A Couple of Texans at The Armory Show

An art fair asks patrons to make quick decisions: turn left or right, step into a booth or keep moving, avoid any sort of eye contact, look for ten seconds or stay for ten minutes. At the 32nd edition of The Armory Show, which brought 242 exhibitors from more than 30 countries to New York’s Javits Center Sept. 24–27, there was plenty competing for that attention.

Among the fair’s presentations, however, some work asked visitors to slow down and consider the structures holding it all together. That was especially true across the fair’s Caribbean-centered program ming. Focus, curated by María Elena Ortiz, curator at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, gathered artists from across the Caribbean and its diasporas, while Platform, curated by SculptureCenter curator Jovanna Venegas, moved related questions into large-scale sculpture and installation.

Throughout the fair, PATRON’s Chase Domke returned to a deceptively simple question in conversations with participating galleries: Why this artist, and why here? The “Million Dollar Question.” The answers repeatedly led to material, remembrance, and an artwork’s ability to carry evidence of what came before it, in dialogue with, as the often-used artspeak saying goes. 

For its first participation in The Armory Show, 193 Gallery presented Cuban-born, New York-based Rafael Domenech in Platform alongside works by Gaëlle Choisne. Domenech’s Folded Nodes occupied an unusual territory between sculpture, architecture, publication, and exhibition design.

“For him, exhibitions and artworks should be kind of treated in the same way as publications,” 193 Gallery Associate Director Maria Herrera told Domke. “What he’s doing here for The Armory Show is creating an open book.” That book was large enough to walk inside. Text appeared across walls, surfaces, and individual works. Visitors entered and circulated through the structure rather than standing outside it. “For him, we should interact with the piece, with the pavilion, as we interact with a book,” Herrera said. “So we read, we enter, we circulate, and we activate the work, in a way.”

The installation was assembled through an interlocking system that Herrera compared to a puzzle, continuing solutions Domenech developed out of necessity. After moving to the United States, she explained, the artist frequently changed apartments and began building furniture that could be taken apart and reassembled. That logic eventually migrated into his artwork.

“He was moving all the time, and he created furniture that could be easily deconstructed and then brought together again,” Herrera said. “He’s doing the same with his work, with the entire pavilion, the entire installation.”

Domenech incorporated CNC baseboards collected from previous projects. Once used beneath material being cut for other works, the boards retained stray letters, incisions, markings, and evidence of earlier fabrication. Objects intended to be discarded became an accidental archive.

“They have the trace and the history of previous artworks or exhibitions,” Herrera said. “He did not make them for the show. He just recycled what he had, and then today they become like a history of other exhibitions and other artworks.”

Domenech pushes that self-sufficiency further. Herrera noted that the artist built the laser-cutting machine central to much of his practice and developed the software used with it. She connected that instinct to his childhood in Cuba, where repairing and repurposing were part of domestic life. A way of preserving memory, or in this case, history. 

Memory took a different physical form at Mindy Solomon Gallery, where Brooklyn-born, Miami-based artist Yanira Collado received a solo presentation in the fair’s Focus section.

Collado, whose family is Dominican, works with materials that already carry histories: textiles, cardboard, wood, concrete, carbon paper, found texts, construction materials, paint, and other accumulated fragments. Mindy Solomon Gallery describes her practice as one concerned with how histories are “recorded, stored, and retrieved,” particularly histories interrupted by colonialism, displacement, and time.

Standing among Collado’s layered works, a gallery assistant suggested thinking of weathered building facades as one way into them. Posters stacked on top of each other, painted over, layers of glue, paint, and paper, exposed again and reshuffled. Years accumulate without entirely erasing what was there before.

“There’s memory embedded into it, and it’s very intentional,” she told Domke. The comparison helps explain why Collado’s works can initially feel architectural. Surfaces are built rather than simply painted. Materials overlap, obscure, expose, and interrupt one another. The works are also modular, able to migrate from wall to floor and change their relationship to the surrounding space.

For Solomon, who devoted the booth to a single artist, that accumulation of material parallels the accumulation of history. “You see this accumulation of surface, which is about time,” Solomon told Domke, “and the degrading of history and the evolution of history.”

Ortiz’s section focused explicitly on artists of Caribbean descent and practices shaped by the region and its diasporas. Collado’s Dominican heritage gives her an entry point into those histories without reducing the work to biography. Her abstractions hold competing ideas of preservation and erosion, things remembered and things covered over. “When you do a solo show for an artist, it’s really like, okay, I want to get behind you 100 percent,” she said. “I want to give you your opportunity to shine.”

Collado is in her 50s and has been working for decades, with work in collections including Pérez Art Museum Miami, El Espacio 23, and El Museo del Barrio. For Solomon, the Armory presentation was a chance to put sustained practice ahead of novelty.

“She’s been hard at making really good work for a long time,” Solomon said, “and I felt like this was her moment to be recognized in a broader context.” For Solomon, the answer was simple enough: sometimes the booth should make one argument clearly.

At KALINER, MaryKate Maher’s sculptures and collages complicated material in another direction. Maher is Brooklyn-based, which factored into gallery owner and director Maryana Kaliner’s decision to present her work at a fair so closely identified with New York.

“We wanted to bring a local artist to the fair,” Kaliner told Domke. “I think it was important to bring, like, a native, like a local artist.”

But locality is only one kind of geography in Maher’s work. Her recent sculptures and collages move between bodily, geological, and landscape-like forms. A surface that appears to be stone can turn out to be manipulated plastic; photography ends up as sculptural material. 

“It’s very unique, and nothing that appears that it is is actually that,” Kaliner said, pointing to what looked like a chunk of stone. “It’s not. It’s all reworked plastic, so it’s recycled material.”

Maher builds many of the works from her own photographs, which Kaliner described as a “baseline” for both the sculptures and collages. For this body of work, the artist looked to Inuit archaeological artifacts used as tactile maps of Arctic coastlines. The small carved objects could be read through touch, their contours guiding a traveler along a coastline. Maher translated that premise into two related bodies of work, sculptures titled Coordinates and collages titled Maps.

“It’s navigation to, like, abstract, undefined universes,” Kaliner said, “like shadow or subconscious mind. And it’s all, like, the entry point to that universe.”

At an art fair, where the whole architecture is temporary, currently the White & Private Label Expo, filled with faceless, brandless products, fills the space today. It feels fitting for work so attentive to movement, reuse, reconstruction, and what materials remember during our time of rapid historical erasure.