Joshua Nazario Lugo. Cerrando en casa, 2026
The Armory Show returns to New York's Javits Center from September 24–27, bringing together more than 240 galleries from over 30 countries for an edition in which artistic exchange across the Americas takes on particular significance. Anchored by the fair's main Galleries sector, the 2026 edition brings together a broad range of artists, practices, generations and perspectives, while its expanded sections create new spaces for emerging voices and ambitious artistic propositions.
But one of the clearest threads running through this year's fair is geographic, and deeply connected to the history of the Americas. The Caribbean and its diaspora take center stage in Focus, the fair's curated section organized by María Elena Ortiz, while that emphasis extends throughout the galleries, Platform, performances and broader program.
The result is an Armory Show in which Latin American and Caribbean art is not simply represented; it becomes part of a larger conversation about movement, identity, memory, exchange and belonging.
The result is an Armory Show in which Latin American and Caribbean art is not simply represented; it becomes part of a larger conversation about movement, identity, memory, exchange and belonging.
As Kyla McMillan, Director of The Armory Show, puts it, "New York is a meeting point for the Americas, and The Armory Show reflects that." The fair's conversations, she notes, move across sections and between different histories, identities and generations, extending through artists and galleries from the Caribbean, Latin America, Canada, the United States and beyond.
Raw Alchemy: The Caribbean and Its Diaspora
At the heart of this year's Americas-focused conversation is Focus, curated by María Elena Ortiz under the title Raw Alchemy: The Caribbean and Its Diaspora.
The section brings together solo and dual-artist presentations that explore the Caribbean as a historical nexus of diverse communities and as a foundation for contemporary artistic discourse. Ortiz's curatorial framework positions the Caribbean and its global networks as an epicenter of experimentation and transformation.
It is a fitting description for a section characterized by different materials, practices and approaches to making. Rather than presenting a single definition of Caribbean art, Ortiz brings together artists whose work reflects the region's complex histories and its continuing influence across the diaspora.
Among the galleries participating is Mindy Solomon Gallery, presenting Dominican American artist Yanira Collado. Proxico Gallery presents Lizania Cruz, whose new work considers an expanding tropics and the tangled ties between humans and more-than-human species.
Through participatory works, printmaking and archival research, Cruz investigates the relationships between ecological systems, human histories and the other forms of life with which we share them. Her presentation adds an ecological dimension to Focus's broader examination of interconnectedness, while also questioning the boundaries between human experience, environmental history and collective memory.
Lizania Cruz at Proxico Gallery
Enrique Faria Fine Art, the New York gallery with a long history of supporting artists from the Caribbean and Latin America, presents artists from Venezuela as well as Puerto Rican artist Rafael Ferré, born and raised in Puerto Rico. Tern Gallery, based in The Bahamas, brings together Kachelle Knowles and Gio Swaby, two artists approaching portraiture from different directions but with a shared interest in expanding how Black subjects are represented.
Swaby works with thread and fabric to explore Black womanhood, personal style and self-authorship. Knowles, working primarily in graphite, creates space for vulnerability and fluidity in representations of Bahamian men. Together, their practices complicate conventional ideas of Black portraiture, emphasizing tenderness, complexity and the agency of the sitter.
At Embajada, a gallery with locations in Puerto Rico and New York City, Nora Maité Nieves and Joshua Nazario bring two distinct practices into dialogue.
Nieves works across drawing, painting and, more recently, ceramics, drawing from the architecture and domestic environments of Puerto Rico and New York. Familiar forms, patterns and decorative details become the vocabulary for an increasingly abstract language.
Self-taught multidisciplinary artist Nazario similarly draws from the everyday, incorporating personal memory, popular culture and the realities of life in Puerto Rico and its diaspora. Together, the artists transform familiar materials and visual languages to examine how identity, place, memory and belonging are constructed.
Self-taught multidisciplinary artist Nazario similarly draws from the everyday, incorporating personal memory, popular culture and the realities of life in Puerto Rico and its diaspora. Together, the artists transform familiar materials and visual languages to examine how identity, place, memory and belonging are constructed.
At Spinello Projects, a solo booth is devoted to Cuban-American twin photography duo Elliot & Erick Jiménez, whose work adds another perspective on identity and diasporic experience.
Elliot & Erick Jiménez at Spinello Projects
Her series Disciplina, developed since 2017 and inspired by weavers in the Dominican Republic and Haiti, transforms materials including coconut palm rib into sculptural objects. The brightly colored pieces, suspended from stands that Ortega Gámez constructs herself, sit at the intersection of furniture, weaving, sculpture and botanical knowledge.
