Armory Art Week 2025 by frieze.com

The ARMORY Art Week

Issue No.1, September 2025—Weaving history and culture in the art of MARTHA TUTTLE, talking Storefront for Art and Architecture with FRIDA ESCOBEDO and JOSÉ ESPARZA CHONG CUY, sharing masa pancakes and diasporic knowledge with Ghetto Gastro’s JON GRAY, building a collection that speaks to you with EVERETTE TAYLOR, strutting your stuff when art and fashion weeks collide, and learning the art of discovery with LISA GOODMAN

Issue 1, September 2025

DIRECTOR’S LETTER

Welcome to the 2025 edition of The Armory Show!

The fair has always been reflective of its time and, this year, we continue that legacy. I’m inspired and motivated by our exhibitors who remain committed to showing today’s best artists through experimental, thoughtful presentations.

As the contemporary art world landscape evolves, the importance of The Armory Show is constant. First and foremost, the fair is a platform for discovery. Whether you discover new artists, curators, galleries to watch, or new frameworks for considering art, the fair remains foundational in spotlighting vital work by artists of our time.

Kyla McMillan

Director,

The Armory Show

EDITOR’S LETTER

I’m excited to share the inaugural issue of The Armory Art Week, and I thank all the individuals whose hard work made it possible. This magazine aims to capture the robust ecosystem surrounding The Armory Show, both in New York City and beyond, and to reflect how the fair has situated itself within a larger cultural landscape over its 31 years. Inside these pages, you can read tips for collecting new and exciting artworks, guides to culinary gems in Harlem and the Bronx, insights into the lives and work of many of today’s key art world players, and more.

Marko Gluhaich

Editor,

The Armory Art Week

A SHORT HISTORY OF JAVITS CENTER

The Indigenous and ecological histories inspiring the design of this year’s Armory Show

Before there was a Javits Center, even before there was a New York, there were the Lenape, and there was Manahatta which translates to “hilly island,” or “the island of many hills.” The Lenape had a very good connection, understanding, and relationship with the land: the plant life, where to hunt, where to lodge, etc.

The land beneath Javits Center was predominantly marsh and meadow. The area contained around 130 different native plant species.

The river beside it, Muhheakantuck, which is now referred to as the Hudson River, is an estuary, the meeting of two bodies of water that are going in different directions. The Lenape knew this, which is why their name for it means “the water that flows both ways.” It’s because of this convergence that the area had such a diverse biome. An estuary creates a social and environmental cohesion.

Mzwakhe Ndlovu of ZOMUZI Fair Designer, The Armory Show

WHO’S WHO

Five people to know at this year’s Armory Show 9

ART FAIR RUNWAY

An insider’s guide to dressing for fashion and Armory weeks 12

ARTIST PROFILE

How Martha Tuttle weaves layers of meaning into her organic practice 16

INTERVIEW

Frida Escobedo and José Esparza

Chong Cuy discuss the legacy of Armory Spotlight winner Storefront for Art and Architecture 22

Ghetto Gastro’s Jon Gray shows us his favorite spots around town

COLLECTING GUIDE

Navigating art fairs with Lisa Goodman

INTERVIEW

Everette Taylor leads us through his eclectic, personal collection 30

A QUICK WORD WITH…

Four artists and gallerists defining this year’s Armory Show

On the cover

Frida Escobedo and José Esparza Chong Cuy photographed by Heather Sten, 2025

PROGRAM T alks and conversations at The Armory Show 2025

Date

September 5 Friday

September 6 Saturday

Time Event

3:30pm Curatorial Leadership Summit Public Discussion

Making Paul Pfeiffer: Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom

Featuring artist Paul Pfeiffer in conversation with Eric Crosby, Henry J. Heinz II Director of Carnegie Museum of Art and Vice President of Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh.

2pm Puncturing the Grid

If you can sit on it, it doesn’t belong here

Featuring artists Sylvie HayesWallace and Tunji Adeniyi-Jones in conversation with Ebony L. Haynes, Senior Director at David Zwirner and 52 Walker.

4pm Beyond the Fair New Pathways for Engagement

Featuring Silke Lindner, Founder of Silke Lindner and recipient of the Gramercy International Prize; artist Iman Raad; and Guillermo Ruiz de Teresa, Deputy Director and Curator of Storefront for Art and Architecture, recipient of Armory Spotlight—moderated by Marko Gluhaich, Senior Editor of frieze

In partnership with The Armory Art Week

September 7 Sunday

12:30pm In Conversation A Permeable South

Featuring artists Joel Gaitan, Baldwin Lee, and Renée Stout in conversation with Jessica Bell Brown, Executive Director of the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University.

2pm In Conversation My Art Is the Evidence of My Freedom

From top:

Paul Pfeiffer, Caryatid, 2008. Courtesy: the artist

Sylvie Hayes-Wallace, Cage (Head) #5 (Memory Image), 2024. Courtesy: Silke Lindner

Iman Raad, Still Life with Green Apples, Cuts, a Knife, and Cups (detail), 2022. Courtesy: Dastan Gallery

Joel Gaitan, Se Vende Bananos, 2025.

Courtesy: the artist and The Pit; photo: Rachel Miller

Renée Stout, Ikenga (If You Come for the Queen, You Better Not Miss), 2022.

Courtesy: the artist and Marc Straus Gallery

Featuring artists Simon Benjamin and Mary Margaret Pettway in conversation with Raina LampkinsFielder, Chief Curator of Souls Grown Deep.

4pm Overcoming Obstacles Leadership and Perseverance in Unprecedented Times

Featuring Connie Butler, Director of MoMA PS1; Erin Christovale, Curator at the Hammer Museum; and Eva Respini, Co-CEO and Curator-at-Large of Vancouver Art Gallery—moderated by Andrew Russeth, Editor of Artnet News.

WHO’S WHO Five voices

reshaping the art landscape

Words

Jane Harris

JESSICA BELL BROWN

When she was curator of contemporary art at the Baltimore Museum of Art, Jessica Bell Brown co-helmed the lauded exhibition, “A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration” (2022–23), with works by Mark Bradford, Torkwase Dyson, Robert Pruitt, and Carrie Mae Weems. Last year, when Brown took over as Executive Director of the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) at Virginia Commonwealth University, she had high ambitions again, among them to produce more traveling exhibitions and foster more diverse partnerships. Above all, she wanted to grow the ICA’s audience and let artists lead: “We go where artists go, where artists enter…Our mission is to listen, to create and to make art public. Our programs, our exhibitions, our partnerships will create that opportunity,” she told Style Weekly last year. So far, she has delivered. Last summer, the ICA opened “Ayida,” a g roup show celebrating the Caribbean and its diaspora through the lens of Haitian-born poet and AIDS activist, Assotto Saint (1957–94). Guestcurated by artist Serubiri Moses, the exhibition embodies the ICA under Bell, with its mission to innovate and envision programs that celebrate the fertile edges of the canon. This means embracing the diasporic communities of Richmond and introducing audiences to artists like Cassi Namoda, a figurative painter from Mozambique who will have her first US institutional survey at the ICA in 2026.

ERIN DORN Gallerist

In the fall of 2023, Erin

opened the doors of her Houston gallery, Seven Sisters, with

a show by artist Brie Ruais, titled “Penumbra.”

