This year’s edition of the Salon Art + Design fair at the Park Avenue Armory is back with 54 galleries, five special exhibitions and new leadership.

The fair, which brings together objects and installations that blur the lines between art and utility has a distinct mission this year: to address the obstacles that have kept many people out of creative fields. Its new director, Nicky Dessources, who is looking to expand the representation of artists — particularly people of color — and connect with other communities: there is a partnership with the Dia Art Foundation and a benefit to support that art institution’s programs as well as a new Design & Art Advisory Council to build ties between the various players in the art and design fields. What matters for most of us, though, is what you see in a fair, and this edition offers quite a lot to appreciate. Here are some highlights.

Ippodo Gallery (Booth B4)

The natural world often plays a starring role in Japanese art and design. At New York’s Ippodo Gallery, that can be as wild as the force of a tsunami, which inspires the origami-styled ceramics of Yukiya Izumita. Ikuro Yagi, who has an exhibition in the gallery, also has a gorgeous, serene painting made with trees painted on squares of mulberry paper and collaged onto a surface with sliding doors that recalls Japanese screens. Also here are Kodai Ujiie’s exceptional ceramics, which use nature’s imperfections as a springboard for creating surfaces that bubble and crackle and crawl. Here, the vessel is treated like a body and the glaze like skin that is living, breathing, and perfectly imperfect.

Elisabetta Cipriani (Booth B6)

Next door to Ippodo, the London gallerist Elisabetta Cipriani specializes in “wearable art,” which means jewelry that transcends jewelry, I guess. Some of the pieces are jaw-dropping, such as a whirling Frank Stella sculpture shrunken to the size of a chunky gold ring, or some crazy golden lips by the sculptor Jannis Kounellis. A homage to the natural world stands out though: Michele Oka Doner’s bronze casts of little tree branches sprinkled with old cut diamonds — basically, recycled diamonds rather than newly mined ones — to look like frost or dew. Spooky and poetic, they offer an interesting way to think about denuded branches as winter approaches.