On the Floor at The Armory Show 2026

 

Last week we shared our guide to the Caribbean at The Armory Show. Now we're back from the floor to share some of our highlights from the show.

Caribbean art has never needed an art fair to tell it that it matters. We built FORGOTTEN LANDS on that belief. Still, it meant something to walk into New York's biggest fair and find the region at its center. Khendrick Beausoleil joined us on preview day to connect with artists and galleries and hear about their work firsthand.

Focus

María Elena Ortiz gave the region room to be specific. Her Focus never flattened the Caribbean into a single story. Walking it meant crossing from the Bahamas to Martinique to Haiti to the Dominican Republic, with each booth speaking in its own register.

TERN Gallery (F4) brought Gio Swaby 🇧🇸 and Kachelle Knowles 🇧🇸 to New York, and the booth drew steady attention all week. Swaby's thread portraits, including Baby Hairs 9 (2025), sat beside Knowles' Start Up for the Summer (2026). 

Tout-Monde Art Foundation | TM Arthouse (F6) came with Garden of Kin and Many Mothers, curated by Vanessa Selk 🇲🇶 (Vol. 06), with work by Chantaléa Commin 🇬🇵 and Eymric Moderne 🇲🇶, and ARTnews counted it among the fair's best booths. Commin spent 25 years in Paris studying aesthetics and experimental film before returning home to Guadeloupe in 2011, and her work moves across media to take up identity, ecology, and mixed heritage. Moderne, who also goes by Moey, trained at Martinique's Campus Caraïbeén des Arts and is known for self-portraits and lush, gold-leafed scenes of the island's birds and plants. Here he turned to the flora that now grows across Martinique, in works on paper and sculpture. Between them, the booth traced how two islands carry many roots at once.

We caught up with Laurena Finéus 🇭🇹 at Fridman Gallery (F5), where her new paintings shared the booth with work by Remy Jungerman and Nate Lewis. Working in oil, ink, pigment, and acrylic, she builds dense, layered landscapes drawn from Maroon terrain, where seasonal rains and flooding make the land as dangerous as it is protective, and the shifting ground stands in for an ongoing pursuit of freedom. 

Lizania Cruz 🇩🇴(Vol. 04) (PROXYCO Gallery, F13) showed Interdependency Exercise II (2025), part of a new body of work on how rising heat is pulling the tropics north into New York. At the booth, works on paper sat alongside an open invitation for visitors to draw the ties that bind them to neighbors, strangers, and the natural world. Pérez Art Museum Miami chose her work for its first acquisition prize.

At Magenta Plains (F18), Paul Gardère 🇭🇹 (1944–2011) filled the booth with rarely exhibited mixed-media paintings from the late 1990s, marking the gallery's tenth anniversary. His work set Haitian and Western imagery against each other to question race and post-colonial history. After a 1993 residency at Monet's gardens in Giverny, he turned that lens on the most painted garden in the Western canon, working in paint, mud, photography, found objects, and collage to show a landscape built to look natural.

Just outside Focus, in Armory Sculpture, Manuel Mathieu 🇭🇹 (Vol. 08) (Galerie Hugues Charbonneau, AS2) built Shhrine (2025), an olfactory installation of burned textile and ceramic, made with perfumer Juliette Karagueuzoglou. The scent is undeniable, but the sculpture holds it close, and it doesn't reach you until you step into its domain. The New York Times named him among its 12 artists on the rise at the fair.


Platform: Passages and Thresholds

For Platform's tenth edition, Jovanna Venegas trusted scale. Her section asked visitors to walk around the Caribbean through, not just look at it, and the work rewarded anyone who slowed down.

Curtis Talwst Santiago 🇹🇹 (Uffner & Liu) used soccer to ask who gets to move freely and who gets kept on the sidelines. His alter ego, Sir Dingolay, appears mid-kick in Dingolay FC, Dance Through the Defence (2025), a life-size armored knight named for J'ouvert, the dawn that opens Trinidad's Carnival, and beaded head to toe in South African glass, goalie gloves included. Beside him, What Gold Can Do (2026), the newest piece in his Infinity Series of miniature worlds built inside antique jewelry boxes, turns a soccer pitch into contested ground, with The Keeper's Prayer (2025) rounding out the presentation.

Bony Ramirez 🇩🇴 (Vol. 06) (regularnormal) built La Carta (2026) around a doll resting on a four-poster bed, an immersive mix of painting and assemblage about what devastating news does to the mind and body: the dread, the grief, the sense of powerlessness. Over the fair's four days, Ramirez rearranged the scene each morning, so it never looked the same twice, carrying her from that first blow toward resilience and, by the final day, toward hope. The figure bears the hallmarks of his practice, with the stretched, uncanny proportions he draws from Italian Mannerism, children's book illustration, and memories of growing up in the Dominican Republic. Longtime readers will know his work from the cover of FORGOTTEN LANDS Volume 06: Neo-Carib Visions.

Ania Freer 🇯🇲 (Vol. 04) and Cornelius Tulloch 🇯🇲 (Vol. 07) brought Ancestral Currents (2026) to AIRIE.Foundation, marking the Everglades residency's 25th anniversary. Set within a field of grass, the installation gathered short films that move between Jamaica and the Greater Everglades, with water as the thread between them. Freer's four films, Kaa-Ha-Yut-Le, Cotton Tree, Shanny, and Shango, build from oral histories to recover stories of labor, folklore, race, and class that rarely make the record. Tulloch's Passages follows performers Arsimmer McCoy and Kunya Rowley through the history of the Saltwater Railroad, the sea route that carried people escaping slavery from Florida to the Bahamas.


Congratulations to This Year's Prize Winners

This year brought the largest prize slate in the fair's history. Big congratulations to FORGOTTEN LANDS family Lizania Cruz 🇩🇴 (Vol. 04) and Simon Benjamin 🇯🇲 (Vol. 06),

PAMM Acquisition Prize ($20,000). Pérez Art Museum Miami split its inaugural prize three ways:

Delfina Foundation Artist Residency Prize went to Simon Benjamin 🇯🇲 (PATRON, F20)

Sauer Artist Prize ($10,000) awarded Yanira Collado 🇩🇴 (Mindy Solomon Gallery, F9)

Pommery Prize ($10,000) selected Lisu Vega 🇻🇪 (Gladwell Projects, Platform)

What Comes Next

The conversations we started at the Armory Show continue uptown at the Studio Museum in Harlem, where we're releasing Volume 08. Join us for Studio Salon: Crossing the Horizon on October 16, 2026, from 2 PM to 8 PM.




 
Cory Bishop