The site-specific sculptural installation centered around the elements of an eclipse sun, moon, Earth and reflected Dorn’s longstanding interest in relationships between art and architectural history, “particularly their intersection in sacred spaces.”

Dor n sees Seven Sisters as its own sacred space, one dedicated to women artists who’ve long been marginalized by ageism and sexism, among other market-driven systems that narrowly define value and relevance. The galler y aims to highlight collaboration and storytelling, celebrating work that, she told me, is “deeply connected to identity, craft, and resilience often found in the practices of women who have never been invited into the spotlight yet who still create with unwavering dedication.”

For this year’s Armory Presents, this will manifest in a dual presentation of sculpture by Julia Kunin and Katarzyna Przezwańska, both of whom explore fusions of organic and architectural forms that engage their materials in metaphoric ways. Kunin’s iridescent ceramics blend human and architectural elements, reflecting on identity, gender, and spatial presence, while Przezwańska transforms objects like eggs, rocks, and plants into otherworldly commentaries on human nature in the Anthropocene.

LUCIA HIERRO Artist

The multimedia artist Lucia Hierro is a native New Yorker who was raised in Washington Heights, a neighborhood often fondly referred to as Little Dominican Republic. Both her mother and her grandmother were expert sewers of Dominican descent, and the artist’s iconic soft sculptures have their roots in this matrilineage.

It was during her MFA at Yale School of Art that Hierro began to make her outsized objects, coupling her interests in conceptual still life and pop art with a tribute

to the bodegas and music of her youth. The series “Objetos” (2020–23), for example, features digitally printed large-scale fabric sculptures that resemble foods popular among the Dominican diaspora like Goya’s Canilla rice and Café Bustelo coffee. More recent installations have incorporated field recordings of street life gathered from her local community.

Reflecting on relationships between consumer culture, architecture, and diaspora, Hierro’s work critically employs scale to highlight the symbolic value of everyday products that are easily overlooked. She has exhibited in a variety of venues from MFA Boston and El Museo del Barrio to the Guggenheim, and is currently included in the group exhibition, “Traffic of Influences,” in Puerto Rico’s artist-run space, El Kilometro.

Appropriating imagery that ranges from commerce to art history, Hierro underscores the ways cultural branding impacts our identity and shapes the aesthetics of 21st century capitalism.

ESTEBAN JEFFERSON Artist

The son of architects, Esteban Jefferson learned early on how to draw, practicing his skills on regular visits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a child. These influences have shaped a practice that centers the role played by artifacts public, urban, and historical in the formation of collective memory.

Turning photographic documents into paintings with schematic drawing, Jefferson’s work deliberately juxtaposes highly detailed imagery with raw expanses of sketchy under-drawing or empty space. Whether limning a street memorial to a lost friend (We Love You Devra Freelander, 2021), the ruins of an unofficial Brooklyn skatepark (Brooklyn Banks, 2025), or two Venetian busts of Black subjects placed absentmindedly behind a ticket desk at a Paris museum ( Petit Palais, 2019–21), this stylistic approach alludes to the shifting power

structures that determine what we remember and what we forget. Nowhere was this more evident than the body of work Jefferson created in 2023 portraying the visual aftermath of nationwide protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd in 2020. Homing in on a burnt-out police van (May 29, 2020, 2023) or a defaced equestrian statue of Theodore Roosevelt before and after it was removed (December 2, 2021, 2022), the artist captured focal points that UK curator Natasha Hoare, in Plaster magazine, calls “fugitive moments of power trickling up.”

AMITHA RAMAN Collector

Amitha Raman is not your typical art collector. With a background in product development and a marketing degree from Emerson College, Raman built her company AMITHA specializing in luxury cannabis accessories from the ground up. A member of the Floret Coalition, an anti-racist collective of small businesses in the cannabis and cannabisadjacent world, she regularly promotes equityoriented actions and donates to campaigns for social justice.

Drawn to work that is connected to personal narratives with broader political resonance, she has focused on collecting artists like Jenny Holzer, Rashid Johnson, Jeffrey Gibson, Marilyn Minter, and Pipilotti Rist. She is “particularly interested in materiality,” she told me when we spoke this summer: “how artists push the boundaries of their medium or use materials in unexpected ways” to tell their stories whether through abstraction, figuration, text, or video. Raman has maintained strong ties to the visual arts as a trustee of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (since 2020); a co-chair of the Museum of Modern Art’s Young Patrons Council; and a member of its Black Arts Council. Raman also co-hosts the podcast Art from the Outside with Will Paley, billed as a place “for anyone who wants an outside-in look at the art world.”

Dorn

JACQUELINE SURDELL

September 5-7, 2025

Booth 216

SCHLEP CHIC

Pulling off a look when art and fashion weeks collide

In our current era—the most photographed in human history, and never before in such ruthless high res, when even the opening of an envelope makes it onto BFA the stakes around what to wear are higher than ever. Working in media, you cannot afford to pretend it doesn’t matter—not in this economy. If there’s ever a moment to be seen in New York City, it’s early September, that stretch after Labor Day when The Armory Show collides with Fashion Week. In a flurry of breakfasts, dinners, exhibition openings, and runway shows, it’s time for back-to-school character arcs, the hard launch of the new you. It’s a feat looking good through 12 hours of schlepping across boroughs between sponsored activations where you need to show face before attending a passed-plate situation masquerading as a meal. There’s an article from 1936 doing the rounds online in which Elsa Schiaparelli advises on the “problem of what to put on in the morning and look smart all day long.” Dressing with versatility and endurance is a timeless concern. For more evidence, look no further than 1985’s Dayto-Night Barbie.

If you’re booked and busy—not to mention on a budget—Ms. Schiaparelli’s advice is that you should get yourself one good, tailored suit. Her own designs favor structuring with a strong shoulder. It’s a solution that 90 years later still works. But I think you can reframe this tip as a recommendation to commit to a personal uniform, whether or not it’s a suit. Picture something that can transition from a gallery breakfast to a branded warehouse after-party;

keep in mind, if you look good (and selfactualized), you’ll never look out of place. Imagining a uniform for one often draws from the way uniforms have been designed for the many. Uniforms carry graphic elements that signal and signify. Think about the animated characters whose wardrobes rely on an officer’s cap or a schoolgirl’s kilt. But uniforms also smooth edges, contain the body, and endure the demands of labor. They’re built for long days and hold their structure instead of wearing down. My godsend is the military skirts I get at army surplus stores. My partner, Isaiah Davis, has a collection of police-issue leather jackets. Kim Hastreiter, who’s mentored me in many ways, including on the virtues of dressing for the schlep, designed her own two-piece skirt and jacket modeled after both a Mao suit and a French chore coat. Literal uniform elements are a place to start, but by no means the one to end at. Photographer Cruz Valdez, one of New York’s undisputed best-dressed, always impresses me for pulling looks that could fit in just as effortlessly at an office as a blacktie gala as a punk show. Her hallmark is a monochromatic minimalism, 1990s doing the ’60s, short hemlines and high necklines. You probably can’t pull this off so don’t bother copying. What you should do is learn from the example. Pare down your wardrobe and focus on repeating variations on a theme of whatever works best for you. The only other wisdom I can impart for navigating the clusterfuck of art and fashion event-mania: go early, leave early. There’s nothing chicer than a French exit.

