Process emerged as one of the more compelling threads. Across the selection, paintings are dismantled and reconstructed, family archives become the material for new work, inherited techniques are carried into new contexts, and thread, stone, crystal and discarded materials take on unexpected forms, rendering the making itself a carrier of ideas, histories and intentions.

Bony Ramírez’s La Carta begins with a young woman receiving devastating news. A canopy bed, chain curtains, paintings and assemblage transform her bedroom into a psychological space, giving physical form to the emotions and associations set in motion by the letter. What makes the presentation particularly compelling is its gradual construction.

Ramírez does not reveal the story all at once. Across four days, the installation evolves as new elements enter the space. What appears complete at one moment becomes only one stage in a larger sequence. Through this approach, Ramírez constructs the emotional architecture of an aftermath. Meaning accumulates through fragments and details, mirroring the way an experience is processed and understood over time. The fair’s four-day duration becomes part of the storytelling itself, extending the work beyond a single encounter.

Zoë Pulley begins with the archive of her grandmother, Sandra Olivia Moon Hightower, a self-taught fashion designer who created and staged her own runway shows in 1980s Philadelphia. Garments, photographs, press clippings and family ephemera trace a creative life largely absent from the institutions responsible for recording fashion history. Pulley works with this material rather than simply preserving it. She reconstructs garments, reworks images and builds new compositions from the archive, allowing her grandmother’s practice to become the starting point for her own.

The Armory Show marked Pulley’s first art-fair presentation and her first gallery presentation in New York. Elegance No. 1 (2026), a large-scale mixed-media work incorporating plexiglass, velvet, steel and cord, received the inaugural Bronx Museum Acquisition Prize and entered the museum’s permanent collection. The trajectory feels especially significant here: a family archive developed outside established institutions has become the basis for a work now held by one.

Identical twins Elliot & Erick Jiménez grew up in Miami in a Cuban-American family shaped by Lucumí traditions. Their practice draws from this inheritance alongside art history, Yoruba cosmology and Catholic imagery, using photography, sculpture and mixed media to build a visual language in which the spiritual and contemporary coexist. At The Armory Show, What We Are Becoming picks up where El Monte, their first solo museum exhibition at Pérez Art Museum Miami, left off.

The earlier exhibition explored Afro-Cuban spirituality, family memory and bicultural identity; this new body of work turns toward transformation. Figures dissolve into flowers, emerge in luminous white or appear suspended between fire, nature and ritual. The shift is subtle but important. Rather than searching for a fixed expression of identity, the brothers consider identity as something continually formed and reformed through inheritance, migration and experience. Even the photographs resist staying within one medium: silk-organza butterflies, ex-votos and other material additions extend beyond the image, giving physical form to this sense of change.

Terrence Musekiwa learned to carve stone from his father, continuing a practice passed through generations of his family in Zimbabwe. It is an inheritance he has chosen neither to abandon nor preserve unchanged. Instead, Musekiwa brings the precision of traditional stone carving into contact with the materials of contemporary life. Hand-carved stone meets discarded plastic, packaging, found objects and industrial materials. The combinations can be strange, humorous and deliberately unresolved: something shaped slowly by hand may sit beside something manufactured by the thousands and designed to be thrown away. One carries the evidence of labor and lineage; the other, the speed and excess of the present. This tension allows Musekiwa to approach tradition as something active rather than historical. The techniques remain, but the world around them has changed—and his sculptures register both. In Musekiwa’s proposition inheritance survives by absorbing the world around it.

Katherine Vetne makes beautiful things misbehave. Crystal, porcelain, candlesticks and decorative vessels designed to be admired, displayed and handled carefully appear throughout her work. She renders them through metalpoint, drawing directly with fine gold and silver wire in a technique dating back centuries. The precision is almost obsessive. Then comes the collapse. 

Vetne also works with actual vintage lead crystal, placing it in a kiln until heat softens forms engineered for symmetry and brilliance. Goblets buckle, bowls slump and elaborate surfaces lose their familiar geometry. The pairing is what makes the practice particularly interesting. In the drawings, she uses precious materials to painstakingly construct perfection; in the sculptures, she subjects objects already associated with perfection to conditions that undo it. Control and failure become two sides of the same process. What remains is not quite ruin. The objects are still seductive, perhaps even more so after their transformation.

