THE LGH GUIDE TO:
THE ARMORY SHOW 2024

Sanford Biggers’s “Mirror” Debut

AT “The Platform”

Proudly presented by Marianne Boesky Gallery, artist Sanford Biggers presents his largest marble sculpture to date. Standing at 8 ft. in height, Mirror (2024) is part of the Chimera series. The series combines iconic elements and symbols from various diasporic origins—including traditional African masks, European busts, and classical western figures—to explore historical manifestations of the human form and the myths, archetypes, and power dynamics that have accompanied it throughout history. According to the Armory website, “Biggers' method, which he terms "conceptual patchworking," entails transposing, combining, and juxtaposing ideas and forms to challenge historiography, provenance, and official narratives. Through this process, Biggers elegantly balances form, gesture, beauty, and tension. The Chimera sculptures challenge embedded cultural and aesthetic assumptions, acknowledging the complex origins of the forms they reinterpret while envisioning a future ethnography that questions historical narratives.”

Biggers will be participating in a conversation alongside other artists featured in the fair’s Platform section on Sunday, September 8th at 4:00 pm. “In dialogue with participating Platform artists, this panel will discuss the artists' selection of materials and imagery to create artworks which draw from personal and cultural histories. The conversation will consider the visual elements of the exhibited works, probing how they create meaning.”

Textile works by Stephanie Santana & Lineage of Black Female Printmakers: Betye Saar, Dindga McCannon, Emma Amos and Mavis Pusey

not-for-profit Booth n8

Presented by the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop Program, this showcase will include textile works by Stephanie Santana including a new print edition entitled As Above/So Below which explores how we exist within intellectual systems that span the material and spiritual worlds. Santana’s textile works are grounded in history of Black women using narrative quiltmaking as a tool to record histories, express personal autonomy, and derive hope from bleak realities. Santana has chosen to present the archived work of four Black female artists—Betye Saar, Dindga McCannon, Emma Amos, and Mavis Pussey—alongside her own to honor the legacy of Black women in printmaking.

The EFA Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop will host a conversation between Santana and McCannon on Saturday, September 7th from 4-5:30 pm. The event will take place at the workshop on 323 West 39th Street. To RSVP, click here.

Akea Brionne and Paul Verdell

gallery Booth 425

Library Street Collective, a Detroit-based gallery will showcase new work by two Detroit artists: Akea Brionne and Paul Verdell. Brionne, best known for her digitally printed jacquard tapestries adorned with meticulous hand-beading and stuffed with scrap fabrics to create dimension, is showcasing her new works entitled Swamp Stories. The images center fashionably dressed Black female figures posed in Brionne’s imagined, afrofuturistic swamp and speak to the energies of the past that hide in the ever-changing environmental backgrounds of the present. Verdell’s new work feature a series of abstractions created by using heavy mark-making with giant oil pastels. Known for using his work to present reflections and examinations of movement within the natural world, these new pieces mark an evolution of the artist’s practice as he begins to shy away from visual mimickery, relying instead on pure feeling to direct his work.

Camila Falquez

PResenting Booth p8

Presented by young, upcoming, Black female gallerist Hannah Traore and her namesake Hannah Traore Gallery. Camila Falquez is a portrait photographer whose work focuses on empowering BIPOC bodies from marginalized communities, specifically showcasing the beauty, elegance, and power of bodies from a wide range of gender and sexual identities. Using model and non-model subjects Falquez references the traditions of fashion, portrait, and landscape photography, effectively queering the conventions of framing, subject, and technique to create a style of her own.

Ebony G. Patterson

Focus booth f8

The Monique Meloche Gallery will present a major installation by multimedia artist Ebony G. Patterson and curated by Robyn Farrell. Patterson’s artistic practice employs materials including fabric, beads, jewelry, and faux flowers to create colorful, organically shaped tapestries that synthesize beauty with chaos. Constantly examining the dichotomies between visibility and invisibility, Patterson chooses to center her work in explorations of the social structures including race, gender, class that she believes constitutes one’s identity, and thus, their potential for visibility. The gallery writes, “Following her acclaimed takeover at the New York Botanical Garden, this installation features her ongoing series, ‘Studies for a vocabulary of loss,’ enveloping the booth with 24 framed pieces that challenge the act of looking and memorialize those rendered invisible by inherited colonial structures.”

Curatorial Leadership: A Conversation with Isaac Julien

Armory live stage // FRIDAY 3:30 PM

This public conversation will feature artist Isaac Julien in conversation with Lauren Cornell, the Chief Curator of the Hessel Museum of Art and Director of the Graduate Program at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.

KÓ Gallery

Presenting booth p27

KÓ Gallery from Lagos, Nigeria will be presenting artists Na Chainkua Reindorf and Ato Ribeiro. Reindorf’s current practice exists within a world she has built rooted in African oral storytelling traditions and centers seven “distinct and unruly” female characters portrayed through large scale-multimedia paintings, tapestries, clothing, and installations. Each of her avatars carry significance and personality, creating a complex narrative that runs throughout her work. Ribeiro is a conceptual artist who works primarily with discarded pieces of wood, creating assemblages containing allusions to Black quilting traditions and Ghanian strip-woven kente cloth. The use of wood and fabric scraps references the second-class treatment that individuals of African heritage have historically received, ultimately combining the media into complex patterns.