Must-See Booths at The Armory Show 2026

Summary

The Armory Show returns to New York from September 24–27 with more than 230 galleries at the Javits Center.

From solo presentations to material-driven installations, Hypeart highlights the booths worth seeking out across the 2026 fair.

The Armory Show returns to New York from September 24–27, bringing more than 230 galleries to the Javits Center for its 2026 edition. A fixture of the city’s fall art calendar, this year’s fair spans established names and younger programs, with the Focus section turning its attention to Caribbean art and Platform presenting a series of large-scale, site-specific works that move beyond the traditional booth format.

With that much ground to cover, the strongest presentations are often the ones that reward a closer look. Across the fair, artists are working through personal archives, inherited histories, material experimentation and collective memory in ways that feel especially immediate. From textiles rooted in family and cultural legacy to paintings shaped by pilgrimage, migration and place, these are some of the booths worth seeking out at The Armory Show 2026.

Zoë Pulley at Superposition Gallery, Booth P10

Superposition Gallery will present new work by Brooklyn-based artist Zoë Pulley at The Armory Show, marking her first solo presentation in New York and debut with the gallery. Drawing from the archive of her grandmother, Philadelphia fashion designer Sandra Olivia Moon Hightower, Pulley transforms garments, press clippings and personal documentation into large-scale textile works that explore how Black creative histories are preserved, lost and reconstructed across generations.

Working through image transfer, collage and text, the new series reframes a deeply personal family archive within a wider conversation around memory, authorship and cultural legacy.

Kathia St. Hilaire at Perrotin, Booth 100

Drawing from her Haitian ancestry and upbringing in South Florida’s Afro-Caribbean communities, St. Hilaire uses printmaking, painting and collage to examine histories of migration, occupation and resistance. Her presentation at The Armory Show centers on Spiralism, the Haitian literary movement founded in the 1960s by Frankétienne in response to the violence of François Duvalier’s dictatorship.

Through layered symbols, carved imagery and collaged surfaces, St. Hilaire treats chaos as a force that can produce transformation rather than only destruction. Her process of printing, sanding away and rebuilding images mirrors that idea, turning histories of the Haitian Revolution, the Banana Wars and Vodun traditions into works that feel fragmented, cyclical and continually in motion.

Sasha Brodsky and Leroy Johnson at Margot Samel, Booth P8

Margot Samel will present work by Sasha Brodsky and the late Philadelphia artist Leroy Johnson at Booth P8. Johnson, who spent much of his life working across social services and education, built densely layered house sculptures from materials gathered during his daily commutes through the city. Using weathered signage, found objects, graffiti and architectural fragments, Johnson transformed the visual residue of Philadelphia into sculptural portraits of urban life. His works blur documentation and abstraction, preserving the marks of neighborhoods shaped by memory, labor and broader social forces.

Simon Benjamin at PATRON, Booth A1

PATRON will present a solo booth by Jamaican artist Simon Benjamin in The Armory Show’s Focus section, curated by Maria Elena Ortiz. At the center is a freestanding wooden structure modeled after a traditional Caribbean fish pot, holding paintings, sculpture and video that trace the ways extraction, labor and memory continue to shape the region.

Benjamin pulls from Jamaican maritime culture, archival photography and geological sampling, including core-like sculptures made from cornmeal, sand, resin and debris gathered from the island’s southern coast. Paintings based on images of Jamaican watermen and a two-channel video filmed from glass-bottom boats extend the presentation toward questions of tourism, migration, environmental change and the sea as both archive and contested space.

Raghav Jabbar at Rajiv Menon Contemporary, Booth P44

Rajiv Menon Contemporary will present new work by India-born artist Raghav Babbar across its Los Angeles space and a dedicated booth at The Armory Show, marking his debut U.S. solo exhibition. Known for intimate portraiture, Babbar expands his focus toward the scale of collective experience through paintings inspired by the 2025 Maha Kumbh pilgrimage in North India.

Drawing from his time among millions of pilgrims, Babbar shifts between individual figures and the force of the crowd, capturing moments of exhaustion, devotion and contemplation. His earthen palette and dramatic use of light nod to the tradition of European history painting, while placing ordinary pilgrims at the center. The resulting works explore faith, mortality and collective identity through one of the largest gatherings in recent history.

Marcos Kueh at Galerie Ron Mandos, Booth 139

Born in Malaysia and now based in the Netherlands, Marcos Kueh works across textile and weaving to explore how inherited traditions can shift within contemporary life. Drawing from his Bornean heritage, Kueh looks to the ways textiles have historically carried stories, beliefs and collective memory, while also engaging the industrial weaving processes he encountered in Europe.

A graduate of the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, Kueh has developed a practice that moves between traditional techniques and modern production, using cloth as a space to think through identity, migration and cultural continuity. His work has been shown at institutions including Museum Voorlinden and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, alongside presentations in Japan, Malaysia and the Netherlands.

Paintings and Sculptures at Maruani Mercier, Booth 114

Maruani Mercier returns to The Armory Show with a cross-generational presentation spanning kinetic sculpture, postwar abstraction, contemporary figuration and material experimentation. George Rickey’s kinetic sculpture explores balance and motion, while Georg Karl Pfahler’s hard-edge paintings examine color, shape and space. Recent works by Peter Halley extend his signature language of cells and conduits, using vivid synthetic color to probe systems of isolation and control.

Elsewhere, Jaclyn Conley, Zaam Arif and Von Wolfe approach figuration through domestic space, memory and psychological tension, while Samuel de Saboia, Æmen Ededéen and Ross Bleckner push toward abstraction through gesture and layered materiality. Works by Francesco Clemente and Andy Warhol round out the booth, connecting these contemporary concerns to broader histories of portraiture, celebrity and representation.