Innholdsfortegnelse for December/January 2021-22 i ARTnews

musician Lucrecia Dalt Electronic musician, creator of new album No era sólida Remedios Varo, La Llamada (1961) I like Surrealism a lot but, in the case of La Llamada, I feel like there’s something very sophisticated that makes it surreal but in a different way—not dreamlike or impossible but maybe related to another state of consciousness in the world or some kind of supreme magical mind. Every work by Remedios Varo is like a whole story that poses so many questions about the condition of being a woman. In this case, it’s this woman in the middle of a claustrophobic space that has some power of vision within the walls. But then she becomes the center of it with the super-luminosity that she has. musician Steve Gunn Songwriter/guitarist, creator of…

After being named creative director of UTA Artist Space in 2019, Arthur Lewis, an avid collector of work by emerging and in-demand artists, set out to build an ecosystem in Hollywood supportive of incisive storytelling. One of the first shows he orchestrated, in collaboration with Mariane Ibrahim, was “Disembodiment,” which introduced then rising stars Vaughn Spann, Marcus Jahmal, Jonathan Lyndon Chase, and Clotilde Jiménez. The lauded exhibition has since been followed by Pamela Council’s buzzy installation Blaxidermy Pink and a digital presentation by Osaze Akil Stigler. A former merchandising executive for the Gap clothing brand, Lewis now helps budding collectors build their own holdings around young local and international artists. As a board member at the Hammer Museum and the Studio Museum in Harlem, he’s also positioned to influence policy…

Peering into a future we have since experienced all too clearly, Naomi Beckwith wrote, in a 2014 essay for Frieze, “the art world’s still-active fantasies of an ahistorical space—a white cube untouched by the social strife outside it—will be continuously disrupted by a recurring nightmare of violence and exploitation until we all do some serious social work.” Years before demands for accountability in museums broke through to the mainstream in the summer of 2020, Beckwith saw ahead to increasingly foregrounded demands for an overhaul of the art world’s exclusivity. Beckwith’s clairvoyant perspective reflected her attunement to how museum spaces are obligated to multiple publics, not simply an in-crowd, and articulated the convergence of the art world and wider social spheres that she has followed through every step of her graceful…

Christine Y. Kim began her career as a writer in the education department at the Whitney Museum of American Art alongside fellow heavyweights Franklin Sirmans and Lisa Dent. In 2000 she rose up the ranks from curatorial assistant to associate curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem under the tutelage of Lowery Stokes Sims and Thelma Golden. While there she worked on seminal presentations including “Freestyle” (2001), “Black Belt” (2003), and Henry Taylor’s first solo museum show (2007). Later, working between New York City and Los Angeles, Kim worked on exhibitions for Kehinde Wiley, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, and Otobong Nkanga. During this time Kim also established the Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND), a nonprofit that orchestrated temporary public art projects. By 2009 she was an associate curator at the Los Angeles…

In 2019 the San Francisco Arts Commission selected artist Lava Thomas’s design for a public monument to the poet Maya Angelou—only to have the proposal rejected by the project’s legislative sponsor, Catherine Stefani. For many community members, the about-face exemplified the systemic suppression and erasure of Black women’s voices in service of whiteness. A movement formed to demand accountability, led by See Black Womxn, a collective of artists, activists, and writers raised on Black feminist theory. Founders Tahirah Rasheed, Angela Hennessy, Dana King, and Jamani Montague launched a campaign to “Abolish White Supremacy at SFAC” and issued calls to see, hear, trust, love, protect, and pay Black women. These values figure in the imperative mantra of See Black Womxn, which has continued to advocate for the well-being of Black women…

With more than two decades of nonprofit and private-sector experience, Isolde Brielmaier now brings her nontraditional and forward-thinking methods as a curator and scholar to the New Museum as the institution’s recently appointed deputy director. After having served on the museum’s board of trustees since 2016, Brielmaier started her new role in September with a charge to administer marketing and communications strategies as well as audience experience for the institution and its cultural incubator, NEW INC. In addition to her work at the New Museum, Brielmaier has taught as an assistant professor of critical studies at New York University’s Tisch School in the Department of Photography, Imaging, and Emerging Media, and in 2020 she was named curator-at-large at the International Center of Photography. There, she curated “Tyler Mitchell: I Can…

