Long billed as New York’s art fair, The Armory Show has set its sights far beyond its home turf this year by showcasing art from the South of the United States. The region is the fastest-growing in the country, as well as one of its most racially and culturally diverse. This year, The Armory Show (4-7 September) is dedicating much of its special Focus section to artists and galleries from the American South.
“I was thinking about how we can amplify the Americas, and about the South as the nexus for so many diasporas,” says Kyla McMillan, the fair’s director. The Focus section, she adds, “felt like a really interesting and vital way to enter that conversation.”
The 2025 iteration of The Armory Show marks the first edition completely under McMillan since she was named director in July 2024, a year after the fair was acquired by Frieze. The fair’s Focus section is curated this year by Jessica Bell Brown, the executive director of the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. During Brown’s tenure, the museum has staged exhibitions by artists including Caitlin Cherry, whose work explores Black femininity, and a new group show of early- to mid-career artists celebrating the Caribbean and its diaspora, all in the former capital city of the Confederacy. (Brown was previously a curator at the Baltimore Museum of Art.)
“When we think of the American South, we’re primed to consider it in a historical and social context,” McMillan says. “It’s really exciting to amplify artists and galleries in an overtly commercial context.”
Queer cowboys
There are 13 galleries taking part in the Focus section this year, though only two actually operate locations in the US South: Martha’s from Austin and Wolfgang Gallery from Atlanta. Martha’s will bring works by RF. Alvarez, a painter living in Austin who is known for his scenes of queer cowboys that incorporate iconography from the Old Masters. Wolfgang Gallery will present a stand dedicated to work by Aineki Traverso, an Atlanta-based painter whose large canvases combine earthy tones and a distorted approach to figuration.
“With her being an artist based in Atlanta and us being a Southern gallery, it was such an obvious choice,” Anna Scott K. Masten, Wolfgang Gallery’s co-owner, says of bringing Traverso’s work to The Armory Show. She contends that the South has too long been overlooked when it comes to the arts, and says to be selected for the gallery’s first New York fair has been a major milestone.
“There’s a lot of associations with the South, especially now politically, which I can understand,” Masten adds. “But we have just unreal amounts of talent, and people for whom being Southern is such a huge part of their identity and what drives them to make work. I hope everyone who’s in the Focus section can bring something to New York that changes the minds of at least a few people about their preconceived notions about the South.”
Peninsula perspectives: a community in DeFuniak Springs, Florida, photographed by Baldwin Lee in 1984
Courtesy the artist and Howard Greenberg Gallery
Howard Greenberg Gallery from New York will show photographs by Baldwin Lee, a Chinese American photographer best known for depicting Black communities throughout the American South in the 1980s. Baltimore’s Galerie Myrtis will present new works by Ronald Jackson and Felandus Thames, artists from Arkansas and Mississippi, respectively, both of whom are interested in the ways personal and collective memories become intertwined. The Hole, which has spaces in New York and Los Angeles, will present a triptych by the Atlanta-based artist Monica Kim Garza that compares the food of her Mexican and Korean heritages with Southern cuisine.
Other galleries in the Focus sector fit more loosely into the American South theme. The Pit, based in Los Angeles, will show work by Joel Gaitan, a Nicaraguan American artist born and raised in Miami.
“While [section curator] Jessica is certainly questioning what a Southern context is, she’s not interested in limiting or creating parameters around it,” McMillan says. “What will be successful about the section is that it will allow people to think about and expand their own definitions.”
Southern representation at The Armory Show extends beyond the Focus sector. Sheet Cake Gallery from Memphis and Seven Sisters from Houston are participating in the fair’s Solo sector for intimate, one-artist stands. And for the first time, the Platform section for large-scale sculptures and installations will be led by a non-profit, the Atlanta-based Souls Grown Deep foundation, which is committed to documenting, preserving and recognising work by Black artists from the South. The section, titled My Art Is the Evidence of My Freedom, is being curated by the foundation’s chief curator Raina Lampkins-Fielder. The presentation will include a piece by Thornton Dial, a self-taught artist from Alabama who made paintings and sculptural assemblages from found materials.
Ceramic sculptures by Miami-based artist Joel Gaitan
Work courtesy the artist and The Pit, photo by Rachel Miller
Other artists from Alabama in Platform include Thornton’s son Richard Dial, Lonnie Holley and Joe Minter. The tradition of quilting will also be celebrated, with work on display by two mother-daughter quiltmaker duos: Mary Lee Bendolph and Essie Bendolph Pettway, and Lucy T. Pettway and Mary Margaret Pettway, along with quilts by Loretta Pettway Bennett and Irene Williams. Marianne Boesky Gallery will present a large-scale installation of sculptures by Allison Janae Hamilton, an artist born in Kentucky and raised in Florida; the work’s title, Love is like the sea… (2023), is borrowed from a line in Zora Neale Hurston’s 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, the Harlem Renaissance classic about a Black woman coming of age in Florida during the early 20th century.
McMillan says she hopes visitors will leave this year’s Armory Show with an expanded understanding of the American South, and how the region has been shaped by myriad outside influences. “It’s an opportunity to really highlight and celebrate the breadth of voices that contribute to the South and really think through things that we associate [with the South] as Americans that are actually influenced by other cultures,” she says.
- The Armory Show, 4-7 September, Javits Center, New York