GRAVITY’S THREAD

Layering gesture, care, and the environment in Martha Tuttle’s handmade forms

Words

Mariana Fernández

Martha Tuttle’s works reflect a material sensitivity to nature’s mix of irregular geometry, chance formations, and the natural rhythm of organic structures. Hand-dyed and stitched fabrics conjure horizon lines, mountain ranges, and vast desert expanses heavy with the weight of bodily marks a nd sedimented memory. When we speak via Zoom this June, Tuttle is in residence in Somerset, UK, working on new pieces that originate as garments. These are not wearable works in their final form but rather canvases for mark-making. After the a rtist walks and runs in the silk clothing, the sweat and minerals from her body c reate nuanced impressions and points of erosion when the fabric is later dyed and transformed into stretched wall works. The results, which will be shown at Timothy Taylor in London this November, are delicate panels with ever-so-subtle splotches and stains on translucent fabric that record movement via physical contact between body and material. The weightless fields of silk are interrupted by polygons of thick wool that cling to the edge of the stretchers unevenly, drawing attention to the work’s likeness to skin a word Tuttle has used before, in a 2020 Brooklyn Rail interview with Susan Harris, to describe the stitched planes.

“I’m interested in how my epithelial cells infuse the material to create a collaboration with the nonhuman,” she tells me. “How my touch of the animal body, the mineral body, and the landscape creates a unique material.”

This is Tuttle’s first time working with the output of her body in such a direct way, though she maintains a very intimate relation to the materiality of all her work. She starts with raw wool (unwashed, preferably), which she spins, weaves, and then combines with sewn silk fragments. She dyes the fabrics using a mix of mostly handground pigment solutions made from rocks, minerals, and plant matter. This use of unstable, organic materials rather than their mere representation is part of her oftstated ecological intention to communicate our entwinement with the physical world: “our earth, our galaxy, and what we can see a tree, a river, a pipeline and what we can’t see the atoms and microbes that make up our world,” as she put it to Harris.

I think of something Anicka Yi told ArtReview recently: “If you look microbiologically, you know that there is no individual and that the self is comprised of a multitude. And so what that means is that the self is we are vessels for interdependence.” Tuttle’s work, like Yi’s, attempts to mirror the entanglements of this co-constitutive life, the symbiotic relationships of living organisms. If there is no autonomous self a nd Tuttle’s work suggests there isn’t then what she creates evinces an interdependence between body and environment, between fabric and the Earth. Her dyed and worn fabrics are material outcomes of interaction with t he microbial, the elemental, and the atmospheric through the artist’s own slow, embodied participation in the rhythms of the world (walking, sweating, weaving, a nd stitching).

Strictly speaking, Tuttle makes paintings liquid pigment applied to stretched or draped fabric. In dialogue with a longer lineage of abstraction, there are tinges of Agnes Martin’s tender geometries, echoes of Robert Rauschenberg’s material experiments, and an embedded awareness of the stakes and structures of minimalism and postminimalism. They also resonate with the work of her father, Richard, whose own materially inventive, antimonumental abstractions helped redefine the boundaries of drawing, sculpture, and painting in the 1970s. Her work similarly embraces fragility, tactility, and a distrust

“Tuttle’s camera lingers on wind-brushed grasses, mineral surfaces, shadows moving across stone, registering the landscape as quiet testament to environmental fragility.”

of permanence but she brings to it a distinct bodily intimacy and ecological grounding. Her paintings are objects: haptic, permeable, performative, and more closely aligned with sculpture and the body than with pictorial space.

While art-historical references are present, they are often secondary to the physicality of process that most concerns Tuttle most, the responsive relationship between maker and material. Much of that sensibility harkens back to the landscape of her childhood. Tuttle grew up an only child in a rural area outside of Santa Fe, often alone in open terrain. “At its core,” she says, “my brain always goes back to the desert.” The colors, textures, and exposures of New Mexico shape her compositional language: translucent whites, stony pinks and grays, and expanses of fabric that echo the spatial vastness of the high desert. Her paintings are not landscapes per se, but they are inflected by place air and dust embedded into the cloth itself. Often, as with the series of works she will present at this year’s Armory Show, they incorporate rocks, crystals, or sculptural elements derived from the natural world, such as bronze casts of the interstices of cow vertebrae.

“One cannot help but be affected by the immediacy of labor that response to and care for the desert climate requires. What it means to make an image feels heightened when performed with an awareness of the limits of natural resources,” Tuttle wrote recently in The Brooklyn Rail. In Milestone (2019), two horizontal panels and one vertical panel interact to divide the wall into a composition of intersecting planes and open intervals. Cream-colored patches of wool are stitched between pieces of pink- and gray-dyed silk, their surfaces marked with patterns that evoke shifting water formations, the visual intricacy of microscopic life, tidal shallows, and cellular activity observed up close.

Part of the immediacy evoked by Tuttle’s translucent compositions stems from the delicacy of their materials. “The works are one-shot pieces,” she notes, since silk can’t be reworked, unstretched, or resewn without damage. This frailty comes through in works like Portrait of a loved one getting older (2024), where sheer and opaque

segments of dyed silk are stitched into a fractured visual field, revealing the wooden and aluminum armature what Tuttle refers to as the work’s “skeleton” beneath. The subdued palette of weathered grays, lilacs, and taupes reads like a bruise, especially where the fabric sags slightly. At the center, a serpentine seam, tucked like a French fold, winds and shifts in response to the work’s internal tensions, bisecting the visual field and offering a soft but insistent arc that suggests aging as a movement both slow and directional. It moves the way bodies do under pressure, less directed than adaptive. A smaller stretcher dyed in a deeper gradient juts from the composition’s top right edge, like a memory node or emotional appendage.

T his way of working with fabric allows “the body to fully integrate into the painting surface,” she says. “The way my hand touches every part of the surface with spinning and weaving to me, that becomes a kind of line drawing.” The stitched lines that extend vertically from so many of her works have a formal function (as drawing, marker of gravity, or the limits of control) as well as a host of associations. Each of the two panels that make up seeing water through thin ice in early springtime (2024) is segmented by curving seams evocative of tectonic drift. The lines here feel less like boundaries and more like records of slow ruptures and slight misalignments, charting the meeting points between opacity and translucency, wool and silk, in a vaguely geometric language.

The new works from Somerset appear looser, more attuned to the unpredictable rhythms of a body moving through the landscape. In one of these still-untitled paintings, soft-edged geometries are less regular, their seams more pronounced. And the palette has dusted over: grays, mauves, and pale blues marked by the faint splotches, streaks, and discolorations left by Tuttle’s bodily chemistry. If earlier works suggested vast terrain, this series is closer in scale and more intimate in register fabrics that have weathered exposure. The works move away from pure abstraction and toward something more tactile and forensic, showing what happens when a surface becomes a site for bodily inscription.

“It intoxicates me,” Tuttle writes in that same essay, “to think about the impact different entities in our universe t angible and intangible make upon each other. For me, this is wondering about whether a landscape absorbs and is changed by the light of a particularly bright moon, as much as it is being fascinated that people who live together strongly influence the microbial communities on each other’s skin.”

