The 10 Best Booths at The Armory Show
By Alina Cohen
Kohn Gallery didn’t aspire to plan a booth celebrating female and non-binary artists; the directors just selected work they were passionate about and ended up with a thoughtful, attractive presentation featuring no male artists at all. Two untitled sculptures (both 2019, both sold for $12,500 each) by artist Chiffon Thomas are busts made from white plaster embedded with various materials. The plaster is sculpted to evoke Greco-Roman columns, with the heads appearing as though they’re buried in or emerging from the material, depending on how you look. Thomas is “looking at construction of identity and all the different components that create that,” said Kohn director Joshua Friedman. The intricate mélange of foam, chalk pastel, embroidery, leather, paint chips, resin, floss, and other substances represents the myriad components that comprise a single self.
The booth also features an embroidery piece by Sophia Narrett, titled I Can’t Stop Crying Except Sometimes When I Think About Ari Gold (2016, sold for $12,000). With her signature sense of romance and fantasy, coupled with an interest in celebrity culture, Narrett weaves a chain and a television screen into her threaded narrative. (The Entourage character Ari Gold was based on power agent Ari Emanuel, whose company, Endeavor, bought 70% ownership of Frieze Art Fair in 2016.) Early in the preview, an abstract canvas by Caroline Kent, Parade of Unlocatable Objects (2018), had already sold to a major institution in Texas for $25,000. Don’t miss Kate Barbee’s and Rosa Loy’s luscious canvases either; all three of Barbee’s paintings sold for $12,500 to $17,000 each, while two paintings and two works on paper by Loy sold for $3,000 to $32,000 each. The artists have very different approaches to painting women, and their juxtaposed canvases suggest the multiplicity of the subject itself.