The biggest week on NYCs art calendar just got bigger. As galleries reopen after their August break, Armory Art Week opens for the first time during the same time slot. So if you throw a dart in any direction, chances are you’ll hit an opening or an artists talk or performance that appeals. Here are just a few things that got my attention. 

Your Handy Guide to Armory Arts Week, in DART

After the COVID lockdown, the Armory Show made major changes, including shifting the dates to the September art opening week, and moving from The Piers to the mammoth Javits Center, where it will be joined this fall by the first edition of Photofairs New York. Here’s the rundown; check each fair website for hours and info.

September 8-10: The Armory Show at the Javits Center

Founded in 1994, The Armory Show brings the world's leading international contemporary and modern art galleries to New York each year. This is one of the best art fairs going and has been for years, plus it's a good time of the year to visit NYC. The fair plays a leading role in the city's position as an important cultural capital through its gallery presentations, thoughtful programming, curatorial leadership, meaningful institutional partnerships, and engaging public art activations. Over 225 leading international galleries exhibiting in the 2023 edition representing more than 35 countries.

In addition to its main galleries section, the fair also mounts several focused sections, including its two curated sections: Focus (organized by Candice Hopkins) and Platform (Eva Respini). Bringing together a large swath of various artists, Focus has a strong emphasis on Indigenous artists, who have rarely ever been given such a large showcase at a commercial art fair. Among those who will take part are Jeffrey Gibson, Beau Dick, Nicholas Galanin, Sara Flores, Matthew Kirk, G. Peter Jemison, Eric-Paul Riege, Abel Rodríguez, Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, and others. Platform will feature works by Jean Shin, Teresita Fernández, Shahzia Sikander, Devan Shimoyama and others.

The Armory Show, Javits Center, 429 11^th Avenue, New York, NY Tickets For events and public programs click HERE To read the entire DART Guide go HERE

Friday, September 8, 6-8pm: Downtown Art Galleries Open

On the Armory Show’s public opening day, dozens of galleries across Chelsea, Tribeca, and the Lower East Side will stay open until 8pm, many of them debuting brand-new and exciting exhibitions. Expect much mingling, people-watching, and that unique New York City vibe. Click HERE  for a full list of participating galleries and a map so you can plan your itinerary for an art-filled Friday night, courtesy of Hyperallergic. 

Wednesday, September 6, 6-8 pm: Daniel Heidkamp | Make Hay at Half Gallery

Oscar Wilde’s contention that art is superior to nature, in The Decay of Lying, serves as a primer to the works of Daniel Heidkamp. From the coasts of Massachusetts to the foothills of Griffith Park, from the 3rd arrondissement to the Spanish Steps, Heidkamp has traveled the globe under the banner of plein air painting. 

This new group of pictures emerge from his ongoing investigation into the art historical landscape of the South of France: mapping the seashores, mountains, and villages employed as inspiration for so much important painting of the last centuries right up until today. By returning to these special places, Heidkamp is replanting the seeds that grew into impression, fauvism, and cubism, hopefully allowing a new flower to grow, a new harvest.

Half Gallery, 235 East 4^th Street, New York, NY Info

Wednesday, September 6, 6-8 pm: Framing the Village | Portraits at Moshava

The Village has been the center of fine arts since the late 19th century. John Sloan and Edward Hopper both vividly chronicled life in and around Greenwich Village. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney was a patron of both artists and many others, and the now-celebrated museum that bears her name began life on West Eighth Street, and which is, today, The New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting & Sculpture. Around the corner, the old Cedar Tavern on University was a Mecca for the Abstract Expressionists, including Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock. Alice Neel lived for a time on the bohemian streets depicted in many of her paintings, while in more recent decades Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat put their unique mark on the East Village – and the world.

Curated by long-time Village artist Marc Kehoe, this exhibition of paintings, drawings and photographs depicting persons past and present demonstrates that the visual arts continue to flourish in this most vibrant downtown neighborhood. Above: Klay-James Enos, Mimi Downtown at the Grand (detail)

Moshava Art, 45 West 8^th Street, New York, NY Info

Wednesday, September 6, 6-8 pm: Instructor Salon 2023 at Art Students League

Thursday, September 7: Exemplary Modern. Sophie Taeuber-Arp with Contemporary Artists at Hauser & Wirth

This special exhibition juxtaposing key works by pioneering early 20th-century Swiss modernist Sophie Taeuber-Arp (1889-1943) with works by three contemporary artists—Leonor Antunes, Ellen Lesperance and Nicolas Party. ‘Exemplary Modern. The show highlights the versatility and enduring legacy of the Swiss avant-garde master artist whose sculptures, works on paper and textile have influenced so many contemporary artists. The exhibition explores the practices of Leonor Antunes, Ellen Lesperance and Nicolas Party, which resonate with that of Taeuber-Arp, underscoring the diversity and enduring influence of her radical interdisciplinary oeuvre. 