Skin feels like the right word bodies, too, and containers, and coverings: things that wrap and protect, that filter and absorb and hold something else together. The fleshy texture of the silk in Tuttle’s works evokes a body, with skin as the wrapping, the dressing of a core. I think again about clothing, which is always a sculptural, three-dimensional form made out of two-dimensional fabric, with an inside and an outside. Clothing is something you climb into, something that covers and protects, or something like a vessel that shelters a nd shapes a body, even as it responds to its shifting contours. When Tuttle describes her paintings as “a surface the body can integrate into,” she refers to the entire ecology of contact between skin and fiber. The works are not fixed compositions, but sites of accumulation, records of exchange.

Tuttle’s understanding of relationality of bodies, materials, and environments in constant, co-constitutive interaction is inherited from her mother, the poet Meimei Berssenbrugge. In Berssenbrugge’s writing, long, spooling lines and loosened syntax give way to nonhuman and invisible forms of relation. “I radiate desert fragrance spontaneously,” she writes in “Star Beings” (2020), collapsing inner experience with atmospheric and ecological c onditions. In poems like “Chaco and Olivia” (2020) distinctions between entities dissolve entirely: “Any soul may distribute itself into a human, a toy poodle, bacteria, an etheric, or quartz crystal.” The same cosmology underpins Tuttle’s openness to arbitrary events like sweat, pressure, and environmental exposure.

Drought (2019–21), a video collaboration between Berssenbrugge and Tuttle, pairs imagery from the deserts of western Texas and Abiquiú, New Mexico, with Berssenbrugge’s spoken reflections on five decades of drought in the Southwest.

Rather than offering a conventional narrative or documentary, the work unfolds as a slow meditation on the shocking perceptibility of environmental change within a single lifetime. It compresses geologic time into lived memory, translating ecological shifts into the emotional registers of grief and helplessness that define the present crisis. Tuttle’s camera lingers on windbrushed grasses, mineral surfaces, shadows moving across stone, and other fragments of desert life that echo the surfaces of her paintings, which in this light register as quiet testaments to environmental fragility. Her process insists that human touch is never singular, that every mark or seam is a site of co-authorship between the artist, the elements, and the materials themselves. Such flattening of relations suggests a model for care grounded in empathetic embodiment and reciprocity. As in Berssenbrugge’s poem “Consciousness Self-Learns” (2020), where “plants and rocks lay under night sky; ground is a subject of sky; the relation’s a force,” Tuttle’s paintings vibrate with quiet signals between entities.

“Look inside when you are struggling,” Berssenbrugge writes. “Every cell in your body emits light.” If Tuttle’s work offers a vision for environmental ethics, it is one built on the subtle, accumulative practice of noticing a nd letting everything, from cilia to clouds, signal back.

Figures

1 Some birds are still flying south, some are singing in the branches, 2025. Courtesy: the artist and Peter Blum Gallery, New York; photo: Jason Wyche

2 Reliquary, 2025. Courtesy: the artist and Peter Blum Gallery, New York; photo: Jason Wyche

3–8 Stills from Drought, 2019–21. Courtesy: the artist

COLLECTIVE GROUND Frida Escobedo and José Esparza

Chong Cuy in conversation

Portraits at Bergen Brooklyn by HEATHER STEN

JECC We’ve known each other for a long time, and I’ve been lucky enough to be able to follow closely how your practice has grown over the last decade. I thought we could begin with your recent move to New York. Can you share a bit about your decision to open an office here?

FE New York City has always been a place of infinite curiosity and complexity for me. It’s a dense city, yes, but it’s one that holds space for ideas, debate, and expermentation in a unique way that’s always challenged me to think critically about the built environment. By the time the commission for The Met’s Tang Wing was announced in 2022, I had already been spending more time here, gradually building relationships and understanding the rhythms of the city through the development of projects like Ray Harlem and Bergen Brooklyn. It was that same year that I decided to open an office here—not just to be physically close to those projects, but to be part of the conversations that t his city enables across disciplines and communities.

Another big part of what drew me here is the vibrant and resilient Mexican presence in New York. Against all odds, this community continues to challenge narrow definitions of identity and belonging, shifting the narrative of what it means to be Mexican and an immigrant in the United States. In a time when the idea of the border is so politically charged, when migration is too often reduced to a “crisis,” building an office here with fellow Mexican architects—and collaborators from other countries—felt like a way to stand as a collective presence, to contribute meaningfully to a broader story of resilience, adaptation, and creativity.

JECC C an you share some reflections on how it’s been since you opened the office here, and how a project like the Tang Wing at The Met has shaped your thinking and practice?

FE It’s been transformative. Designing for a major encyclopedic museum like The Met made me think in expanded timeframes— historical, institutional, cultural. It deepened my understanding of how architecture not only shapes space but also participates in shaping narratives: what gets preserved, what’s foregrounded, what’s left out. But, just as importantly, it completely reframed how I think about collaboration. A project of this scale involves so many voices: from curators and conservators to city officials; parks advocates; community stakeholders; and, of course, the public itself. Working with these different teams and constituencies helped me to understand collaboration in a much more layered way—not just as a design process, but as a process of listening, negotiation, and shared responsibility.

It makes you acutely aware that architecture doesn’t happen in isolation. There’s so much emotional, intellectual and political investment in a project like this. And that awareness has stayed with me. It’s shaped how I perceive the role of the architect, not just as a form-giver, but as someone who can assist in making space for all those complexities.

JECC Now that you’ve put down roots here, what are your hopes—or plans—for this New York chapter of your work?

FE I want to focus on building meaningful relationships. I’m excited about working on projects that don’t fit neatly into categories like urban, cultural, or educational, but a re ideally cross-disciplinary. At the studio, all our projects are approached conceptually through ideas that aren’t necessarily even spatial or architectural. I spend a lot of time thinking about a nd seeing the many ways in which the built environment is shaped through social use and the passing of time. We’re constantly researching different approaches that are informed by many different fields,

whether it’s art history or archeology. This is actually one of the reasons why, earlier this year, I decided to join the board of Storefront for Art and Architecture.

JECC T hanks for bringing that up. Let’s talk about that: this is your first board position anywhere. Can you share a bit more about why Storefront made sense to you?

FE Storefront has always been an intellectual and spatial reference point for me. I first encountered it not just as a physical site, but as part of a much larger conversation—one that connected people across disciplines who were invested in the built environment as a cultural, political, and social project. Early in my career, I had the opportunity to exhibit at Storefront, and that experience left a lasting impression. It showed me that architecture could be porous, performative, and engaged with the world beyond the built environment.

Joining the board this year felt incredibly natural—especially with you, José, leading the institution. Seeing a longtime friend whom I admire shape the direction of the space over the past six years has been nourishing both personally and professionally. Your vision has expanded Storefront’s reach while staying true to its core values: experimentation, provocation, and public engagement.