Liu Tianlian brings the precision of traditional Chinese gongbi painting into the fluorescent world of the New York laundromat. Gongbi is a centuries-old tradition of meticulous brush painting, characterized by extraordinary control and attention to detail. Liu, who trained in Chinese painting at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, works primarily on silk with traditional Chinese pigments. Since immigrating to the United States in 2023, her subjects have shifted toward the places she encounters around her: laundromats, nail salons, street vendors and small neighborhood businesses. Rather than monumentalizing these spaces, she looks closely at their ordinary rhythms—the machines, signage, objects and people that make up their visual language. Observation and imagination overlap, turning familiar interiors into scenes that can feel slightly dreamlike. 

For The Armory Show, Yiwei Gallery pushed the idea further. Its solo presentation recreated elements of a New York laundromat around paintings from Liu’s ongoing Laundry Room series, effectively allowing the world inside the paintings to continue into the booth. Works included 24-Hour Laundromat, The Wash, Spin Cycle 1–10 and Culture on Demand. The intrigue lies in the meeting of two visual worlds: the patience and precision of gongbi applied to fluorescent lights, washing machines and the ordinary spaces of everyday life.

Roméo Mivekannin returns to paintings from Western art history and changes who occupies them. Born in Bouaké, Côte d’Ivoire, and raised in Benin, the artist revisits canonical paintings and archival images, inserting himself into histories of representation from which Black subjects have often been absent, marginalized or subjected to an external gaze.

His process begins with large sheets of unstretched canvas, painted directly and repeatedly immersed in mixtures developed from plants and other materials. The resulting stains give the surfaces the worn quality of objects that have already lived a history. His own face recurs across bodies, genders and periods, making the artist impossible to separate from the histories he revisits.

At The Armory Show, Mivekannin takes the place of Jean-Michel Basquiat in Andy Warhol’s 1984 portrait of the artist. One artist enters the image of another, made by a third—a particularly striking extension of Mivekannin’s interest in portraiture, authorship and cultural memory.

Élise Peroi paints landscapes only to take them apart. Working first in gouache on silk, the French artist cuts the painted surface into narrow ribbons before bringing them to a tapestry loom and weaving the image back together. Painting becomes material: something that can be divided, rearranged and rebuilt. The reconstruction is deliberately incomplete. Gaps remain between the woven strips, allowing the wall, light and air behind the work to enter the composition.

The method brings two processes usually treated separately into direct contact. Peroi first builds an image through painting, then subjects it to the logic of weaving. The loom does not simply reproduce what was there before: cutting, spacing and tension reorganize the original composition. There is something almost contradictory in Peroi’s process: she spends time meticulously painting an image, then cuts through it. What emerges from the loom is not the painting restored, but a new landscape made possible by its destruction.

It begins with a mango tree planted by her grandmother in Venezuela. For Lisu Vega, the tree is at once a childhood memory, a living trace of family and a point of connection to a place she left behind. In A Momentary Whole, its roots spread across the installation in sewn rope, meeting photographs from the family archive transferred onto translucent fabric. There is a beautiful inversion at work here. Something normally hidden underground becomes visible, while photographs—objects we usually rely on to make memory concrete—appear almost weightless. Vega places the permanence of roots against the fragility of an image, allowing both to occupy the same space.

Textile carries its own history within her practice. Vega grew up in Maracaibo in a family of seamstresses and draws from her maternal Wayuu heritage, where weaving carries generations of knowledge. In her hands, these techniques expand well beyond the scale of the domestic. Recent installations have become increasingly monumental, turning rope and fabric into structures that spread across walls and occupy entire spaces. A Momentary Whole remains anchored in the intimacy of its origin. A grandmother plants a tree; decades later, her granddaughter follows its roots into an artwork.

Gio Swaby draws with thread. Raised in The Bahamas, she learned to sew from her mother and has transformed a familiar domestic practice into a distinctive language of portraiture. Working from photographs of friends, family and herself, Swaby traces hairstyles, clothing, posture and gesture in thread, allowing the details through which her subjects present themselves to become central to their imprints. Swaby often turns the embroidery around. The side conventionally meant to remain hidden faces the viewer. What might ordinarily be considered unfinished becomes the image itself, preserving the physical record of how each portrait was made.

There is also an intimacy to the process. Swaby photographs many of her subjects herself and has described the importance of conversation and collaboration in making the portraits. Rather than treating clothing or hair as embellishment, she pays close attention to these choices as expressions of personality and self-fashioning. The result is portraiture built not only from likeness, but from the accumulated nuances through which a person chooses to be seen.