Located in a former iron works factory in Red Hook, Brooklyn, Pioneer Works is an interdisciplinary art space and social hub founded in 2010 by artist Dustin Yellin for the “creation, synthesis, and discussion of art, science, and education.” Its emphasis on intellectual cross-pollination allows artists, scientists, and creative thinkers to work together on projects that fall “outside the boundaries of traditional institutions,” where such thinkers are too often expected to specialize at the expense of innovation. Core Pioneer Works offerings include a residency program that engages different disciplines (visual arts, music, narrative arts, and technology) through selections from an open call. Locally, the center is known for its robust programming and events calendar. Its signature “Second Sundays” series occurs on the second Sunday of every month, inviting the public…

It has become exceedingly easy to appreciate Garrett Bradley’s tender moving-image films, thanks to their appearance not only in major art institutions but also on big and small screens around the world. At the Sundance Film Festival, Bradley made waves with her documentary Time (2020), which won the artist an award for directing, making her the first Black woman to take the prize. The documentary’s heartrending narrative about activist Fox Rich’s repeated attempts to get her husband out of prison struck a chord with critics—and distributors. Amazon Studios shelled out $5 million—an unusually large sum for a documentary—to release the film theatrically, and Time wound up getting nominated for an Academy Award. That same year, the Museum of Modern Art in New York gave Bradley a solo show. Bradley’s work…

Founded by philanthropist, entrepreneur, and architect Sharon Chang, Future Guild of Architects calls itself “a home, refuge, and resource for people collaboratively shaping a kind, just, inclusive, and prosperous world.” Chang created the Guild to develop and further the emerging discipline of “future architecture” using the four frameworks: “Imagination/Narrative/Embodiment”; “5C: Curiosity, Curation, Coordination, Commitment, Creation”; “Agnostic Contextual Design”; and “Story/Rule/Money.” In order to “establish future architecture,” the Guild says, one must “first understand what it means to be a future architect.” With its 100-year plan, the Guild hopes to foster that understanding far and wide. The Guild sponsors annual meetings, local gatherings, and digital programming. There are also two separate incubator programs (a retreat-style “Flagship” incubator and a partnership-based “Specialty” incubator), learning programs including a Futurist Writers’ Room, workshops, and…

Since its founding in 1976, the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute has advocated for cultural equity, and racial and social justice for African descendants in New York and across the U.S. Founded by Marta Moreno Vega and presently under the management of executive director Melody Capote and curator-at-large Grace Aneiza Ali, the organization based in East Harlem has been a pioneer in advocating for historically marginalized communities through different kinds of programs and initiatives. Since 2014, their Innovative Cultural Advocacy Fellowship has helped mentor and train a significant number of BIPOC curators and educators. Similarly, the Afro-Caribbean Art Curatorial Fellowship continues the center’s goal to diversify art institutions, increase cultural equity, and connect the African diaspora by fostering networks at home and abroad, with a group of fellows for…

As part of the Walton Family Foundation, Olivia Walton has been instrumental in all the art activity that has made Arkansas a major hub for what classifies now as American art. Married to Tom Walton, a grandson of Sam and Helen Walton, she serves on the board of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and is chairperson of The Momentary, a satellite space for contemporary art in Bentonville, Arkansas. She is also a cofounder of the Heartland Summit, an event geared toward promoting economic growth in the American heartland, as well as the founder and managing partner of Ingeborg Investments, a venture capital portfolio focused on early-stage investment in women-led businesses.…

Ryan N. Dennis started her curatorial career working at prominent institutions including the Menil Collection and the New Museum, but joining the community-arts platform Project Row Houses (PRH) in 2012 was the move that allowed her practice to truly flourish. In her hometown of Houston, Texas, Dennis worked on more than a dozen “Artist Rounds”—a biannual event for which artists and community members in the Third Ward neighborhood collaborate on installations and programs—over her eight-year tenure as a curator and program director at PRH. Dennis started a new role in March 2020 at the Mississippi Museum of Art as chief curator and artistic director of the Center for Art & Public Exchange. Her first major project there, scheduled to open in April 2022 (and then travel to the Baltimore Museum…

