The Armory Show has revealed its curators for the 2024 Platform and Focus sections and the Curatorial Leadership Summit. Eugenie Tsai, Independent Curator, will curate the Platform section; Robyn Farrell, Senior Curator at The Kitchen, will curate the Focus section; and Lauren Cornell, Chief Curator of the Hessel Museum of Art and Director of the Graduate Program at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, will chair the seventh annual Curatorial Leadership Summit (CLS).
To commemorate the fair’s 30th Anniversary and celebrate New York’s global leadership in the arts, The Armory Show 2024 brings together three curators practicing in New York. As in previous years Platform, Focus, and the CLS will all benefit from a unified thread, with the 2024 curated sections examining an overarching theme of art-historical reverberations and echoes in the present.
I am proud to announce an extraordinary team of curators for our 30th Anniversary edition. The Armory Show 2024 is thrilled to have Eugenie, Robyn, and Lauren bring their impressive talent and unique vision to the fair’s curated sections. We are fortunate to have them collaborate on a theme that both reflects their individual interests and collectively informs our understanding of how the past informs the present. We look forward to seeing which artists they highlight and what conversations, connections, and discoveries they inspire this year.
Nicole Berry, Executive Director of The Armory Show,
Curated by Eugenie Tsai, Platform will examine the overarching theme through large-scale installations and site-specific works material, and spirit.
Introduced in 2017, Platform has previously been curated by Eric Shiner, Director, Andy Warhol Museum (2017); Jen Mergel, former Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2018); Sally Tallant, Director, Liverpool Biennial (2019); Anne Ellegood, Executive Director, Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2020); and Claudia Schmuckli, Curator-in-Charge of Contemporary Art and Programming, de Young Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (2021); and Tobias Ostrander,
Curated by Robyn Farrell, Focus considers the experimental spirit of the fair’s founding in 1994 at The Gramercy Hotel and the namesake International Exhibition of Modern Art in 1913 at New York City’s 69th Regiment Armory. Works in this section reflect on these avant-garde histories while probing the radical strategies and poetic interventions of interdisciplinary forms and cultural exchange.
Lauren Cornell will chair the seventh annual Curatorial Leadership Summit. The curatorial convening will directly examine conversations in and around art historical reverberations and echoes in the present. A public keynote presentation follows the closed-door session. In addition to the on-site summit, Cornell will be chairing the Virtual CLS event in the spring of 2024 leading up to the fair.
The Armory Show, September 6th-8th, 2024 Javits Centre @thearmoryshow
About
A cornerstone of New York’s cultural landscape since 1994, The Armory Show opens New York’s fall art season by bringing the world’s leading international contemporary and modern art galleries to the Javits Center each year. The fair emphasizes thoughtful programming, elevated presentations, curatorial excellence, meaningful institutional partnerships, and engaging public art activations. In 2023, The Armory Show was acquired by Frieze, the world’s leading organization for modern and contemporary art. For more information on The Armory Show, visit thearmoryshow.com
Eugenie Tsai is a curator and writer based in New York. After sixteen years, she recently stepped down from her position as the John and Barbara Vogelstein Senior Curator, Contemporary Art, at the Brooklyn Museum. During those years, she shaped the Contemporary collection, and organized around forty loan and collection exhibitions. Before taking up her position at the Brooklyn Museum, Eugenie worked at PS1 Contemporary Art Center in Queens as Director of Curatorial Affairs, and at the Whitney Museum in various curatorial roles including Associate Director for Curatorial Affairs.
Robyn Farrell is Senior Curator at The Kitchen in New York where she organizes and oversees exhibitions, publications, live and online programming. Before The Kitchen, Farrell was an Associate Curator in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she served on the curatorial teams for fifty projects including career surveys with Barbara Kruger (2021) and Gregg Bordowitz (2019). Farrell holds an MA in Art History from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she has served as a visiting lecturer moderator for the Gene Siskel Film Center.
Lauren Cornell is Chief Curator at the Hessel Museum and Director of the Graduate Program at the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS), Bard College. At CCS Bard, Cornell has curated multiple monographic exhibitions including surveys of Sky Hopinka, Leidy Churchman, Nil Yalter, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, Martine Syms and Dara Birnbaum. Previously, Cornell was the Curator and Associate Director of Technology Initiatives at the New Museum. From 2005–2012, Cornell served as Executive Director of Rhizome, an organization that commissions, exhibits, and preserves art engaged with technology. She is a coeditor, with Ed Halter, of Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the Twenty-First Century (New Museum and MIT Press, 2015), and has contributed to numerous exhibition catalogs and art magazines. Cornell is a recipient of ArtTable’s New Leadership Award.
