New York’s fall art season gets underway this week with The Armory Show and Independent 20th Century, both running from September 24 to 27. This year brings notable change for each. The Armory Show has moved from its longstanding place in early September to the end of the month, while Independent 20th Century leaves downtown Manhattan for the first time to stage its largest edition to date at Sotheby’s Breuer building on Madison Avenue.
At the Javits Center, The Armory Show brings together around 230 galleries from more than thirty countries, with a growing share devoted to emerging and mid-career artists. Independent 20th Century is smaller and more tightly curated, with its 56 exhibitors presenting twentieth-century work and most stands given to a single artist or a pairing. Together, the two fairs open the New York art season. Here’s everything you need to know.
The Armory Show
The Armory Show returns to the Javits Center with around 230 exhibitors and a greater emphasis on its younger and more focused sections. Presents and Solo, devoted to emerging galleries and single-artist stands, have each expanded by more than twenty percent this year, together accounting for roughly 80 presentations. The expansion follows one of the clearer lessons of the 2025 edition, when the fair’s most tightly edited booths were among its most successful.
The shift is increasingly visible in the balance of the fair itself. Alongside its established international exhibitors, the fair has given greater space to younger galleries and single-artist presentations, where much of its momentum now gathers.
The Caribbean and its diaspora provide the curatorial focus for the 2026 edition, shaped by María Elena Ortiz of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. More significant still, the fair introduces museum acquisition prizes for the first time in its more than thirty-year history. A $20,000 award will enable the Pérez Art Museum Miami to acquire a work from the fair’s Focus section for its permanent collection and its Green Family Foundation Caribbean Cultural Institute, while a second fund of $15,000 will support an acquisition by the Bronx Museum from Presents.
Independent 20th Century
Independent 20th Century undergoes the more dramatic transformation this year. After four editions at Casa Cipriani, the fair moves uptown to the Breuer building, where it will be staged in partnership with Sotheby’s. The move marks the first collaboration of its kind between a commercial art fair and a major auction house, bringing primary-market galleries into one of the principal centers of the global auction market.
Its 56 exhibitors this year mark an increase of seventy-five percent on previous editions, with 33 galleries taking part for the first time. Among them are Hauser & Wirth, Thaddaeus Ropac, Marian Goodman Gallery, Sprüth Magers, Esther Schipper and Lévy Gorvy Dayan, bringing a new concentration of major international galleries to a fair long defined by its intimate scale.
What has not changed is its curatorial model. Rather than filling stands with broad selections of secondary-market material, Independent builds its fair around tightly focused exhibitions. Around eighty percent of this year’s stands are devoted to one or two artists, with many turning to overlooked figures or lesser-known periods within established careers.
The Andy Warhol Foundation, participating in an art fair for the first time, presents Andy Warhol: Love, Sex, and Desire, a group of the artist’s drawings of men from the 1950s and early 1960s. Made before the soup cans, Marilyns and Flowers that would come to define his public image, they reveal a more private body of work, much of it rarely exhibited in his lifetime. Lévy Gorvy Dayan turns to Yves Klein, with a presentation centered on Pluie bleue, first conceived in 1957, alongside works from the Cosmogonies and Reliefs planétaires. Hauser & Wirth presents the geometric drawings of Emma Kunz.
Photography also has a notable presence. Fraenkel Gallery pairs the paintings of B.J. Newton with photographs by Ralph Eugene Meatyard, bringing together two artists whose work shares an interest in the mysterious and metaphysical. Michael Hoppen Gallery looks to Francis Bacon’s extensive use of photography, presenting photographs and source material by figures including Peter Beard and John Deakin, some recovered from the floor of Bacon’s famously chaotic studio.
Ithaca Gallery advises private collectors on significant 20th and 21st-century fine art and photography, with expertise spanning acquisitions, private sales and valuations. We are glad to advise collectors navigating the fairs and the wider market. All inquiries are handled privately.
What to Know
The Armory Show and Independent 20th Century run concurrently from September 24 to 27, both opening to the public on Friday, September 25.
The Armory Show
September 24–27, 2026
Javits Center, 429 11th Avenue, New York
Independent 20th Century
September 24–27, 2026
Sotheby’s at the Breuer, 945 Madison Avenue, New York