Chicago native Theaster Gates has spent the last decade injecting new life into the vacant and underutilized spaces scattered across the city’s South Side. Since launching the Rebuild Foundation, an organization focused on sustainable cultural development and neighborhood revitalization, in 2010, the artist has worked with local communities to redefine their neighborhood as a hub for art. The area now plays home to such projects as the Stony Island Arts Bank, a disused community savings and loan that Gates repurposed for an exhibition space, library, and artist residency program; the Black Cinema House, which hosts screenings and discussions; and the Dorchester Art and Housing Collaborative, a former derelict housing project that now offers affordable housing for artists and their families. Even more projects are in the works, including an arts…

Rashida Bumbray is a curator, choreographer, and writer who, like so many of her distinguished peers, got her start as a curatorial assistant and exhibition coordinator at the Studio Museum in Harlem, before moving on to bigger roles (but not before establishing a jam-session event at the museum for tap dancers). She worked as a curator at the Kitchen, the performing-arts center in Chelsea, where she contributed to projects with Simone Leigh, Kyle Abraham, and others, as well as Creative Time, for which she guest-curated the 2014 show “Funk, God, Jazz, and Medicine: Black Radical Brooklyn.” Bumbray is now director of culture and art for Open Society Foundations, a grant-making enterprise founded by George Soros that is active in more than 120 countries and focused on “work to build vibrant…

Working at the intersection of art and journalism, Josué Rivas describes himself first as a storyteller. Being intentional about who controls the narrative is fundamental to his approach as an Indigenous Otomi and Mexica photographer, especially as he often documents movements as an outsider, from Black Lives Matter demonstrations to the Sioux-led Dakota Access Pipeline protests. Rivas works to resist centuries of harmful representation of Indigenous communities, advocating in his roles as an artist and educator for Indigenous authorship. His photobook Standing Strong, which won the 2018 FotoEvidence Book Award, reflects a seven-month stay at Oceti Sakowin camp at Standing Rock, North Dakota, during which he connected with Indigenous leaders to portray their opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline as not just a protest but also a spiritual awakening. More…

Amplifier is a nonprofit design lab that commissions and distributes “free and open source” poster art with a mission of “reclaiming an American identity rooted in equality, dignity, diversity, truth, and beauty” while dispelling the “chaos and negativity of this polarizing time.” Founded by photographer Aaron Huey and led by CEO Cleo Barnett, the organization claims to reach 20 million viewers per campaign, using savvy ad buys, public placement, classroom mailings, and an open-source model that allows the public to use the art made available however they please—on social media, for example, or protest signs. Amplifier’s 2017 “We the People” campaign distributed 700,000 images combating bigotry and hatred ahead of Inauguration Day for Donald Trump. The campaign featured work by activist-artists Shepard Fairey, Ernesto Yerena, and Jessica Sabogal, and raised…

AFTER MEETING AT A NEIGHBORHOOD bar a little more than a decade ago, Rashid Johnson and Joel Mesler became such fixtures together on New York’s Lower East Side—where Johnson lived and Mesler owned a gallery—that one day Mesler half-jokingly said to his friend: “‘Look, man, we’ve got to divide Orchard Street properly.” Mesler decided that he would commandeer the thoroughfare two blocks south of Grand Street, while Johnson would take control of the blocks to the north. After quickly becoming the unofficial mayor of his zone, Johnson would “sit out on his porch, on the steps, and smoke cigarettes—and he just knew everybody,” Mesler recalled. For one so outwardly social, Johnson doesn’t seem to care much for small talk these days. Close friends and acquaintances alike describe him as measured…

Chicago has always been a driving force in the contemporary art market. Season after season there continues to be a strong demand for works by Chicago artists from all movements, including the Harry Who? and the Chicago Imagists. Contemporary artists originating in the Chicago art scene since the 1960s displayed a creative excellence that continues to resonate with bidders across the city and the world. Hindman, Chicago’s auction house since 1982 has shown distinguished expertise in presenting these artists’ work with new global records being set for artworks by Jim Nutt, Gladys Nilsson, Roger Brown, Karl Wirsum, Barbara Rossi, Joseph E. Yoakum and Ray Yoshida, among many others. “As someone who has spent my life immersed in the Chicago art scene and has been privileged to bring remarkable examples of…