In many ways, I’ve always sought out spaces that challenge me to think critically about architecture—what it does, who it’s for, and what kinds of futures it imagines. That’s what led me to pursue a master’s degree in Art, Design, and the Public Domain at the GSD [Harvard’s Graduate School of Design] after running my own studio in Mexico City for several years. I’ve always wanted to push disciplinary boundaries, and now that my studio is working on more formal building commissions, I feel an even greater need to stay in

“I’m interested in how built form can shape relationships between people, between histories, between institutions and publics.” Frida Escobedo

d ialogue with institutions like Storefront: spaces that keep the critical dimension of architecture alive. Even when the influence isn’t immediately visible in the work, it’s present in the way we think about and approach a project.

T hat’s where I feel such alignment with Storefront. It’s a space that doesn’t just champion architectural practice—it challenges it, interrogates it, expands it. And that’s why I’m here—not just to support it, but to grow alongside it. Storefront offers something unique and intangible, and it continues to be a source of inspiration I return to again and again.

JECC Storefront has always been committed to experimentation, but at its core, it’s also a space deeply invested in the idea of publicness—not just public discourse, but the very question of what constitutes the public: who it includes, how it forms, and how it’s challenged. What role do institutions like Storefront play in today’s cultural and architectural landscape?

FE Storefront plays a vital role precisely because it doesn’t operate according to the usual r ules of the market. It’s not about selling objects or producing spectacle, it’s about generating ideas and making space for public engagement in the broadest, most inclusive sense.

What makes Storefront so special— and also so resilient—is that it insists on publicness as a core value. It’s not just a gallery; it’s a testing ground for new ways of thinking and being together. Whether through an exhibition, a symposium, or a publishing project, everything it does is in service of provoking dialogue in public space. And that kind of work doesn’t a lways fit into neat categories or attract traditional funding.

That’s why it is so important to support organizations like Storefront. They remind us that architecture isn’t just about buildings, and art isn’t just about objects. Both a re about ideas, which need care and room to evolve. Storefront offers that space. Since we’re on this subject—why would you say support for Storefront matters now?

JECC A s you know, at Storefront, we operate outside conventional models—and intentionally so. We’re not a museum, we don’t have a collection, and we’re not driven by the art market. The work we present isn’t always straightforward or easy to package. It often sits between disciplines, between process and outcome, and asks difficult questions about the nature of public life, space, and belonging.

Lately, we’ve been thinking more intentionally about Storefront as a space for longterm research, one that can gather and hold emerging ideas by artists and architects and find ways to share those publicly. We’ve been organizing traveling summits, symposia, and publications not just as events, but as tools for extended inquiry. It’s been fascinating—and necessary—to ask what it means for an institution to operate in this way: as a kind of companion or coconspirator to ambitious thought that helps us engage critically with the world we inhabit, with all its social, political, and environmental urgencies.

A nd now, when funding for speculative or critical research is increasingly difficult to secure, the role an organization like Storefront plays becomes even more essential. We aim to offer time, trust, and dialogue— conditions that allow ideas to grow before they’re legible to larger systems of validation. There’s no real market for that k ind of work, but in a way, you could say that it’s an exercise in pushing the field forward. In this sense, supporting Storefront means committing to the kind of work that often happens behind the scenes: slow, critical, and vital to shaping how we think and engage with the world.

As we approach our 45th anniversary, we’ve been thinking seriously about the kind of institution we want to become in the near future. Our vision is to build a more stable and resilient Storefront—one that can support more people, continue to push boundaries, and remain that rare space that’s neither strictly art nor architecture, but both—and everything in-between. A place that persistently challenges ideas of what is public, and for whom.

As someone now deeply involved in shaping that future, how do you imagine Storefront evolving in the next few years—and how do you see your own practice growing alongside it?

FE I see Storefront becoming even more crucial —especially when public space, public discourse, and even the very concept of the public are under pressure. What makes Storefront so powerful is that it doesn’t settle. It provokes, invites dialogue, and makes room for the kinds of ideas that don’t always have a place elsewhere.

That’s also something I think about constantly in my own work. As an architect, I’m interested in how built form can shape relationships between people, between histories, between institutions and publics. My studio has always approached architecture as a cultural practice, one that’s in conversation with broader social, political, and environmental questions. And that’s exactly the kind of space Storefront fosters.

To support that type of work—especially over time—is rare. And to do it with such r igor and openness, at your scale, is something I deeply admire. I’m proud to be part of this vision, one that began nearly 50 years ago and continues to evolve with urgency and relevance. I see my own practice growing alongside Storefront’s: rooted in criticality, but always looking outward.

“Our vision is to build a more stable and resilient Storefront—one that can support more people, continue to push boundaries, and remain that rare space that’s neither strictly art nor architecture, but both—and everything in-between.”

José Esparza Chong Cuy

BOROUGH BITES

Camera in tow, Jon Gray of Ghetto Gastro serves up stories diasporic flavor in Harlem and the Bronx

Words

Terence Trouillot

of radical joy and

Somewhere between a driving tour and a homecoming, a morning with Jon Gray is more than just a hang it’s a full-sensory immersion into the geographies that shaped him. As co-founder of the Bronx-based culinary and cultural collective Ghetto Gastro, Gray moves through Harlem and the South Bronx like a proud steward: part neighborhood celebrity, part griot.

He cuts a striking figure: tall, brolic, with long dreadlocks and a raspy voice. His personality looms just as large g regarious, warm, quick to smile. When we meet, he pulls up in a double-parked car, wearing low-slung jeans and a Noah Davis T-shirt. Later, over pineapple espresso, griddled tortas, and a sublime masa pancake at La Cocina Consuelo a cozy Harlem Mexican eatery tucked into a groundfloor storefront he grins. “I came here once and ended up coming four times that week,” he laughs between bites. “Three times in 36 hours.” It’s the first of three stops on a loosely plotted foodie route uptown, each one a portal to a deeper story.

Gray has never lived outside the Bronx or Harlem. “Those Museum Mile institutions on Fifth Avenue, they were ten blocks from me growing up, but they felt like another planet,” he tells me. Years later, curating a show at the Cooper Hewitt and serving as an artist-inresidence at The Met during the pandemic felt like “a full-circle moment.” That’s Gray’s kind of arc: redrawing boundaries between historically marginalized neighborhoods and the worlds of art, food, and luxury with irreverent flair.

“For Gray, sweetness is resistance. Joy is infrastructure. Everything architecture, food systems, even style is up for reimagination.”

Ghetto Gastro itself began, as Gray puts it, as a “spite project.” He laughs. “I’ve got to talk to my therapist about that.” But beneath the bravado is a deliberate strategy. Alongside collaborators Pierre Serrao and Lester Walker, he’s used food as a medium for storytelling, resistance, and celebration. “The first human to nourish was a Black woman,” he says. “We honor that. We cook for liberation.”

His own path into food was anything but conventional. “My kitchen experience was selling drugs,” he says candidly. “But I always loved food. My mom was an Epicurean. We’d bond over meals when she wasn’t at work or night school.” That early exposure built a palate and a curiosity that fuels Ghetto Gastro’s ex perimental approach diasporic cooking with an arched deference to haute cuisine.

Next up is watermelon juice at Black Seed Brothers on 139th and Lenox, open 24/7. “It’s a different type of crack spot,” he jokes, grabbing his go-to late-night indulgence a clean, sweet fix of fruit sugar and potassium. “It’s gangster,” he says approvingly. The family running this business drives up to 16 hours almost daily to haul fresh watermelons straight from farms in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida.

