Armory Show 2026: Ten Standouts Not to Be Missed

The Armory Show returned to New York this year bigger than ever, bringing together more than 230 galleries from 30 countries under one roof. Beyond its sheer scale, this edition stood out for the ambition of the work on view: more thought-provoking and more willing to push the boundaries of medium than in years past. Across the aisles, artists reached for materials far outside the traditional canvas, from dried coconut palm fiber and bindis to deconstructed rope, hand-carved tires, silk, and handmade ceramic tiles, each chosen not for novelty but for the stories it could carry.

A few threads ran through the fair with striking consistency. Migration, memory, and ancestry surfaced again and again, whether in Caribbean coastlines threatened by climate change, reimagined colonial maps, family archives stitched into sculpture, or the everyday rituals of immigrant life in New York. Others turned a sharp, often humorous eye on wealth, consumption, and power, while some explored new ways of making, from AI-generated sketches translated into thick impasto to centuries-old techniques given a contemporary twist. Below are our standout presentations from this year's fair, including works recognized by the Pérez Art Museum Miami and the Pommery Prize.

Graphite Drawing Reaches New Heights: kó gallery – Diana Ejaita solo booth

Lagos-based kó gallery presents new work by Diana Ejaita, a Berlin-based Nigerian-Italian artist whose multicultural background shapes her interest in migration and cultural exchange. Drawing on West African literature, textile traditions, and recognizably Yoruba symbols, she reimagines the still life as something spiritual and mythological rather than static. Ejaita is also an acclaimed illustrator, with 11 New Yorker covers and an award-winning children's book, Making Art, to her name.

The standouts are her graphite and colored pencil drawings, which demonstrate an extraordinary command of the medium. Ejaita builds each form through meticulous, painstaking shading, achieving surfaces so smooth, even, and precise that they read almost like prints, making it hard to believe they were rendered entirely by hand. The subtle gradations in details such as a single hand reveal both her technical control and the patience behind each piece, which the gallery considers even more laborious than her paintings. Prices range from $2,500 for smaller individual works to $5,000 and $6,500 for single pieces and $22,500 for each set of nine.

Weaving as Sculptural Language: Lisu Vega for Gladwell Projects

Presented by Gladwell Projects, Lisu Vega treats weaving as both a sculptural language and a vessel for memory, migration, and ancestral knowledge, creating forms that shift between image, body, architecture, garment, and shelter. Her central installation, A Momentary Whole (2025), uses branching networks of sewn rope to evoke the roots of a mango tree planted by her late grandmother in Venezuela. Family photographs are transferred onto sections of translucent Poly Silk and collaged across the surface, so that fragmented images appear and fade as viewers move around the work and the light shifts.

Surrounding it, La Colmena, Totem, and La Cueva (all 2026) stand like totemic guardians, carrying the same materials of deconstructed rope, Poly Silk, and photographic transfer into sculptural forms that suggest bodies, vessels, and shelters. Drawing on her Venezuelan upbringing and maternal Afro-Indigenous Wayuu ancestry, Vega approaches memory not as a fixed archive but as something living, continually reshaped through sewing, knotting, and accumulation. The presentation was awarded the Pommery Prize.

Rituals of Power: Droste Gallade’s solo presentation of Willehad Eilers

Droste Gallery presents eight new paintings by Willehad Eilers, a German-born artist based in Amsterdam for about 25 years, made for the Armory Show after a summer in New York. Continuing the recurring characters and German script that define his visual language, the works take a humorous look at hedonism and consumption during eras of economic excess, from the 1930s to '80s and '90s Wall Street, anchored by a centerpiece titled Little Baby Jesus Born in the Office.

A notable development in this presentation is a white central figure, which the gallery describes as new to Eilers's work. These figures help each painting build its own mythology by fusing art-historical and classical references with scenes of capitalist office life: one work alludes to Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son another to the she-wolf of Romulus and Remus, and another to the nativity. One piece, whose German title reportedly references an old-money family name (transcribed as "Irwin"), depicts a young boy imagining his mother, father, and sister around him as he's pushed to perform a ritual for acceptance into the family, whether or not he's ready. Together, the works use satire and myth to examine wealth, belonging, and the rituals of power.

Romanticizing New York in Oils: OCHI Gallery presents Cooper Cox

Ochi Gallery presents new paintings by Cooper Cox, a New York-based artist raised in Sun Valley, Idaho, who uses AI-generated images, refined from his memories of places, as sketches for his paintings. This body of work focuses on what we notice only in passing, with reflection as its common thread: a lake holds an inverted, rippling landscape, skyscraper windows catch a sunset, and wet pavement glows under streetlights. Each scene arrives secondhand, doubled or reshaped by the surface that returns it.

The grass paintings break from this approach, replacing reflection with close, tender attention as pale blooms emerge from dense fields of blue, green, and ochre. Throughout, Cox's thick impasto in oil on linen gives ripples, blades, and glass the presence of relief. He remains a painter of place, but the place is now the surface that catches it. The booth has seen strong sales, marking a standout presentation at what the gallery says is its final fair of the year.

