Calling Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka’s solo presentation at the Armory Show a “booth” feels somehow wrong, like a reduction of the all-encompassing sanctum that she and Toronto gallery Patel Brown assembled for the Manhattan art fair. Suspended gently from wooden rods are billowing linocut and gyotaku prints on handmade Japanese washi paper in deep indigos and earth tones. In conversations with attendees on the fair’s opening day, Hatanaka shared that she has bipolar disorder, and that her landscapes are informed in part by her research into evolutionary theories for the condition as a form of climactic adaptation.Hatanaka, a first timer at the Armory Show, said she was moved and gratified by visitors’ responses. “It’s still quite stigmatized to talk about bipolar, even though there’s more conversation about mental health,” she told me. “I think telling my story has been kind of disarming to people, allowed them to be vulnerable.”For all the whispers about the market downturn, gallery closures, and art fair shake-ups, a crisp air of first-day-of-school excitement cut through the drab halls of the Javits Center during the Armory Show’s VIP preview on Thursday, September 4. Often accompanying the gallerists fielding collectors’ inquiries were the artists themselves, many of them showing for the first time at the modern-day incarnation of the historic exhibition where Marcel Duchamp shocked American audiences with his dizzying 1912 “Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2.”“It is a classic, world-famous fair, and it is the ambition of every artist to show there, particularly if you come from Europe … or the edge of Europe, in my case,” said Irish artist Alice Maher, whose drawing “The Glorious Maid (of the Charnel House)” (2016) is displayed in a nook at David Nolan Gallery’s booth of 100 drawings from 1944 to the present. Maher could “hardly believe,” she said, that her work is hanging in the company of such figures as Hannah Wilke, Dorothea Rockburne, Etel Adnan, and Ellsworth Kelly. Alejandro García Contreras at his booth with Swivel GalleryDiagonally across from Patel Brown’s booth is New York’s own Swivel Gallery, where ceramic works by Alejandro García Contreras stopped attendees in their tracks. The Guadalajara-based artist, another newcomer to the Armory, said that though his practice dates back to 2002, he’s glad this moment didn’t come sooner. “In some ways it was complex and discouraging,” García Contreras told me in Spanish, reflecting on his early years, “but it helped me build up the patience not to do something stupid.” Though his sculptures today are hyper-detailed, Boschian constructions dripping in symbolism, the artist’s earliest inspiration came from action figures — especially the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles — which, as a child, he didn’t so much play with as study to figure out how they were made. “That’s where the origin of my obsession with the sculptural object comes from,” García Contreras said. “Sometimes I think, ‘Wow, when I was a kid, it was my dream to make action figures. And now I’m making collectibles for adults. I’ve made it.’”Storm Ascher of Superpositions Gallery, with works by Ryan Cosbert and Marcus Leslie SingletonThere’s always fresh blood at the Armory, in part thanks to the participation of first-time galleries. The big four (Gagosian, Hauser, Zwirner, Pace) haven’t showed at the fair in years, opting for Frieze (which also owns the Armory Show) and the various Art Basels. But notably absent this year are other major players, such as Lehmann Maupin, Galerie Lelong (which hasn’t been at the Armory since 2023), Almine Rech, and Kasmin (currently transitioning into a new gallery started by two partners). Younger galleries — some of which told Hyperallergic that they got a last-minute call from Armory Show organizers this year offering them a booth — are eager to step up, and the Presents section, notably dedicated to emerging spaces no more than 10 years old, is slightly larger than in past editions. “This is one of those things that always felt like a prestigious dream,” said Storm Ascher, who opened her gallery Superpositions seven years ago in a fashion pop-up space in downtown LA that was still cluttered with clothing. “I sold a Haleigh Nickerson piece for, like, $1,500, and broke even on my rent,” Asher recalled. “And now we have Nickerson showing at Frieze LA next year. It feels like a full circle moment.” The gallery’s program centers artists from the African diaspora, and its