Natalia Ortega Gámez at Heliconia Projects
Also participating in Focus are Ricardo Cabret, presented by Hidrante, and Ernesto Rivera, presented by Mimo.
Taken together, the section demonstrates the breadth of what can constitute a contemporary Caribbean practice: portraiture, abstraction, photography, sculpture, textiles, botanical knowledge and domestic materials all become vehicles for considering histories of migration, race, place and cultural inheritance.
Ricardo Cabret, exhibition view
Passages and Thresholds
The Caribbean emphasis continues into Platform, which celebrates its tenth edition in 2026 under the title Passages and Thresholds. Curated by Jovanna Venegas, the section occupies the heart of the Javits Center and is devoted to large-scale sculpture and installation that challenge the conventional limitations of the art-fair booth.
The section examines the fluid and interconnected realities of the Caribbean and its diaspora, with particular attention to architecture, materiality, reconstruction, resilience, memory and self-determination.
REGULARNORMAL debuts at The Armory Show with Bony Ramirez, whose sculptural installation considers how the mind and body respond to difficult news. The work combines mixed-media assemblage and painting and is organized into four chapters. During each day of the fair, the configuration changes, creating a different chapter of the narrative.
Bony Ramírez, La Carta, 2026
At Jane Lombard Gallery, Margarita Cabrera is represented through her Space in Between series.
Gladwell Projects presents Venezuelan-American fiber artist Lisu Vega, whose monumental installation A Momentary Whole (2025) transforms the center of the fair into an environment visitors can enter and navigate. Measuring approximately 40 by 20 feet, the textile installation operates somewhere between maze, architecture and archive.
Vega draws on her maternal Afro-Indigenous Wayuu ancestry and her experience of migration to approach memory not as something fixed, but as a living material continually reshaped through migration, grief and survival.
Lisu Vega, by Gladwell Projects, exhibition view
At Hesse Flatow, Cuban-born, New York-based sculptor Paloma Izquierdo presents Jalousie I (2025), in cooperation with Murmurs Gallery. The work reconstructs a familiar architectural object—the louvered window—as a sculptural threshold.
Izquierdo's practice often takes mundane infrastructural elements that disappear into everyday life and brings them into focus. Here, the window becomes a means of considering ventilation, transparency, control and borders.
Paloma Izquierdo, Jalousie I, 2025
Company Gallery presents New York-based multidisciplinary artist Jesús Hilario-Reyes with Salt Tolerance (2026), an ambitious installation and the gallery's first appearance at The Armory Show. Hilario-Reyes, who also works under the moniker MORENXXX as a resident electronic DJ at Nowadays, combines land installation, sculpture and sonic concepts to address Black radical thought, queer nightlife and ecological resilience.
Jesús Hilario Reyes, Salt Tolerance, 2026
Marc Straus Gallery presents Lucía Hierro, adding another distinctly Caribbean and diasporic perspective to the section. Born and raised in New York in a Dominican family, Hierro's practice draws extensively on the visual culture of Dominican and Caribbean communities and on the everyday economies of migration. Her work frequently transforms ordinary objects, food packaging, commercial imagery and domestic materials into meticulously constructed sculptural and pictorial environments, while Uffner & Liu returns to the fair with a solo presentation by Curtis Talwst Santiago.
Lucía Hierro, exhibition view
Santiago, a Canadian-Trinidadian multidisciplinary artist, works across painting, sculpture and film and is particularly known for his Infinity Series: miniature dioramas constructed inside jewelry boxes. These intimate worlds bring personal memory into dialogue with migration, race and cultural identity, moving between scenes of everyday life and moments marked by broader social and political histories.
Curtis Talwst Santiago, by Uffner & Liu
Borders, migration and the material language of Latin America
Galerie Barbara Thumm, based in Berlin, presents Cuban artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons, extending the Caribbean conversation beyond the geographic boundaries of the region itself.
If Focus establishes the Caribbean and its diaspora as a central geographic and conceptual axis, Platform expands the conversation through the language of movement itself.
This is particularly evident in the work of Margarita Cabrera, whose practice has long considered migration, labor, borders and the relationship between people and their environments. Her presence at Jane Lombard Gallery places these questions within a section explicitly concerned with thresholds and passages.
Margarita Cabrera by Jane Lombard
The same themes emerge through Lisu Vega's textile architecture, Paloma Izquierdo's reconstructed window and Curtis Talwst Santiago's miniature worlds. In each case, the border is more than a geopolitical line. It can be architectural, psychological, domestic, historical or material.
