffmann. The sound artist has on view several works from his “Canto Rodado” series, which draws on his research into Colombian waterways that have been altered by human intervention. He is particularly interested in the sounds made when water runs across rocks, eroding them gradually over the course of decades, if not millennia. At this booth, Vásquez amplifies these sounds, via wooden needles that scratch the surfaces of the water and rocks and then play via copper horns, offering a soothing experience amid the chaos of the fair.

• André Magaña at Kendra Jayne Patrick

  
  Image Credit: Christopher Garcia Valle

  The New York–based artist André Magaña has on view several sculptures, which he said use “industrial materials, production, and form” to think about how “power is distributed within a capitalist enterprise.” The sculptures on the floor are particularly intriguing, since they appear abstract until one realizes they’re meant to resemble the docking stands for New York’s Citi Bikes. Magaña questions whether Citi Bikes really are just an alternative means of transportation, or if they aren’t something more—a signifier of gentrification, according to the artist. The work asks: Why is a financial institution the sponsor of a program like this, especially when it has the effect of disrupting neighborhoods? To his docking stations, Magaña has added his own interventions, disrupting a prospective rider’s ability to dock within them by adding a pyramid of beer cans or a bollard (cylindric plinths that can prevent access to roadways) with a FDNY custodian lock (often used to cap fire hydrants). There are levels to access in New York, Magaña seems to say.

• Ana Mercedes Hoyos at Instituto de Visión

  
  Image Credit: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews

  In a joint booth with Proxyco, with which this gallery shares a Lower East Side space, Instituto de Visión has on view a small selection of paintings by Ana Mercedes Hoyos, a Colombian artist who received a major retrospective at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá last year. For the Armory Show, Instituto de Visión has brought examples from Hoyos’s “Ventanas” (Windows) series, which she began making in 1969. These square paintings are striking for their use of bold colors and their compositions, in which a tightly cropped window becomes a commentary on the history of modernism and abstraction.  

• Coulter Fussell at Sheet Cake Gallery

  
  Image Credit: Christopher Garcia Valle/ARTnews

  The highlights of Memphis-based Sheek Cake Gallery’s booth are textiles by Coulter Fussell, an artist based in Water Valley, Mississippi, who has shown extensively in the South but rarely elsewhere in the US. After two decades as a waitress, Fussell turned her attention to art-making full-time around a decade ago. (She will have her first museum solo show at the Mississippi Museum of Art next year.) To make her large, wall-hung sculptures, she combines donated fabrics to create compositions that breathe new life into these time-worn textiles.