From Harlem, we head uptown in Gray’s G-Wagon, past the iconic mural of Big L and other memory markers. As we cross into the Bronx, Gray points out IS 162, his old junior high, just across from the new 40th Precinct a sleek building renovation by Bjarke Ingels Group, billed as a police station-cum-“community engagement” center. The cognitive dissonance is sharp. “That used to be a juvie center,” he says. “Now it’s all design and PR spin. But what’s really changed?”

Gray’s relationship to the art world is ambivalent equal parts admiration and critique. A chance encounter at Art Basel Miami in 2008 catalyzed his entry into the space. “I was at this show, ‘30 Americans’ at the Rubell Family Collection, and everyone kept asking if I was an artist,” he says. “The only Black folks there who weren’t artists were me and Thelma Golden.” That moment of alienation sparked a need to understand the system. At the suggestion of his friend, the curator Larry Ossei-Mensah, he picked up The $12 Million Stuffed Shark (2008), a book about the art market, and began self-educating.

Since then, his social orbit and his artistic universe have expanded, from meeting Okwui Enwezor shortly before the curator’s death, to crossing paths with Sophie Calle at Art Basel Paris both of whom cited the legendary Bronx

art space Fashion Moda as formative to their careers. (Calle had her first New York show there in 1980.) The lineage is clear, and Gray’s ambitions align. “The revolution must be financed,” he says, quoting Martine Syms. “I’m a hustler, but I’m also an artist. We’ve got to build new value systems.”

Our final stop is La Morada, an Oaxacan restaurant in Mott Haven, where we’re greeted like family. Marco Mendez poet, artist, and activist hands out fresh bread destined for neighbors. During the pandemic, Gray partnered with the Mendez family to distribute food and build mutual aid networks when the state was slow to respond. “We can’t wait for anybody to save us,” he says. “Mutual aid is where it’s at. I vote, sure. But I’m skeptical of government. This is about infrastructure we build ourselves.”

It’s no coincidence that the restaurants championed by Gray are all family-run, deeply embedded in their neighborhoods, and rooted in diasporic knowledge. They’re also incubators for exchange. At each stop, Gray collects stories and shares plans l ike launching his own magazine, which he jokes about with his friend dream hampton when he calls her up mid-conversation: “She’d be the artistic director!” There’s a sense of improvisation to everything, but it’s far from directionless. “We don’t ask permission,” he says. “We just strike back at the empire.”

For Gray, sweetness is resistance. Joy is infrastructure. Everything architecture, food systems, even style is up for reimagination. “I used to sell jeans out my trunk,” he says. “Same ones Bergdorf was selling. But people needed Fifth Avenue validation. We’ve been taught to mistrust our own.” In place of that hierarchy, he offers another model: hyperlocal, collaborative, and defiantly Black. Whether designing d inner parties or reshaping public memory, Gray isn’t just telling stories he’s shifting the ground beneath our feet.

WATERMELON AND PRIME-TIME GINGER LIME Serves 4

Ingredients

For the pickled watermelon rind

8 ounces watermelon rind

(from a 1-pound watermelon)

1 cup rice vinegar

1 cup spring water

1⁄2 cup palm sugar

2 tablespoons coarsely chopped fresh ginger

4 teaspoons flaky sea salt

1 teaspoon red pepper flakes

1 teaspoon coriander seeds, toasted

1 teaspoon whole green cardamom, toasted

1 lime leaf

1 star anise pod

For the ginger-lime dressing

1 shallot, unpeeled

1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil, plus more as needed

Flaky sea salt

2 tablespoons minced fresh ginger

1⁄2 cup fresh lime juice (from 4 limes)

1⁄4 cup fresh orange juice

Pinch of ground white pepper

For the melon salad

3 cups cubed or balled watermelon

3 or 4 fresh mint leaves, torn

Candied pepitas, for serving

Micro basil, for garnish

Pinch of flaky sea salt, to taste

Pinch of Aleppo pepper, to taste

Lime zest, for garnish

Method

Pickle the watermelon rind

Using a sharp peeler, remove and discard the exterior green portion of the rind. You should have a rind that is mostly white, with

a little pink or red on one side. With the peeler, create 3-inch ribbons of rind.

In a two-quart saucepan, combine the vinegar, water, palm sugar, ginger, salt, pepper flakes, coriander, cardamom, lime leaf, and star anise. Bring to a boil over medium-high heat and hold at a boil for one minute, then carefully add the watermelon rind. Return to a boil, then remove the pan from the heat and allow to cool for 30 minutes.

Using a canning funnel and a ladle, transfer the watermelon rind to a two-quart jar. Pour in as much of the pickling liquid as possible. Cover the jar and leave at room temperature for 90 minutes. Refrigerate the pickled rinds overnight before using.

Make the dressing

Heat the oven to 375°F. Place the whole shallot on a sheet of aluminum foil and add a drizzle of olive oil and a pinch of salt. Wrap the shallot in the foil and roast it for about 20 minutes. Allow it to cool for about 30 minutes in the refrigerator, then peel. In a blender, combine the roasted shallot, ginger, lime juice, orange juice, salt and white pepper to taste. Blend for about one minute. With the motor running, slowly add the olive oil and blend until the dressing is fully emulsified.

Prepare the melon salad

Place the cubed watermelon, five pieces of pickled watermelon rind, and the mint in a large bowl. Drizzle the dressing over the melon mixture and toss to coat. Sprinkle with additional olive oil, the candied pepitas, micro basil, salt, Aleppo, and lime zest. Serve immediately.

FAIR PLAY

The Armory Show attendees standing in front of Robin Kid, Peekaboo War Pigs (Searching For America –V) , 2024.

Photo: Jonah Rosenberg

How Lisa Goodman discovers art and builds her collection

1 Plan Ahead: Before visiting an art fair, set a budget. This doesn’t mean you have to spend it, but it allows you to walk through the fair with a greater sense of purpose. Less important but still helpful: ask yourself where you’d like to hang a new work of art. Might the location limit what you could purchase? Is there direct sunlight? A physical obstacle like a switch or a light fixture? How large could the new piece be? These are not essential questions to ask before going to the fair but answering them can make the day more enjoyable.

2 Research: Art fairs can be overwhelming. Charting a course in advance makes it less daunting. Explore the fair’s website and social media to identify sections, galleries, and artists you’re interested in. Take a moment to understand how the fair organizes their floor plan: do they divide between younger and more established galleries? Is there a curated section? Make a point to visit galleries that you don’t know. Is there something you want to see right away? If not, you could always just start at the beginning and meander through the rows.

At last year’s Armory Show, my husband and I visited the Platform section which showcases large-scale sculptures, installations, and site-specific works where we met Amanda Coulson of TERN Gallery and have since bought several works from her. This year, I’m excited about Swivel Gallery’s presentation. We’ve collected younger artists from their roster like Amy Bravo.

3 Interact: Seize the opportunity to speak to the gallery staff in the booths. If you see something you like, ask them about the work. Inquire about their gallery and artist selection philosophy. They hold a wealth of knowledge that they’re eager to share with you. Often one of their artists may be present. Do not hesitate to ask them questions about their practice, background, technique a nd, perhaps, you could even do a studio visit with them. Leave your contact details in the gallery’s book to be added to their mailing list. Take business cards and follow up after the fair.