Different series of compositions on paper typify Taeuber-Arp’s meticulous attention to the interplay of geometry and color, a formal concern that informed much of her practice. Sketches of scenographies showcase the artist’s mastery in designing theatrical space, while a beadwork purse on view encapsulates her brilliance in dissolving the line between applied and fine art. 

By situating such objects in conversation with new and recent works by Antunes, Lesperance and Party, the exhibition reveals ways in which Taeuber-Arp’s multifaceted career and exceptional versatility continue to generate ripples across art today. Above: Nicolas Party in his studio

Hauser & Wirth, 32 East 69^th Street, New York, NY Info

Friday, September 8, 6-8pm: Jonathan Lyndon Chase | His beard is soft…at Artists Space

This exhibition presents the artist's reimagined versions of environments such as a barbershop and a living room that engender Black Queer interiority, community, and the beauty of everyday intimacy. Combining aspects of the artist’s biography with elements of folklore and fantasy, Chase’s highly spirited, provocative paintings and soft sculptures incorporate materials such as bedsheets and clothing to create an atmosphere of both vulnerability and comfort.

Chase’s immersive installation harnesses the power of memory to map the emotional, mental, and physical territories of the everyday. In their witty, sensual paintings and sculptures, their longing poetry, and their work in other mediums, the artist finds new ways to make the Black Queer body visible.

Artists Space | 11 Cortlandt Alley, New York, NY Info

Saturday, September 9, 6-8 pm: Roy Lichtenstein Remembered at Gagosian

This an exhibition of sculptures and related studies by Roy Lichtenstein, curated by Irving Blum, is presented in recognition of the centenary of the artist’s birth. To create the miraculous drawings in space that constitute his sculptural work, Lichtenstein employed an array of visual strategies familiar from his painting and printmaking.

Representing glasses, lamps, mirrors, and mobiles, as well as portrait heads and stylized explosions, he produced witty and seductive sculptures in the Pop art mode of which he was a progenitor. Referencing his adaptation of popular print media in general and comic book illustration in particular, the works on view in New York evoke the stylistic and conceptual innovations of artists including Matisse and Picasso.

Gagosian, 980 Madison Avenue, New York, NY Info

Saturday, September 9, 1:30-6pm: Yvonne Lamarr-Rogers at Heath Gallery

Saturday, September 9, 2-6pm: Model Drawing at NYSS 

The New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture invites artists of all ages to draw from a live model outdoors in front of the School, along with many other events presented by neighboring businesses on 8th Street including live music. The NYSS Gallery will also be open to the public with Ruth Miller’s Enduring View on display.

This event is hosted by the Village Alliance Eighth Street Block Party Info

York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture, 8 West 8^th Street, New York, NY Info

Saturday, September 9, 1:30-3:30pm: Queens Memory Project at Socrates

In partnership with The Folk Art Museum, Queens-based artist Antonia Perez leads a workshop inviting participants to share their memories and ideas of home. Create your own woven block to add to the community weaving project. The final piece will be displayed at a Queens Library site. More about the Queens Memory Project HERE RSVP

Socrates Sculpture Park, 32-01 Vernon Boulevard, Long Island City, NY Info

Tuesday September 12, 6-8 pm: Emanoel Araujo at Jack Shainman 

The works in this presentation—created from the 1970s through the artist’s death in 2022—reverberate with cues from his childhood in the Afro-Brazilian spiritual capital of Bahia, expeditions across his family’s ancestral Benin and Nigeria, and studies of Yoruba iconography. Explorations into the sociopolitics of geometric abstraction and preservation of Afro-Brazilian material culture further position Araújo as a prism through which historical and spiritual wisdom is filtered into a more dimensional spectrum.

In the catalog essay, Paulo Herkenhoff speaks of the artists innovative vocabulary of Afro-Brazilian aesthetics, the soul of which can be found in “the body subjected to a dominating system. Color is printed in planes that are often triangular and which articulate without superimpositions to create rectangular space. His imagination proposes the declassification of the rules of the microphysics of power in the field of expression, and the elimination of identity based on genealogy. It is in the ‘coming together of faults’ that subjectivity manages to create the discourse of art.”

Jack Shainman Gallery, 513 West 20^th Street, New York, NY Info