
The Armory Show 2025
429 11th Ave
New York, NY

The Armory Show returned to the Javits Center in September, its first edition under the direction of Kyla McMillan. For three days, more than two hundred and thirty galleries from thirty-five countries fill the cavernous hall.

Over the past years, ceramics have moved steadily and decisively to the center. Among the returning highlights are Elif Uras’s voluptuous, patterned vessels and narrative tablets at Gallery Nev; Jane Yang-D’Haene’s textured, painterly moon jars at Bienvenu Steinberg & C; and Zizipho Poswa’s monumental tributes to Xhosa women at Southern Guild.

New presentations broaden the scope. At K Contemporary, Elizabeth Alexander’s delicate porcelain cups — cracked and gilded with veins of gold—are set against paper collages and mosaics that scrutinize the pressures of American domesticity. Swivel Gallery presents Alejandro Garcia Contreras, whose glazed skeletons and hybrid figures, drawn from Mexican ritual and pop culture, veer toward the occult. The Pit, recipient of the Sauer Art Prize, shows Joel Gaitan’s richly glazed figures, their clay surfaces deepened by lapis underglaze and shimmering luster, their ornate headdresses pitched as offerings to ancestry and identity. At SMAC Gallery, Marlene Steyn — working at the intersection of ceramics and painting — summons uncanny motifs, drawing on psychoanalytic theory, art history, and pop culture to transform the everyday into the surreal. And at Sorry We’re Closed, towering dango forms and gestural plates by Jun Kaneko — also recognized with the Best Solo Award at Ceramic Brussels 2025— bring scale and strokes to the fore.

From vessels to surreal figuration, clay is everywhere—foregrounded by twenty-six galleries whose presentations form the ceramic highlights of this Armory.