The Armory Show

For the 2025 edition of the Armory Show, Garth Greenan Gallery is pleased to present a selection of works by Neal Ambrose-Smith, Esteban Cabeza de Baca, Rosalyn Drexler, Paul Feeley, Art Green, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Al Loving, Mario Martinez, Gladys Nilsson, Howardena Pindell, and Fritz Scholder.

Printmaker, painter, draftsman, and sculptor Neal Ambrose-Smith (b. 1966) is a New Mexico–based artist and a descendent of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation. The son of internationally recognized artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Ambrose-Smith occupies the tradition of postmodern collage, juxtaposing Native motifs, passages of gestural abstraction, and imagery lifted from magazines, television, and computer screens. A rotating cast of characters—from Darth Vader to the Coyote trickster—populate his art, sardonically evoking themes of racism, environmental destruction, and the legacy of colonialism.

Born in San Ysidro, California, Esteban Cabeza de Baca (b. 1985) is a painter based in Queens, New York. Cabeza de Baca’s compositions originate in plein-air observational painting of the American southwest landscape, yet they simultaneously undermine that mode—and its associations with European regimes of visual mastery—through dense, collage-like layers and dramatic shifts in perspective and scale. Cabeza de Baca’s painterly vocabulary pulls from a wide range of influences—gra ti art, pre-Columbian petroglyphs, inherited Indigenous knowledge systems, and his own family history—to deftly collapse past, present, and future.

Born in the Bronx, New York, Rosalyn Drexler (b. 1925) was a central figure in American Pop art. She began using commercial imagery in 1961—the same year as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein—yet received little critical and commercial recognition for this breakthrough until recently. Graphically intense and thematically dark, Drexler’s artworks channel the sinister undercurrents of American life, evoking themes of sexuality, fame, and violence. In addition to her work as a visual artist, Drexler was also a novelist, a three-time Obie Award-winning playwright, an Emmy Award-winning screenwriter, and a professional wrestler. Her 1972 novel To Smithereens was recently republished by independent press Hagfish.

Paul Feeley (1910–1966) was an influential artist, teacher, and major figure in the Color Field movement. The subject of an upcoming exhibition at Garth Greenan Gallery this September, Feeley appeared in such era-defining exhibitions as Post-Painterly Abstraction (1964), The Responsive Eye (1965), and Systematic Painting (1966). Distinguished by rounded, symmetrical shapes, expansive fields of bold color, and an otherworldly weightlessness, Feeley’s formal vocabulary hovers on the cusp of dynamism and meditative stillness.

Art Green (1941–2025), who died this past April at the age of 83, counts among the original members of the Hairy Who (a group of Art Institute of Chicago graduates including Jim Falconer, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Suellen Rocca, and Karl Wirsum). Inspired by the Surrealism of René Magritte and Giorgio de Chirico, the Frankfort, Indiana–born artist developed a personal cosmology of objects derived from the post-war era of mass consumption—ice cream cones, painted fingernails, car tires—that he meticulously rendered in his signature high-key fetishistic style. On view at the gallery’s booth is Irresistible Object, an eight-foot-tall painting from 1970.

Born on the Standing Rock Reservation, North Dakota, Cannupa Hanska Luger (b. 1979) is of Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota, and European descent. An enrolled member of the Three Affliated Tribes of the Fort Berthold Reservation, Luger works in media including installation, sculpture, video, and performance. Forming a spine through the artist’s practice is his “Future Ancestral Technologies” series, an ongoing body of work, inaugurated in 2018, that imagines future shaped by inherited systems of Indigenous knowledge. Here, the gallery presents góodex, 2024, a monumental figurative sculpture from the artist's Sovereign Series recently on view at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.

Based in New York throughout his career, Al Loving (1935–2005) was a pioneer of postwar abstract painting. The first Black artist to receive a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art (in 1969), Loving initially received acclaim for his hard-edge geometric compositions of dense crystalline lattices, experimental color relationships, and illusionistic cubic volumes. In the 1970s, however, Loving decisively abandoned this approach and adopted an entirely new approach to abstraction. Cutting and tearing painted canvases (and later, painted paper) into strips, Loving would reassemble these colorful fragments into decentralized, unframed compositions whose expansive presence is at once enveloping and profound.

Born in Penjamo village, a Yaqui settlement in Scottsdale, Arizona, Mario Martinez (b. 1953) is an enrolled member of the Pascua Yaqui Tribe of Arizona. Inspired by the Abstract Expressionists of the New York School, Martinez paints large-scale abstractions reminiscent of the turbulent compositions of Arshile Gorky or Willem de Kooning. In his work—composed of vaporous fields of color fit together into hypnotic configurations—Martinez withholds overt references to his Yaqui cultural traditions: “I know people expect figuration from Natives,” he says, but abstraction “has been in Indian and Indigenous cultures forever.” On view in the gallery’s presentation is a large-scale painting from 2024.

A Chicago-based artist, Gladys Nilsson (b. 1940) first rose to prominence in 1966 as one of the original members of the Hairy Who (along with fellow Art Institute of Chicago Graduates Jim Falconer, Art Green, Jim Nutt, Suellen Rocca, and Karl Wirsum). Celebrated for her densely layered and meticulously constructed watercolors and collages, Nilsson populates her joyful, surreal scenes with a bombastic, ever-evolving cast of characters. Dancing, singing, applying makeup, or eating cake, these long-limbed figures cluster and mass in a range of enigmatic scenarios, invoking themes of femininity and domesticity, gender and sexuality, beauty and the grotesque. A full-scale retrospective of Nilsson’s work will open summer of next year at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, California.

Howardena Pindell (b. 1943) is a New York-based artist born in Philadelphia. A key member of a small group of Black abstract painters, including Jack Whitten, Al Loving, and Sam Gilliam, Pindell pioneered a multifaceted art practice that fused deeply political commitments with a rigorous inquiry into the medium of painting. At the Armory, the gallery presents one of the artist’s signature works: Untitled #20 (For Masa: Lavender Lotus). For this piece, the artist gathers thousands of hole-punched paper circles and collages these units into densely material surfaces that at once summon the seriality, systems, and grids of conceptual art and evoke richly personal associations.

Fritz Scholder (1937–2005) was an enrolled member of the Luiseño tribe. A major influence for generations of Native artists, Scholder is best known for a groundbreaking series of paintings from the 1960s and 1970s that brought the artist lifelong notoriety and fame. Meant to combat sentimental cliches of Native subjects, these unsparing works—brutally depicting scenes of alcoholism, poverty, and cultural subjugation—provoked criticism not just from the public at large but from his own Native community. “People say that I must hate Indians since I sometimes paint them as monsters,” Scholder wrote in 1973. “But I paint what I see, faces reflecting the torment in the minds of Indians today, torment resulting from the impositions on them of contemporary American society.”