This year’s 36th edition of The Art Show at the Park Avenue Armory leans heavily into painting — but its 75 exhibitors, all members of the Art Dealers Association of America, still manage to bring a little something for everyone, from a booth full of Charles White paintings and drawings (Michael Rosenfeld, D16) to a Richard Diebenkorn gouache that looks like a red and blue Ace of Clubs (Van Doren Waxter, B2). Not every booth’s a winner, but many are terrific, and since your admission fee directly benefits the Henry Street Settlement on the Lower East Side, you can feel good about going: Since 1989, the fair has raised more than $37 million.
Ortuzar (A10)
The earnest, only slightly unnerving self-portrait in this solo booth shows the reclusive midcentury artist Maybelle Stamper as a young woman studying at the Art Students League in 1933. But the rest of the display, all works on paper, gets stranger and more interesting. Lithographs in which round, netsuke-like heads float on moth wings or bump into unattached breasts mingle with tangled lines, invented not-quite-alphabets and more peculiar faces staring just over your shoulder.
In this sand-colored exhibition of work by three women, the designs on Ruth Laskey’s delicate, hand-woven linens evoke sigils from the Maghreb and a small brass hanging by Ruth Asawa hits above its weight. But the stars are three abstract terra cotta sculptures by Adaline Kent (1900-1975), which loosely resemble a planter, a vase and an adobe dollhouse. Stocky but somehow soaring, they’re hard to parse but just as hard to look away from.