YELAINE RODRIGUEZ is an interdisciplinary artist and curator who received a B.F.A. from the New School and an M.A. from NYU. Her curatorial portfolio includes exhibitions at NYU, the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute, and the New School. She has also exhibited at El Museo del Barrio, Mexic-Arte Museum, Photoville, IPCNY, American Museum of Natural History, El Centro Cultural de España, and Centro León Biennial in the Dominican Republic. SUMMER SLOANE-BRITT is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU. She has held roles at the National Gallery of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She received a B.A. from Swarthmore College in art history, and sociology and anthropology. MELISSA SMITH is a writer based in Brooklyn. She graduated from NYU…

Whose Truth, Whose Creativity? is an expert analysis of both neuroscience and art theory—this new book delves into the source of all art and creativity, from ancient cave paintings to contemporary art. It explores why postmodern art theory has had a damaging impact on the art world and explains how neuroscience can prove this. Does talent spring, as Paul Cézanne would have you believe, from our unconscious mind? Or does it, as Marcel Duchamp theorized, come from conceptual thinking at the conscious level? Cognitive neuroscientific psychology, a fairly new field of psychology, explains a natural, mental basis for human creativity. One of the intentions of this book is to expose—in no uncertain terms—the many falsehoods and distortions of postmodern reasoning and to demonstrate how, by following this disturbing, unnatural direction…

Hank Willis Thomas, the guest editor of this Deciders issue of ARTnews, is an artist whose practice is so wide-ranging that it resists easy summary. He makes art in a variety of mediums (photography, sculpture, collage) and materials (recent work renders images of protests as screenprints on retroreflective vinyl). From the beginning of his career, he has been inverting recognizable branding and advertising messaging and imagery, using it to direct viewers’ attention to troubling aspects of the world we live in. A classic example is his photograph Priceless #1 from 2004, a spoof of a Mastercard ad with these words running across an image of the funeral of his cousin Songha Willis Thomas: “3-piece suit: $250; new socks: $2; 9mm pistol: $80; gold chain: $400; bullet ¢60; Picking the perfect…

Throughout her career, Lauren Halsey has maintained the aura of her humble South Central Los Angeles upbringing based in a grassroots concern for her neighborhood while carving out a new space in the art world. As her gallerist David Kordansky said, “The DNA of her practice is the notion of the local. She embraces regionalism but as a positive connotation. Lauren is exploring L.A. as a place, a site, a demographic, a geography.” Like Ed Ruscha, who has chronicled the city since 1956, Halsey is a documentarian of shared experiences in her community, and she has encapsulated the language, energy, and emotionality of the place in her artwork as well as the service work she is doing as an outgrowth of the love she has for her home. With her…

Another reason to love a city already so rich in culture, Prospect New Orleans is a contemporary art triennial that has been hosting world-class artists since the opening of its first edition in 2008. This year’s “Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow,” which opened in October and runs into January, was curated by artistic directors Naima J. Keith and Diana Nawi, both of whom were already important figures in their own right. Keith is the vice president of education and public programs at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and previously worked as the deputy director and chief curator at the California African American Museum. Nawi was an associate curator at the Pérez Art Museum Miami before becoming an independent curator; she has worked on exhibitions for artists including Nari…

In March 2020, the feminist activist-artist Michele Pred issued a call to female-identifying artists everywhere to permanently raise their prices by 15 percent as part of the ambitious initiative called the Art of Equal Pay. A data specialist working with the project placed the current price differential between male and female artists on the primary market between 14 and 19 percent, so Pred settled on 15—with encouragement for the price increase to go into effect on March 31, Equal Pay Day, a day that indicates how far into the following year women must work in America to earn what men take in by December 31. Pred had planned for a year of public activations and fundraising, but only weeks into the initiative, the world went into lockdown. So programming pivoted…