two-person booth features Ryan Cosbert and Marcus Leslie Singleton. The latter’s “Yellow Field in the Catskills” (2025) is drenched in a luminous hue (“butter yellow, the color of the summer,” said Ascher, quoting the artist); it’s hard not to feel unfettered joy radiating from the canvas, even if the works are underpinned by intimate moments of pause and introspection.Artist Elisabeth Perrault at the Armory Show, where she’s showing a ceramic work with Carvalho GalleryAcross the disorienting Armory Show map, nearly every sightline reveals work by artists who have never before exhibited here — a reminder that fairs, with all their pitfalls, can still serve as a stage for new voices. Montréal-based ceramic and textile artist Elisabeth Perrault first attended the fair in 2023 as a visitor, letting herself get lost in the endlessly dizzying rows of booths. This year, her massive installation “Ces géants qui se nourrissent de soleil (Sunflowers)” (2024) is the head-turning centerpiece of Carvalho Gallery’s presentation. In the nonprofit section, the Storefront for Art and Architecture boasts an array of whimsical sculptures of fruits, plants, and other organic elements by the late artist Ming Fay: a rounded pear, a larger-than-life oyster, a pepper. Jessica Kwok, the organization’s associate curator, is “99% sure” that Fay has never been included at the Armory before — an irony considering the sculptor’s legacy in New York City’s public art circuit. Busy commuters looking down at their screens might whiz past his glass mosaics at the Delancey-Essex Street subway station for free, while fair visitors who shelled out for tickets stop to marvel at his mastery of foam, ceramic, and papier-mâché.Over at Praxis Gallery, which has locations in New York and Buenos Aires, it’s hard to capture a photo of four of the six artists in the booth — all showing for the first time at the fair — in between playful exchanges, bursts of laughter, and interruptions from curious collectors. Among them is Josefina Concha, a Chilean artist whose color-soaked, machine-sewn textile pieces evoke natural forms, from fungal shapes to the concentric circles of tree trunks.Left to right: artists Darlene Charneco, Josefina Concha E., Elisa Lutteral, and Tamika Rivera with Director Carolina Constantino at the booth of Praxis GalleryAgainst all odds, the energy is palpable. “I walked in and thought, ‘It feels like 10 years ago,’” dealer Leo Koenig told me. “And I mean that as a compliment.”The wide-eyed enthusiasm, the glorious taste of the first sale, the lingering gaze of a curator … perhaps it’s all too trite, part of the art-world-industrial complex that keeps the wheels turning while obfuscating its darker undertones and nagging inequalities. But what if we could distill that thrill into something new, channel the spark into an alternative to the market monopoly of the blue-chip?Elbert Joseph Perez with his work “The Swimmers” (2025) at Chozick Family Art Gallery’s boothAt the Armory, some exhibitors represent the industry’s changing tides, which have cautiously embraced collaborative models. Chozick Family Art Gallery, for instance, founded just last year by Rachel Uffner alumna Rebekah Chozick, shares its Lower Manhattan space with JDJ and Deanna Evans Projects, alternating on monthly exhibitions. The gallery is making its debut at the fair, as are the two painters in its booth: Elbert Joseph Perez and Christopher Paz-Rivera (co-founder of the Puerto Rican gallery Embajada, which has been at the Armory before as an exhibitor. Head spinning yet?).Works by Elbert Joseph Perez and Christopher Paz-Rivera presented by Chozick Family Art GalleryStanding by his painting “The Swimmers,” depicting a rubber duck nonchalantly drifting past the pair of hands thrashing above the surface of the oil-slicked water, Perez said he aims to capture the universality of human experiences and the need to empathize with others. The artist, who has a finger in a splint from his job as a mechanic and who shared that his first solo show was organized by his therapist, is candid and forthcoming about what it’s like to be a first-timer at the fair, admitting that he feels an “incongruence” between his professional presence and his real identity.“I think if you were to tell my younger self that I’d be here, it wouldn’t compute at all,” he said. “Everyone is really cool or really beautiful, or wandering around with something going on, but I have a feeling that we’re all in a state of anxiety. We’re all really weird, and we’re all putting on a performance.”