THE ARMORY SHOW

The Armory Show is four days of art at the end of September at the Javits Center, on 11th Avenue in New York: an invitation-only preview on the Thursday and three public days after it, with around two hundred and thirty galleries from more than thirty countries on the ground floor of the hall. It calls itself “a cornerstone of New York’s cultural landscape since 1994”, and it opens the city’s autumn season of art.

It takes its name from the exhibition of 1913 that brought modern art to America. Theodore Roosevelt declared of it, “That’s not art!”

The Armory

The International Exhibition of Modern Art was got up by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors. In 1912 Walt Kuhn, Walter Pach and Arthur B. Davies gathered loans in Europe, and the association rented the 69th Regiment Armory, on Lexington Avenue between 25th and 26th Streets, for $5,000 and $500 more for the staff. It opened on 17 February 1913 and ran to 15 March: some 1,300 paintings, sculptures and decorative works by more than three hundred European and American artists of the avant-garde, the first large exhibition of modern art in America. It went on to the Art Institute of Chicago and the Copley Society in Boston.

The critic Julian Street said Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase resembled “an explosion in a shingle factory”.

The present fair began eighty-one years later, in 1994, as the Gramercy International Art Fair, held in the rooms of the Gramercy Park Hotel by five dealers: Colin De Land, Pat Hearn, Lisa Spellman, Matthew Marks and Paul Morris. In 1999 it moved into the 69th Regiment Armory and took the old exhibition’s name. It went to Piers 88 and 90 in 2001 and to Piers 92 and 94 in 2009, and since 2002 has given an Armory Artist Commission, to Pipilotti Rist, Theaster Gates and Xu Zhen among others.

In 2021 it moved to September and to the Javits Center, and in July 2023 Frieze bought it.

The Fair

The VIP Preview is on the Thursday, by invitation only, and closes at seven. The public comes from the Friday, from eleven until six, to seven on the Saturday and six again on the Sunday. On the Friday evening the hall is cleared at six and reset, and reopens from seven to nine for Armory After Hours, on a ticket of its own.

The booths are arranged in sections: Galleries, Solo and Focus; Presents, for galleries no more than ten years old; and Platform, for installations on a large scale. There are cafés on the floor, among them the Gramercy Restaurant and a Champagne Pommery Lounge.

In 2026 the fair moved to late September, to keep clear of Frieze Seoul, which has the same owner. Its director, Kyla McMillan, gave Focus to Caribbean artists and their diasporas, curated by María Elena Ortiz, and Platform to Jovanna Venegas.

The thirty-second edition ran from 24 to 27 September 2026. The headline sale was a painting by Joan Mitchell, sold by Michael Rosenfeld Gallery for more than $2 million, and the Pérez Art Museum Miami and the Bronx Museum bought for their collections through the fair’s acquisition awards. Some fifty thousand people came.

What to Know

It runs from a Thursday to a Sunday in the last week of September. The 2027 dates have not been announced.

The VIP Preview is by invitation only. For the public days there are single-day, multi-day, evening, student and senior tickets, and tickets for After Hours, for guided tours and for Premier Access. The Armory Insider pass, at $500, admits two on all three public days, with a guided tour and invitations to the events of Armory Week. Tickets are not refunded; only the Insider and multi-day tickets allow re-entry; no cash is taken; children under twelve come free.

A lounge suit. Nothing is published, and the Court goes on the preview day.

The nearest subway is 34th Street, Hudson Yards, five minutes’ walk from the hall; cars set down at 38th Street and 11th Avenue. The fair’s hotel partners are the Ace Hotel New York, Fasano Fifth Avenue, The Fifth Avenue Hotel, The Moore and the Gansevoort Meatpacking.

The mistake is to buy a Friday ticket and stay on for After Hours. Everyone leaves at six, and comes back at seven on a separate ticket. Leave the backpack, the umbrella and the luggage behind too: they are not allowed in, and are checked in the Javits atriums for a fee.

The Court

The Armory Show is not the Court’s own. Places at the VIP Preview are sought on a member’s behalf, and the Court arranges the whole of it: getting there, where to stay in the city, and the table afterward. Frieze Seoul, under the same ownership, opens the month in Seoul.

How one becomes a member is set out under Admission.