Luxurious Silk Depictions of Everyday Life: Liu Tianlian’s NYC Laundromats

Yiwei Gallery presents work by Liu Tianlian, a Beijing-born, Los Angeles-based artist who reimagines gongbi (工笔画), the traditional Chinese technique of meticulous brushwork, through a contemporary lens. Working in ink and traditional Chinese pigments on silk, which lends each piece a distinctive sheen, Liu explores cultural identity, introspection, and the tensions of modern life, bridging past and present through delicate, highly precise compositions.

Since immigrating to the United States in 2023, Liu has drawn inspiration from immigrant-centered spaces such as nail salons, street vendors, and, in this series, the New York laundromat, a near-universal ritual in a city where in-home machines are rare. She transforms this everyday chore into a dreamlike, communal scene where people from different cultures share the same machines, reflecting her own diasporic experience. Vibrant and playful, the works pair lighthearted charm with exacting technique, and the booth extends the theme with a laundry cart that completes the setting.

Whimsical Dreamlike Textiles by José Bedia at El Apartamento

El Apartamento brought a wonderful piece by José Bedia's El regreso de aquella niña, a work that captures the Cuban artist's signature style, rooted in Indigenous American and Afro-Cuban spiritual traditions such as Palo Monte. A stylized central figure trails a line of vibrant geometric flags across a deep blue ground intricately patterned with stars and fine white line work, the Spanish title handwritten along the canvas's lower edge.

Bedia's practice is fundamentally anthropological. He has spent time with communities across Africa and studies the iconographic systems of diverse religious and ethnic traditions, from Yoruba and Afro-Cuban beliefs onward, with some of his works made on textiles from Mali through ongoing exchange with communities there. Drawing these sources together, his paintings build a personal mythology that bridges cultures and belief systems.

Environmental Messages Prevail at the Fair with Natalia Ortega Gamez’ Switches

Presented at Heliconia Projects' booth, Natalia Ortega Gámez, a Dominican artist based in New York, creates meticulously hand-embroidered works from dried fiber harvested from the coconut palm, the material that surrounds the coconut itself. Every element is made by hand, down to the wooden hoop, and each piece takes months to complete. The featured work, Disciplina (Spanish for "discipline"), is an homage to a close childhood friend, a hairstylist who died in tragic circumstances; the act of brushing out each individual strand of fiber becomes a meditation on his memory as well as a practice of patience and rigor. The work was shortlisted for a museum acquisition prize at the fair.

Her carefully chosen palette also carries an environmental message. Ortega Gámez responds to the surge of sargassum seaweed washing onto Caribbean beaches, a climate-driven phenomenon that blankets the shoreline in murky browns and greens and has begun to affect tourism. By filling her works with vivid, rainbow-like color, she reclaims the vibrancy of the Caribbean, offering both a celebration of the region and a quiet critique of the forces threatening it.

Perez Art Museum Prize Winner: Theresa Weber’s Masterful Works

Studio/Chapple presents the first US showing of Theresa Weber, a Cologne-based artist who reimagines colonial cartography through the movement of bodies across geographies and histories. Drawing on Caribbean culture and Suzanne Césaire's eco-feminist writing, she combines handmade ceramic tiles, beads, textiles, and silkscreen prints, including one taken from a performance she staged in costume and another reproducing a 19th-century German map of colonial trade routes to the Caribbean.

Recurring circles evoke cycles of regeneration in nature and culture, and each large work conceals a real river seen from above: the Rhine, visible from her studio in Cologne, and the Hudson, linking where the works were made to where they would be shown. In this way, Weber takes existing maps and reworks them into her own. One of her textile works was acquired by the Pérez Art Museum Miami through its prize at the fair, marking her first entry into a US institutional collection.

Exploring Mobility, Migration and Borders: YAM Gallery

YAM Gallery presents work by Betsabée Romero, a Mexican artist who uses the car as a symbol of modernity to explore mobility, migration, and borders. Her first car, made for a biennial at the Tijuana–San Diego border, was covered in roses as an ironic plea to the Virgin of Guadalupe for a miracle that never came. Another, clad in ceramic tiles like a "house skin," references the hundreds of thousands of idle cars parked across Mexico City and belongs to a series of ten made in East Los Angeles and Mexico City, reflecting family ties that endure across borders.

Romero also carves tires by hand, turning them into cylindrical stamps whose slow process counters the speed of a modernity that has overrun Indigenous cultures, while their circular form evokes pre-Hispanic, non-linear views of history. Her carved shoe lasts, salvaged from a bankrupt Mexican factory, bear the border line as a wound that won't close, cut apart like migrant families forcibly separated.

The West Inspires the East: Bharti Kher’s The Whale at Nature Morte

At Nature Morte, Bharti Kher's The Whale (2013) showcases the artist's signature material: the bindi, the ceremonial dot worn by many South Asian women that carries both ritual and cultural significance and that Kher likes to describe as a "third eye" to be awakened. Unusually for her practice, the work is mounted on an aluminum panel rather than the boards or mirrors she typically uses, making it a rare piece for the gallery. The bindis, which Kher initially bought and later began producing herself, are individually laid down using their own adhesive backing in a painstaking, labor-intensive process.

Taking its title from Moby-Dick, the work engages the novel's preoccupation with whiteness, examining how white is conventionally associated with purity and innocence and black with their opposites. Kher suggests that fixating on purity can itself become hypocritical, so that the two colors begin to invert their traditional meanings, a tension she renders through thousands of small, devotional marks.