Across The Armory Show 2026, artists from the African continent and its diasporas bring distinct perspectives to questions of history, memory, identity and belonging. Their practices span painting, sculpture, photography, textiles and installation, drawing from personal archives, ancestral traditions, spiritual practices. From Lagos and Nairobi to Haiti, Jamaica and their diasporas, Culture Makes takes a closer look at the presentations at this year’s fair.

Curated by Jovanna Venegas, Passages and Thresholds brings together large-scale installations examining the Caribbean and its diasporas through histories of migration, colonialism, spirituality and belonging. Across the section, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Remy Jungerman, Sandra Brewster, Hew Locke, Curtis Talwst Santiago, Jesús Hilario-Reyes, Zenobia Lee, and Ania Freer & Cornelius Tulloch draw from distinct geographies and cultural traditions, from Maroon histories and African and Caribbean textile practices to Carnival, ancestral memory and migration. Together, their works trace connections between Africa, the Caribbean and their diasporas, foregrounding traditions and histories that persist across generations and geographies.

Presented by Carolina Nitsch and Galerie Barbara Thumm within the Armory Sculpture section, Tusukane is a monumental textile-based work by Nairobi-based artist Kaloki Nyamai, whose practice draws on Kenyan history, collective memory and Kamba traditions. Built from stitched canvas, acrylic, rubber threads and photo transfers, the work oscillates between painting, sculpture and installation. Its stitched and layered surfaces bring fragments together, with sewing becoming both a material process and a gesture of care and repair.

As part of Armory Sculpture, Galerie Hugues Charbonneau presents Manuel Mathieu’s Shhrine (2025), created in collaboration with perfumer Juliette Karagueuzoglou. A sculptural vessel diffuses fragrance into the surrounding space, making the work something encountered through breath and sensation as much as sight. Rooted in Mathieu’s Haitian heritage and his engagement with spirituality and ritual, Shhrine uses scent to evoke presence, collective experience and forms of memory that exist beyond the visible.

Presented within The Armory Show’s Caribbean-focused Focus section, PATRON dedicates its presentation to Jamaican-born, New York-based artist Simon Benjamin. Benjamin looks to the sea and coastal landscapes as sites where Afro-diasporic histories, ecology and colonial economies intersect. Drawing from vintage travel imagery created to promote Jamaica to Western tourists, he examines how the island—and particularly Black life—was packaged into an image of the Caribbean for outside consumption. Across painting, sculpture, printmaking, video and installation, Benjamin places these inherited images alongside materials and experiences drawn from the coast, complicating the familiar idea of the Caribbean as tropical paradise and inquiring what those images leave out.

Perrotin presents a solo booth by Kathia St. Hilaire, whose practice draws on her Haitian roots and South Florida’s Afro-Caribbean communities to examine histories of migration, occupation and resistance through experimental printmaking and painting. Her newest works turn to Spiralism, the Haitian literary movement founded in the 1960s amid François Duvalier’s dictatorship. Working through repeated acts of carving, printing, layering and erasure and incorporating text by Frankétienne. History emerges altered by memory and reconstructed in the present.

Ethan Cohen Gallery presents a focused survey of Renée Cox, bringing together photographs made between 1996 and 2018 that revisit some of the most familiar images in Western art and American history through Black presence. From Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper and Manet’s Olympia to the signing of the U.S. Constitution, Cox places herself and other Black figures at the center of images from which they have historically been absent. Through staged photography and self-portraiture, she disrupts their familiar narratives, using the authority of these images to confront the histories, representations and power structures they have helped preserve.

Adegbola Gallery presents the life of a few, a solo presentation by Oluwasemilore Delano arising from her encounters with cattle at Oko Oba abattoir in Lagos. Rather than treating the animals as an anonymous herd, Delano attends to each as an individual presence, with its own memory, instinct and vulnerability. Across painting and sculpture, bodies merge with landscape while the intimacy of Delano’s observations sits in tension with the systems of labour and consumption surrounding them. The works restore specificity to lives ordinarily understood collectively, shifting attention from the herd to the singular animal.

Magenta Plains revisits rarely exhibited mixed-media paintings by Paul Gardère made between 1994 and 2000, bringing an earlier chapter of the Haitian-American artist’s practice into view. Gardère combines painting, collage and found imagery, placing European and American visual traditions in dialogue with Haiti and the wider African diaspora. Navigating abstraction and figuration, the works examine race, power and cultural identity, layering distinct visual histories without allowing any one tradition to assume authority over another.

Hannah Traore Gallery presents a solo exhibition by Kesewa Aboah, whose practice begins with her own body, not simply as subject, but as an instrument in the making of the work. Aboah presses her fingerprints and body into magnesium printing plates, etching these physical impressions directly into the metal. Across printmaking, painting and assemblage, self-portraiture emerges through contact, pressure and trace rather than likeness, grounding presence in the physical act of making.

Lagos-based kó presents a solo exhibition by Diana Ejaita, whose multidisciplinary practice spans painting, illustration, textiles and publishing, drawing from Nigerian and European visual traditions. For The Armory Show, Ejaita presents a new body of still lifes she describes as “visual prayers.” Bodies, vessels, plants and symbolic forms inhabit densely patterned compositions, where memory, migration and belonging are woven into the visual language of West African storytelling.

TERN Gallery brings together Gio Swaby and Kachelle Knowles, two Bahamian artists approaching Black identity and portraiture through distinctly different material languages. Swaby’s thread and fabric portraits celebrate Black womanhood through intimacy, clothing and personal style, while Knowles renders Black Bahamian men in delicate graphite, countering conventions of masculine hardness with vulnerability, softness and individuality. Together, their works expand the possibilities of Black portraiture through tenderness and self-possession.

For its Solo presentation, PSM turns the booth over to Berlin-based artist and writer Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju, whose practice spans painting, writing, performance and installation. Personal and family histories provide a point of departure. Working with materials including cowhide, birch bark and the breeze blocks used by her grandfather to build his home, Ilupeju draws ancestry, migration, desire and belonging into a material language where personal memory and inherited histories intersect.

Catinca Tabacaru pairs Terrence Musekiwa and Youssra Raouchi, bringing together two practices shaped by questions of cultural inheritance, identity and resistance. Musekiwa draws from Zimbabwean stone-carving traditions, introducing contemporary and discarded materials into an inherited sculptural language. Raouchi works across painting, sculpture and installation, bringing memory and the body into tension with the social structures that define and constrain identity.

Yanira Collado turns to material as a carrier of history, drawing from her Dominican heritage to recover Caribbean narratives disrupted by colonialism and the erasure of Indigenous cultures. Working with concrete, textiles, iron, drywall, wood and reclaimed texts, Collado draws attention to the geographic histories, economies and cultural values embedded within everyday materials. Anchored by a central installation, the presentation looks to the traces held within these materials as a means of recovering histories that have been obscured.

Galerie Hugues Charbonneau presents a solo exhibition by Clovis-Alexandre Desvarieux, whose paintings approach Haitian mythology and history as living forms of knowledge. Drawing from Vodou cosmology and the legacy of Haitian painters including Hector Hyppolite, André Pierre and Louisiane Saint-Fleurant, Desvarieux brings abstraction and figuration together through imagery rooted in ancestry, spirituality and the natural world. Personal memory sits within a broader continuum of ancestral knowledge, where the material and spiritual, contemporary and inherited coexist.

Havana-founded El Apartamento brings together Cuban artists in a group presentation exploring personal and collective memory, spirituality, landscape and cultural identity. Among them, Roberto Diago approaches Cuba through its African inheritance. Across painting, sculpture and installation, Diago confronts the legacies of slavery and racism, placing ancestral memory alongside the lived realities of Black identity in contemporary Cuba. The presentation coincides with Hombres libres at the 2026 Venice Biennale and his inclusion in My Own Past: Afrodescendant Contributions to Cuban Art at Miami’s Lowe Art Museum, extending a practice deeply engaged with the histories and experiences of the African diaspora.

Fridman Gallery brings together three artists whose practices trace distinct routes through Black and diasporic histories. Laurena Finéus turns to landscapes connected to Maroon histories as sites of freedom and resistance; Remy Jungerman draws from Surinamese Maroon culture and Winti traditions, placing them in dialogue with European modernism; while Nate Lewis cuts and sculpts paper, connecting the body, movement and histories of healing. Across landscape, spiritual tradition and the body, each artist gives material form to histories that remain active in the present.

Nairobi’s Circle Art Gallery brings together Shabu Mwangi and Donald Wasswa, pairing painting and sculpture in a presentation attentive to the social and environmental conditions of contemporary life. Mwangi’s paintings confront the psychological and social effects of inequality, while Wasswa transforms wood and found materials into sculptural forms that reflect on shifting relationships between nature, technology and the environments we inhabit.

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