The Armory Show has named Eva Respini, Candice Hopkins, and Adrienne Edwards as curators for various sections of its 2023 show, to be held next September at the Javits Center in New York, Artnews reports. Respini, deputy director for curatorial affairs and chief curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, will organize the Platform section, which features large-scale and site-specific works. Hopkins, who is the director and chief curator of Forge Project in Taghkanic, New York, will curate the Focus section, which centers single and dual-artist presentations. Edwards, a curator and the director of curatorial affairs at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, will chair the event’s sixth annual Curatorial Leadership Summit, which each year gathers an international panel of curators to discuss timely topics.
All three projects will address the theme of historical narratives: Respini’s section will examine the ways in which artists have challenged the art-historical canon, while Hopkins will curate her section around the uncovering by artists of hidden histories. Though the talking points for the summit led by Edwards have not yet been determined, Armory Show executive director Nicole Berry noted that Edwards would respond to the themes of the Platform and Focus sections, adding that “those conversations that will happen in the [Curatorial Leadership Summit] will have a correlation to what’s on view at the fair, as well as addressing issues that are relevant to the broader curatorial practice.”
In adopting an overarching theme across its special programming for a second year running, the Armory Show hopes to reproduce the success it had in doing so earlier this year. The 2022 iteration, which saw curators Carla Acevedo-Yates, Tobias Ostrander, and Mari Carmen Ramírez curate the Focus, Platform, and Curatorial Leadership Summit programs, focused on Latinx and Latin American art.
“We wanted to build on that,” Berry said. “We wanted to pivot based on last year’s success. We’re mixing it up a little but that doesn’t mean we’ve abandoned what we looked at last year. And that’ll be the same moving forward; 2024 might be something really different, but we’ll still be looking at historical narratives.”