[2][20] She was hired as senior curator by the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego in 1996, and organized twelve exhibitions there, including four touring shows with major publications.
[6][27][28] Armstrong's curatorial work and leadership has been recognized for guiding contemporary museums through change, growth and a rethinking of their cultural roles in relation to local communities, new audiences and the wider art world.
[29][1] "First Impressions" (1989) documented the growth of printmaking in the United States over the previous 30 years, using diverse work by Lynda Benglis, Helen Frankenthaler, Bruce Conner and Larry Rivers and later artists Carroll Dunham, Elizabeth Murray and Donald Sultan; New York Times critic William Zimmer called the show "an especially clear statement on the origins of the contemporary art world," accompanied by a catalogue filled with now-classic images and rich quotations.
[34][35][36] During Armstrong's tenure at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (MCASD), she organized several notable exhibitions with an increasingly cosmopolitan focus.
"Ultrabaroque: Aspects of Post-Latin American Art" (2000, curated with Victor Zamudio-Taylor) featured 80 diverse works made in the prior decade years by sixteen, far-flung, mainly younger artists (e.g., Miguel Calderón, Maria Fernanda Cardoso, Adriana Varejão, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle).
"[44][10][46] In 2006, OCMA offered a sprawling, cosmopolitan biennial organized under six loose themes that Artforum wrote, broke from prevailing trends or labels for a "breath of fresh West Coast air.
"[11][47][48] Armstrong's OCMA shows that traveled widely included "Girls' Night Out" (2003), which presented two generations of groundbreaking photography, video and performance by women taking more evocative and poetic approaches to female identity, and "Villa America: American Moderns, 1900-1950" (2005), which drew on the extensive private collection of Minneapolis businessman Myron Kunin to explore the evolution of early American modernism in relation to French art and popular culture.
[49][50][51] The latter exhibition was the first museum show devoted to Kunin's collection, which Armstrong became familiar with while at the Walker; it presented an eclectic mix of well-known (Stuart Davis, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O'Keeffe) and more obscure artists, such as Peter Blume, Jared French, Morton Schamberg and Paul Tchelitchew.
[5][17] During her tenure at the Palm Springs Art Museum, Armstrong launched highly visible exhibitions including "Women of Abstract Expressionism" (2017), "Albert Frey and Lina Bo Bardi: A Search for Living Architecture" (2017), "Kinesthesia: Latin American Kinetic Art, 1954-1969" (2017), "Andy Warhol: Prints from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation" (2018) and "Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist.