Five Artists We Loved At Armory Arts Week 2019

Armory Arts Week was admittedly a little weird this year. Collective Design took a sabbatical, as did NADA, which hosted a gallery open downtown in place of its sprawling art fair. Spring/Break moved out of its former Condé Nast digs and we never quite made it to the new location. And, oddest of all, the pier that typically hosts VOLTA showed structural damage at the eleventh hour, leaving a raft of galleries and artists homeless (some were folded into a last-minute show at David Zwirner galleries titled, appropriately, Plan B). Luckily, there was still plenty to love. If you follow our Instagram stories, you know that our favorite presentation was by design world refugees Material Lust at Independent New York, and it’ll be getting its own story later this month.

But while it can be sometimes be difficult to find artists who fit our aesthetic, the five we’re featuring in this story seriously delivered. Samantha Bittman (no stranger to Sight Unseen) showed trippy acrylic on textile pieces against a digitally printed wallpaper; Sadie Benning used some sort of magical geometric inlay process; emerging Stockholm artist Jesper Nyrén exhibited prismatic paintings in oil, acrylic, sand, and beeswax; Anna Dickinson displayed a suite of murky, mysterious cast-glass vessels; and Carmen D’Apollonio showed some of the slumpy ceramic lamps that we’ve been obsessed with for the past year. Read on to for some serious art inspiration.