4 Pace Yourself: Take breaks by enjoying a glass of champagne, a cup of coffee, or any of the yummy food options. Dining areas are great spaces to process what you’ve seen and network with others. Your brain needs a break about as often as your feet. An art fair shouldn’t be a slog: it should be fun. Make sure you take the time to recharge mentally and physically so you can enjoy the experience fully.

5 Discover Public Programs: Art fairs offer talks, panel discussions, and presentations featuring prominent figures in the art world. Review the topics before you go. These can be great opportunities to gain deeper insights into current art market trends, absorb firsthand experiences shared by industry experts, and broaden your understanding of the diverse and dynamic art landscape. Take advantage of curated guided tours, which can be easy to book on the fair’s website.

6 Take Notes: You will encounter hundreds of works of art, so creating a personal record is indispensable. Bring a small notebook or use your smartphone’s notepad to remember what you have seen. Jot down artist names, booth locations, and any pieces that particularly resonate with you. This will help you to reflect and strategize later. My husband makes notes beforehand of the artists exhibiting at The Armory Show who most excite him and sometimes emails galleries in advance to see if those artists will be in attendance. This strategy helped us purchase our Carmen Neely artwork from Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, and, as an added bonus, we met the artist at the fair.

7 Trust Your Gut: If you can’t stop thinking about a piece, it’s a pretty good sign you should buy it. Look for work that moves you. Ask yourself if you feel connected to a particular piece. Consider the materials, the quality of execution, the narrative, and whether the work fits your aesthetic or longer-term collection goals. Key to any collection is the emotional and intellectual connection that you hold with each artwork.

8 Wear Comfortable Shoes: It doesn’t mean they can’t be stylish.

Inside Everette Taylor’s

Navigating art fairs, Instagram, and identity— the Kickstarter CEO on building a collection that tells a story

MG W hat were your earliest experiences with art?

ET Oh, man, to be honest, it was the street art and graffiti that I saw in my neighborhood. I grew up in the south side of Richmond, Virginia. It was a rougher part of the city, so you didn’t have a rt galleries, museums, or your traditional art world things.

A lot of art programs were cut from city funding. Luckily, in my elementary school, we still had art programs, so I loved doing art in school. But what really attracted me was the graffiti. It was the coolest thing: it was rebellious and just stood out.

It gave my environment and surroundings this different aesthetic and feel. T hat was when I first realized how art can transform spaces or buildings or structures. It wasn’t until much, much later, that I got introduced to more of the traditional art world. You didn’t really get to cultivate that. I didn’t even know that just across the bridge i n downtown Richmond was VCU [Virginia Commonwealth University], which has one of the best arts programs in the country. That felt like a million miles away from the environment I was growing up in.

MG How did you come to collecting art?

ET In the spring of 2017, I was the keynote speaker at a conference in Boston, Massachusetts. There was this independent artist named Jonathan Henriquez that was showing his work. He’s still never been signed to a gallery. He was raffling off a couple works at the event. I bought a couple of raffle tickets and somehow won. I was like, “That’s kind of crazy.”

T hat changed everything for me because it was my first art piece. I was in my 20s, and when I brought that work home, it completely transformed my space. You put up one art piece and

Interview

Marko Gluhaich

Photography Vincent Tullo

“Some people shy away from their early purchases, but I embrace them. Everything that I buy has a personal connection for me.”

Art World Playbook

then you’re like, “Wow. This wall is blank. That wall is blank. How have I been living like this?” I ended up buying another piece from him. I still didn’t know about the traditional art world. So, I would see artists on Instagram; I would travel the world and see artists on the street selling paintings. Anything that I liked, I would just pick up.

One day, either that year or the following, I’m on Instagram and see this artist, Lina Iris Viktor, and think her work is really beautiful. I reached out to her, and she tells me that I have to contact her gallery. I couldn’t understand why I had to reach out to this third party—she’s the artist. Her gallerist at the time was Mariane Ibrahim, who then had a small gallery in Seattle. I contacted her through a platform called Artsy. I didn’t even know what Artsy was at the time. [Taylor would become Artsy’s Chief Marketing Officer in 2019.]

MG Wow!

ET We got connected. She saw me as a young Black collector, she was a young gallerist, and we bonded. She really took me under her wing. She took me to my first Miami Art Week in 2018. There, she introduced me to collectors and different galleries. I got my first Derrick Adams. She showed me the ropes of the art world and helped guide me through these spaces.

MG Do you remember any of those initial lessons?

ET I learned about how quick things can move. I didn’t know you could put things on hold. I didn’t know any of that language. At her Untitled booth in Miami, Mariane had an Amoako Boafo painting for 9,000 fucking dollars.

It was beautiful. Meanwhile, Rhona Hoffman, who is a Chicago legend, was going to offer me a Derrick Adams. I probably could have just emailed the gallery and said I was going to buy the Adams, but, no, I thought that I needed to physically go back to Art Basel M iami. I told Rhona I’d buy the Adams—then, I came all the way back to Untitled, and the Boafo painting was gone.

You’ve got to know what galleries you need to hit first and not just wander around treating an art fair like a museum. When I go into Armory, when I go into Frieze, when I go into any art show, I have a strategy for what galleries I want to hit, what artworks I want to see. I want to see what’s in the back room. Don’t just commit to buying something. Put this and that on hold and then make your decisions.

It’s a lot of fun going around art fairs. I didn’t realize how much of a gathering and community art fairs are. During my first art fair I didn’t really know anybody, so I could easily move around, but as I started to get to know people in the art world, fairs became social outings. They can be fashion shows, community gatherings, catchups, family reunions, all in one. It can make art fairs difficult to navigate, because you’re there to buy art but to catch up with this, that, and the other person.

MG How did your relationship to art evolve over the course of your time at Artsy?

ET I saw more art than most people will ever see, just the sheer number of

galleries and movers in the space. I entered the traditional art world in 2018, went to Miami in December of that year, and by December 2019, I was the CMO of Artsy.

I just moved fast and started collecting and meeting a lot of people. Artsy was like art knowedge on steroids because I was suddenly dealing with all kinds of galleries across the world—large and small—and all their artists. I started to fundamentally understand the business of art at a level that I never had before, which helped me as a collector.

It helped shape my taste in art. I had a very particular taste that evolved because I was seeing so much. Working there also took me from being this young, emerging collector to a respected art world player, which in turn changed how galleries looked at me and gave me access.

MG You founded your company ArtX the same year you started there.

ET I founded ArtX several months before joining Artsy. That’s one of the things that caught their attention. ArtX came about because I thought the art world was kind of ridiculous. There are so many unsigned, unrepresented artists that need to sell work, connect with collectors, and access tools for support. So, I started building this platform. It was partially inspired by my own frustrations with galleries. Early on, I remember going into a gallery and wanting to buy a work by a prominent Black artist. The gallery blew me off, telling me they didn’t have anything available, but I gave them my email. I g uess they Googled me because they contacted me immediately and with so much courtesy. It was only then that they told me works were available. When I got connected to Artsy, I realized they were doing similar work to what ArtX was doing, but on a much larger scale, focused on the democratization of the art world.

At the time I joined, so many more new people were collecting art, so many more artists were finding success and getting exposure. When I started there, 90 percent of our most in-demand artists were white male artists. By the time I left, 75 percent were artists of color, 50 percent were Black, almost 50 percent were women. We just really changed that whole dynamic of our marketplace.

MG Could you tell me a little more about your art collection?

ET I probably have one of the weirdest and wonkiest collections. I have a piece by an artist nicknamed Chicken that I bought for $25 hanging just a few feet away from a Henry Taylor and a Sam Gilliam. Some people shy away from their early purchases, but I embrace them. That was a part of my whole journey of being connected to art from the African diaspora and wanting to support those artists. I focused on figurative works at first, because they were accessible and I saw representation. Then I found out about abstract artists like Gilliam, Kevin Beasley, Julie Mehretu and Stanley Whitney, and thought, “Wait, these are Black artists?” I felt so connected to this art, a nd I would have never known it was by Black artists.

My tastes evolved from emerging, nontraditional artists to those represented by galleries. At first, I just wanted to live with art. I just wanted to buy things that made me feel good. I then started to buy bigger names from galleries because I wanted to be a bigger player in this space.

MG W hat are some recent acquisitions that you’ve made?

ET One is by Felandus Thames, an artist I’ve been following for a long time. I bought a sculpture of his from a group show I saw at Hannah Traore’s gallery. It’s a series of hairbrushes that spells out, “You want my rhythm but not my blues.” [Rhythm and Blues, 2024] I love this piece. Another one that I got recently is by Denzil Hurley. He passed away in 2021 but is now getting recognized with shows at places like ICA Miami. The piece I bought is called Glyph Within, Without and About [2016–18], a beautiful oil on canvas with these black panels, with a wooden stick attached. I also got another Whitney, who is one of my favorite artists. I’ve always wanted one of his small canvas paintings. There’s something about them that I just adore. It’s Untitled [2023] but I call it “Green Thumb” because it looks like someone just smudged a green thumb across the canvas. It reminds me of my love of the plants that fill my home. Everything that I buy has a personal connection for me.

MG Can you give an example?

ET I have this piece by Vaughn Spann called Blood on the Leaves [2020], one of his “X Man” paintings. It’s representative of Black men when they get a rrested and spread their feet and put their hands up. When I was a teenager and had my first break back home from college, I hopped into a car with some friends who had some stuff that they probably shouldn’t have had.

I didn’t know. We ended up getting pulled over by the police and they had me stand just like the painting. I thought my life was over. The policeman was checking me, patting me. He asked what was in my pockets, and I pulled out my college ID. When he saw I went to Virginia Tech, he was surprised because people from my neighborhood didn’t go to schools like that. He then let us go, but I was scared. It could have changed my life. Whenever I see Vaughn’s painting, I think of that and how grateful I was. I can literally go around the whole room and give you examples like that. These days, I don’t care about trying to establish myself as an art world player. I don’t care about trying to collect a certain level of artist anymore.

MG How has your time as Kickstarter’s CEO informed the way you think about creativity and artmaking?

ET K ickstarter supports creators and artists wanting to bring something into the world and get it done right. They’re not motivated by sales or museum placements. It’s not about a lot of the stuff that I used to think about in the art world. It’s literally the pure nature of helping creative things come to life.

Artists on Kickstarter just want to do what they are put on this earth to do. It’s like, “I have this creative thing that’s in me that I really need to get out.” To me, that’s the purest form of artistry, a nd is one that I’ve grown to love in a lot of ways.

A rtsy was true art world. I was in the institution of what art was, even though we were disrupting the space a bit. Kickstarter is allowing me to take a step back and appreciate what all this is about, and that’s supporting artists so they can live out their dreams and do the things that they creatively want to do.

The Armory Art Week speaks with the artists and gallerists defining this year’s edition

IMAN RAAD Artist

TAAW

Your paintings draw on older Persian traditions, especially ornament, optical illusion, and applied color. How do you engage these histories?

While my paintings speak to our time—our individual or interconnected traumas, our hopes and fears, our days and our nights— the visual construction of them is rooted in centuries of Persian art and craft history. Ornamentation and color tension are fundamental to my practice. Misconceptions may arise: a viewer may presume that my paintings convey culturally specific symbolism or serve as ethnographic amusement. But I approach these traditions subjectively, refusing cultural literalism. Several paintings address a moment when Persian painters encountered European naturalism. I seek a bicultural vocabulary that teeters between familiarity and strangeness, while my stories oscillate between bitterness and sweetness.

TAAW

What upcoming exhibitions or projects are you excited about?

The Armory Show! New York has been my home for several years and the place where my painting practice has taken shape. Though my work has appeared worldwide, there’s something uniquely meaningful about sharing it here.

TARWUK

Collaboration of artists Ivana Vukšic

SILKE LINDNER Gallerist

TAAW In interviews, you’ve described your gallery program as lacking an explicit curatorial scope beyond platforming emerging, international artists. As you approach your third year, has any particular direction revealed itself?

SL While the gallery program is still primarily driven by personal taste, some recurring threads have emerged over time. I’m drawn to work that is both conceptual and accessible. Most of the artists I work with have ties to subcultural, countercultural, or pop-cultural movements, which inform their visual language and practice. These elements aren’t always central to the work, but they offer alternative points of entry.

TAAW You are the 2025 recipient of the Gramercy International Prize. What does this opportunity represent for you and the gallery?

SL I’m thrilled! Winning the prize presented a significant opportunity to show an ambitious installation by Sylvie Hayes-Wallace demonstrating the full scale of her practice.

A Quick Word With...

Artist

TAAW

What feels important about showing Tidalectic No. 1 (2025) within the context of The Armory Show and New York City?

New York, my home of 24 years, is known in the popular imagination for its built environment, which makes it easy to forget that we are surrounded by nature, and that we are not separate from it, but a part of it. It is also easy to forget that the hyperdevelopment of the built environment is connected to the colonial foundations of the city, and the ecological and human displacement that was involved in shaping this rich, complex, and stratified metropolis. The work is an offering to think about the city in relation to a deeper time, as well as our present moment in relation to the climate crisis. It is important for me to bridge this particular sculpture—part of my “CORE” series (2021–ongoing)—which is specific to New York City, to concerns around environmental degradation in the Caribbean, as I see these not as separate, but deeply interrelated issues.

TAAW Can you describe the shift from collaborating as Ivana and Bruno to working together under the name TARWUK?

TARWUK It’s been 12 years. What was once perceived as a third entity, we now view as a condition. When we began our collaboration, we were able to start anew and separate ourselves from previous structures or methods. From the start, we consciously attempted not to have any division of labor and to fully merge our individual subjectivities.

TAAW What are you showing as part of The Armory Show?

TARWUK The works are informed by the “Moon Sessions” (2021), private performances without audiences that took place during the COVID-19 lockdowns. Isolated in a borrowed studio, we performed actions during each full and new moon and documented them with a camera. The sessions later became nomadic, using puppets as surrogates and unstretched canvases as backdrops. Recently, we’ve become interested in relationships between textiles, objects, costumes, performers, and display elements—such as pedestals and mannequins—expanding the theatrical and performative dimensions of our work.

SIMON BENJAMIN

and Bruno Poga č nik Tremow