The best thing about the Art Show, the annual fair sponsored by the Art Dealers Association of America in the Park Avenue Armory, is that ticket sales benefit the Henry Street Settlement, which has been bringing art and culture to the Lower East Side since 1893. The second best thing is that all 72 exhibitors are in a single room, albeit a large and drafty one: You can take it all in with a leisurely stroll.
What you’ll find this year is a program dominated by uncompromising female artists. The very best of them are two joint presentations: the painter Judith Linhares with the sculptor Annabeth Rosen at P.P.O.W. and Anglim Gilbert, and Alice Neel’s paintings with photographs by Diane Arbus, brought together by David Zwirner and Fraenkel Gallery.
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Here are some especially notable booths.
A full booth at the Washburn Gallery is dedicated to the painter Alice Trumbull Mason (1904-1971), with a focus on drawings and paintings from the 1940s, whose surfaces are broken into rhythmic showers of narrow shapes. In “Bearings Charted With Yellow,”from 1946, the overlapping rhombuses have a dizzying effect, suggesting a teasing motion that doesn’t actually get anywhere, while “Bearings in Transition,” beside it, is as still as the grave.