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The New York Gallery Shows Not to Miss During Armory Week

These exhibitions, spanning museum-level presentations of works by Lynda Benglis and Alfredo Jaar, ambitious gallery debuts and digital experimentation, are worth making time for.

After the art world's all-too-brief summer break, New York is back in business with a packed slate of major exhibitions kicking off the fall season. This year, The Armory Show has been pushed to the end of the month, from September 24-27, avoiding the usual overlap with Frieze Seoul—an unsurprising bit of coordination now that the two fairs sit within the same portfolio.

The change will spare many international dealers the frantic stretch between the two regions and scenes, though several galleries are opening shows at the beginning of the month, creating early momentum around what has long been one of the calendar's most important slots, typically reserved for the strongest artists. As usual, there will be plenty worth seeing in Chelsea, Tribeca, the Lower East Side and what remains of the Upper East Side gallery scene. To help you navigate the sprawl, Observer has compiled our usual list of the best Armory adjacent exhibitions in New York.

NYC's Must-See Armory Week Exhibitions

Anthea Hamilton, "Comfort Zones"

Bea Scaccia, "Groomed"

Lynda Benglis, "KNOTTING, TYING, FOLDING" 

The Haas Brothers, "MATHEMAGICAL"

Lee Bul, "The Anatomy of Every Setting Sun"

Akira Ikezoe, "The Stories of Kunkuru"

Maia Cruz Palileo, "The World Tangled in You"

Alfredo Jaar, "A Logo for America"

Aurie Harvey, "Ready to Die"

Gökhun Baltaci, "A Moonless Plateau"

Cannupa Haska Luger's "American Traditional"

"WEBSITES, WEBSITES, WEBSITES!"

Sara Zapata, "In escape from the vices of idleness"

Melissa Joseph, "Casserole Culture"

Emma Beatrez, "Candy Apple"

Anthea Hamilton, "Comfort Zones"

Through October 24, 2026

Salon 94's treasure-filled, three-story Beaux-Arts townhouse is always worth a trek uptown. This fall, even more so, as Turner Prize-nominated British artist Anthea Hamilton takes over the space with the full reach of her imaginative universe, staging a series of surreal encounters through fantastical sculptures, uncanny presences and lifestyle-inflected forms. Known for her world-building ability, Hamilton moves fluidly across media and between art-historical references and popular culture, using both to reflect on the human body, femininity and the interplay between psychological and physical presence. There is a theatricality in the way she fragments, enlarges and abstracts bodies, treating them almost as sculptural props or spatial devices within a narrative she builds across the gallery. Yet that narrative remains intentionally open, allowing the viewer's imagination to complete it—an exercise that feels especially vital in today's increasingly disenchanted world.

Bea Scaccia, "Groomed"

With star curator Francesco Bonami brought in to organize a seven-exhibition sequence at Gagosian's Park & 75 location—launched in May with Eliza Douglas's first New York solo—Italian artist Bea Scaccia is now making her debut at the gallery. Known for her highly detailed, surrealist-inflected figurative style, Scaccia turns the codes of feminine beauty into something theatrical, unstable and slightly grotesque. Hair, that quintessential marker of femininity, has long been central to her work, along with wigs, pearls, ribbons and fur, which coalesce into faceless, articulated and overtly artificial figures—as if ornament alone were enough to cover, replace or stand in for the psychological and bodily presence of the feminine subject itself. Baroque and Rococo excess and Flemish vanitas imagery fluidly combine with fairy tales and contemporary pop culture, while hair and wigs become almost invasive—closer to organisms, infestations or masks—pushing beauty toward monstrosity. The title of the show, "Groomed," suggests a commentary on how a certain idea of femininity is cultivated from childhood within a society that has never stopped asking women to please, to be pretty, resulting in a mania for self-improvement and a pervasive performative anxiety.

Through October 16, 2026

At White Cube, the Vietnamese-born Danish conceptual artist unveils an installation of found objects and artifacts, historical artworks and new sculptures within a spatial intervention constructed from pinewood scaffolding. In some works, mushrooms bloom through cracks in stone, bronze or wood, staging an ongoing tension between the human and natural worlds while highlighting the interdependence of the cycles of generation and regeneration that bind them together. Fifteenth-century ceramics recovered from a shipwreck in Vietnam are shown alongside wall-based works featuring calligraphy by his father, Phung Vo, a figure with whom he has collaborated for many years. Bringing attention to the different tempos of archaeological and geological time, Vo examines how private and collective histories can shift meaning within new and evolving contexts, while considering the conditions that shape how we move, endure and create meaning.  Additionally, several pieces from his iconic Statue of Liberty and American flag series remain on view at the Vilcek Foundation uptown through June 2027, including three sculptures from his We the People series (2011-2016) with Live Free or Die (2026), a work commissioned specifically for the Vilcek Foundation's gallery.

September 24 through November 22, 2026

"260 Madison" brings together more than 50 artists across two vacant floors of a Midtown building at 260 Madison Avenue: a former Duane Reade at street level and a stripped-out office floor above. The unusual location became available while the building awaits its next phase of construction, presenting challenges but also opportunities to engage with its architecture and the remnants of its former uses, which serve as both a setting and a point of departure. Working across sculpture, new media and video, the artists intervene in a site defined by the spatial condition Rem Koolhaas diagnosed as "Junkspace." Showing alongside these emerging names are established artists including Matt Mullican, Josh Kline, Eva and Franco Mattes, Jon Kessler and Rachel Rossin.

Lynda Benglis, "KNOTTING, TYING, FOLDING" 

Through October 24, 2026

IIt has been a while since a gallery staged such an extensive presentation of Lynda Benglis's pioneering practice, which........

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