How The 2025 Armory Show 2025 Reframed Southern Narratives

Since its founding in 1994, The Armory Show has been a cornerstone of New York’s calendar, marking the unofficial start of the fall art season and offering a global platform for contemporary and modern art. Annually, the fair brings together galleries, collectors, and cultural leaders from across the world. This year, from September 5–7 with a VIP Preview on the 4th, the 2025 edition welcomed more than 230 galleries representing 30 countries. With its revised floor plan, ambitious new programming, and expanded curatorial scope, the fair reflected not just its international reach but also a sharpened focus on narratives often underrepresented in the commercial art world.

Walking into the Javits Center this year, it was impossible not to feel the energy throughout the air. The Platform section, curated by Souls Grown Deep Foundation, featured monumental works by Thornton Dial and quilts from the storied Gee’s Bend collective, placing the South’s creative legacies at the literal center of the fair. The Focus section, curated by Jessica Bell Brown, spotlighted the American South as a nexus for diverse histories and practices, weaving together themes of diaspora, migration, spirituality, and craft. New and established galleries such as Retro Africa, Brandywine Workshop and Archives, Mariane Ibrahim, and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles deepened this focus, presenting works from the incomparable Evita Tezeno, who is featured in the July/August 2025 issue of ESSENCE Magazine. At every turn, the fair underscored that Black art was not an accent or side note, but a driving force.

At the helm of this edition was Kyla McMillan, leading her first Armory Show since being named director. With a background at the Studio Museum in Harlem and galleries including Alexander Gray Associates and Gavin Brown’s enterprise, McMillan brought both curatorial expertise and a deep belief in the power of community. “I think I have a very romantic idea of what fairs can be,” she said. “They’re a convening that brings together artists and gallerists and curators and collectors, and every kind of facet of the art world comes together in celebration of the fair and of the fair week. And so as much as possible, we’ve just been reconsidering the ways in which fairs can function.” Additionally, this year’s Focus section was an essential part of that thought process. “A spotlight on the American South in an overtly commercial context, that felt like something new,” she explained. “And I’m really pleased with how well received it’s been and how we’ve been able to expand the thinking of what a Southern context is. That feels like a goal being achieved.”

Brown, the Executive Director of the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, titled the section A Permeable South, intentionally resisting narrow definitions of the region. “When I was invited to curate the Focus section by Kyla McMillan, who I’ve admired and respected for a long time, I was really excited about her shared interest in thinking as expansively as possible around the theme of the American South,” she said. “When we talk about the art world, we often focus our attention on international metropolises like New York, LA, or London. But when we think about what’s happening on the ground nationally, if you’re not in those major centers, you’re really thinking about local and regional artists and how that shows up in your artistic program or collections. That was a kind of sub-thread of our thinking around the Focus section this year.” The result was a powerful presentation that showcased craft traditions such as quilting and ceramics alongside explorations of spirituality and migration, underscoring the ways southern identity has always been porous and connected to broader global histories.

For Raina Lampkins-Fielder, Chief Curator of Souls Grown Deep Foundation, curating Platform was both a responsibility and an opportunity. The section was titled My Art Is the Evidence of My Freedom, borrowing a phrase from Thornton Dial, and featured works that stood as testaments to resilience, ingenuity, and vision. “For us, it’s both an honor and a responsibility,” she said. “It is right that these Black artists from the South who really have been pioneers in the field, though often unsung, have them be center stage quite literally at the center of the Armory Fair. Everything that we do is really about promoting the legacy and the artistry of these creative individuals from the South. And so this kind of allows for that to again come to the fore even larger.”

The presentation emphasized that these artists are not peripheral but foundational to American art history, a point Lampkins-Fielder was determined to make clear. “This isn’t expansion or inclusion—it’s about telling the true story and the full story of what artists produce,” she said. “So to have this, I feel like one of the things that I definitely want to encourage is that these voices and these artworks, while they might be new to some, they’re not new to all, but also really to drive home this point that these works, these artists, the South, Black artists from the South, that this isn’t peripheral, this is foundational and it is central for all of us to really understand art and creativity in ourselves.”

Earlier in the week, before the fair officially opened, The Armory Show and the Black Trustee Alliance hosted a celebration at the newly renovated W Hotel Union Square. Several notable figures from the art world came together to toast McMillan’s first year at the helm, with DJ April Hunt setting the tone for an evening of music, conversation, and connection. The event underscored the significance of McMillan’s leadership while also affirming the fair’s commitment to fostering community and elevating Black voices. That spirit of celebration carried directly into the Javits Center, where the galleries and curated sections demonstrated the breadth of Black artistic production across generations, all set to the backdrop of the Big Apple.

“We’ve done a lot of cultivation work throughout the year, meeting people in other cities where they are in other communities, to really understand how they’re contributing, how galleries are contributing, how collectors, and how institutions are contributing to their own local landscape,” McMillian said. “Through our Focus section, through our Platform section, through many of the young galleries, booth and solo presentations, we’ve done a great job of amplifying those local contexts and finding ways to build bridges and create through lines, and all of it is relevant in New York because all of these communities are here.”

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