Curators of The Armory Show 2024
Eugenie Tsai, Robyn Farrell, Lauren Cornell
Javit Center, New York
September 6 - 8, 2024
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.
Curated by Eugenie Tsai, Platform will examine the overarching theme through large-scale installations and site-specific works that explore the interplay of memory, 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, Estrellita B. Brodsky Adjunct Curator, Latin American Art at Tate, London (2022.); and Eva Respini, Deputy Director and Director of Curatorial Programs at the Vancouver Art Gallery (2023).
Curator of the Platform section
Photo by Marco Giugliarelli
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 Tsai 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.
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.
Previous curators of Focus have included Jarrett Gregory, Associate Curator, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2017); Gabriel Ritter, Curator, Minneapolis Institute of Art (2018); Lauren Haynes, Curator of Contemporary Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville (2019); Jamillah James, Curator, Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2020); and Wassan Al-Khudhairi, Chief Curator, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2021); and Carla Acevedo-Yates, Marilyn and Larry Fields Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago (2022); and Candice Hopkins, Director and Chief Curator of Forge Project (2023).
Curator of the Focus section
Photo by Claire Britt
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 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, Lauren Cornell will be chairing the Virtual CLS event in the 2024 leading up to the fair.
Previous chairs of the CLS have included Naomi Beckwith, Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2018); Dan Byers, John R. and Barbara Robinson Family Director, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University (2019); José Carlos Diaz, Chief Curator, The Andy Warhol Museum (2020); and Valerie Cassel Oliver, Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (2021), and Mari Carmen Ramírez, Wortham Curator of Latin American Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2022); and Adrienne Edwards, Engell Speyer Family Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2023).
Curatorial Leadership Summit
Photo by Carrie Schneide
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, Lauren 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. Lauren Cornell is a recipient of ArtTable’s New Leadership Award.
THE ARMORY SHOW