That expanded understanding of borders is one of the most compelling aspects of the Latin American and Caribbean presence at this year's fair.
Beyond Focus and Platform
The Latin American presence does not stop with the fair's curated sections.
From Mexico, YAM Gallery, based in San Miguel de Allende, presents a solo booth dedicated to acclaimed Mexican artist Betsabeé Romero in the expanded Solo section. Romero's decades-long investigation of migration, mobility, labor and identity is grounded in one of the most recognizable symbols of modern global movement: the automobile.
From Mexico, YAM Gallery, based in San Miguel de Allende, presents a solo booth dedicated to acclaimed Mexican artist Betsabeé Romero in the expanded Solo section. Romero's decades-long investigation of migration, mobility, labor and identity is grounded in one of the most recognizable symbols of modern global movement: the automobile.
The car, tire and road become recurring materials and metaphors in her work. Romero turns the vocabulary of consumer culture against itself, contrasting the accelerated circulation of global capital with the precarious journeys undertaken by migrants. At The Armory Show, the presentation becomes a concentrated examination of displacement, borders and collective historical memory.
Bestsabée Romero, exhibition view
Elsewhere in the fair, Ryan Bock presents a strong dialogue between art history, systemic power and modern mythology through his presentation with Ki Smith. At its center is Ode to Duchamp; A Liar, a monumental chess-set assemblage that invokes Marcel Duchamp while questioning authority, control and the mythology surrounding artistic authorship.
Bock's paintings and sculptures are marked by a stark, predominantly monochromatic palette of blacks, whites and deep shadows, drawing on the visual languages of Expressionism and film noir to explore recurring historical anxieties.
Ryan Bock, exhibition view
The fair's international dimension also extends beyond Latin America. Yiwei Gallery, based in Los Angeles, presents a solo booth devoted to Chinese-born artist Liu Tianlian in the Presents section. Her ongoing Laundry Room series provides an introspective counterpoint to the larger conversations about domesticity, identity and everyday life occurring elsewhere throughout the fair.
And at Madrid-based Galería Max Estrella, Cuban-Spanish conceptual artist Glenda León occupies Booth 427 in the main Galleries sector. León's presentation places her alongside artists including Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Daniel Canogar and Tiffany Chung, creating a dialogue between conceptual, digital and kinetic practices.
León's work introduces a quieter register to the fair. Her poetic minimalism turns toward the invisible dimensions of science, spirituality and humanity's relationship with nature. In a fair characterized by scale, spectacle and technological experimentation, her work offers another way of thinking about connection: through what cannot necessarily be seen.
Lozano-Hemmer's technological environments, Canogar's investigations of data and light, Chung's engagement with maps, displacement and geopolitical histories, and León's attention to invisible natural and spiritual systems ultimately converge around a shared question: how can contemporary art give form to forces that shape our lives without always being visible?
Galería Max Estrella, exhibition view
A Caribbean center of gravity
What emerges from this year's Armory Show is not simply a larger number of Latin American and Caribbean artists. More significantly, the fair's organization allows their practices to speak across geographic and generational boundaries.The Caribbean is presented not as a peripheral region but as a place of exchange—a space shaped by migration, colonial histories, African and Indigenous traditions, diasporic networks, ecological knowledge and continual cultural transformation.
That proposition extends well beyond Focus. It appears in the materials used by Natalia Ortega Gámez; in the portraits of Gio Swaby and Kachelle Knowles; in the memories embedded in the work of Elliot & Erick Jiménez; in the Puerto Rican architecture and domestic vocabulary of Nora Maité Nieves; in Joshua Nazario's popular-cultural references; in the installations of Bony Ramirez, Lisu Vega, Paloma Izquierdo and Jesús Hilario-Reyes; and in the miniature histories of Curtis Talwst Santiago.
It is also present in Betsabeé Romero's investigation of migration, in María Magdalena Campos-Pons's engagement with diasporic and Afro-Caribbean histories, and in Glenda León's poetic investigation of the relationship between the visible and invisible.
The effect is a fair in which Latin American and Caribbean art is not confined to one geographical story. Instead, it becomes a way of thinking about the Americas themselves: as places in constant motion, connected by migration and exchange, separated by borders and brought together by histories that continue to reverberate.
For an international art fair in New York, a city whose own identity has been built through those movements, the emphasis feels particularly consequential. The Armory Show's 2026 edition makes the Caribbean a point of departure, but the conversation ultimately extends across the entire hemisphere.
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