When Kabelo Malatsie was named director in 2021 of the Kunsthalle Bern, a storied museum in Switzerland, the news was regarded with some degree of surprise, given Malatsie’s unusual path to one of Europe’s most beloved contemporary art museums. Unlike most leaders of European Kunsthalles, who cut their teeth in experimental art spaces and gradually rise up the ranks by organizing international biennials, Malatsie got her start in the gallery world. From 2011 to 2016, she worked at Stevenson, a prominent South African gallery with spaces in Cape Town and Johannesburg. Then she completed a master’s degree at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, where she focused on independent South African art spaces, and went on to lead the Visual Arts Network of South Africa, an artists’ rights group with…

Ceyenne Doroshow likes to say that GLITS (Gays and Lesbians Living in a Transgender Society) is all about “community taking care of community.” Doroshow founded the organization in 2015 as a grassroots hub to connect transgender people and sex workers with crisis support and health and housing services—fundamental needs that many LGBTQ+ nonprofits are unable to fill quickly. During the pandemic, the urgency of these requests only grew, and in turn the compassionate, charismatic Doroshow redoubled her efforts to provide care for her community, raising money on social-media platforms to bail LGBTQ+ people out of prisons overwhelmed by severe Covid-19 outbreaks. The initial success of the bail campaign soon snowballed into unprecedented visibility and support for GLITS, and by the time Doroshow took the mic at a widely attended Brooklyn…

Over the past decade, E. Carmen Ramos has been quietly—and then with a crash and a bang—altering and reconstructing notions of what constitutes American art. From 2010 until earlier this year, she was a curator focusing on Latinx art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., where she presented two landmark exhibitions: 2014’s “Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art,” highlighting important artistic contributions of Latinx artists to artmaking in the U.S., and 2021’s “¡Printing the Revolution! The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics, 1965 to Now,” a testament to her having expanded the museum’s holdings of Chicanx works on paper by some 300 percent. Then, this past May, Ramos was appointed the chief curatorial and conservation officer for the National Gallery of Art. “We’re deeply committed…

If you love art and spend any time online, you know Kimberly Drew, who, for close to a decade, has cultivated her singular voice as @museummammy. A writer, curator, and organizer, Drew has been a forceful proponent of Black cultural production since the heyday of Tumblr, where she amplified Black artists on her blog Black Contemporary Art. As the former social media manager at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she advocated for greater accessibility, equity, and community representation. Drew left the institutional world in 2019 to work on her own terms. She published This Is What I Know About Art in 2020, a youth-focused guide to art, protest, and empowerment. Then came Black Futures, a vital collection (coedited with Jenna Wortham) of texts and images about Black culture that asks:…

Linda Goode Bryant—who several decades earlier founded the legendary New York gallery Just Above Midtown—got to thinking in 2008 about a food crisis that impacts the whole world. She didn’t know much about how to grow food herself, but she knew she wanted to get involved. The result was Project EATS, a New York–based organization devoted to distributing edible resources in underserved neighborhoods. Working within a tradition more closely associated with activist groups, Project EATS has in the past year brought food to residents in the predominantly Black Brooklyn neighborhood of Brownsville and the largely Latinx Belmont district in the Bronx. The project’s offerings tend not to look like art, though they have periodically been exhibited as such. In his “Social Works” show at Gagosian gallery earlier this year, Antwaun…

American lawyer and activist Chase Strangio has been at the center of recent milestones advancing trans rights in the United States. A staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, Strangio has served on the legal teams for landmark cases that have led to impactful decisions on LGBTQ issues. He was among the lawyers in October 2019 who represented Aimee Stephens, a trans woman who was illegally fired from her job at a funeral home, in the U.S. Supreme Court case R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes Inc. v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. He was also on the legal team for a case involving Gerald Bostock, a gay man terminated from his job as an official in an Atlanta juvenile court system over discrimination on the basis of his sexual…

What does it mean to have the power of numbers? ARTNOIR is conscious of the power of collectivity and what a strong community and support system can signify to marginalized cultural producers like Black and Latinx artists. It takes a village to rectify the lack of diversity during a time of racial reckoning, and since 2013 this collective of seven friends has successfully united artists of color with collectors, curators, and their contemporaries, formulating a network that can be viewed as a sort of artistic family. Realizing the undeniable racial gap within the art world, the cofounders of ARTNOIR—Larry Ossei-Mensah, Carolyn “CC” Concepcion, Danny Báez, Isis Arias, Melle Hock, Jane Aiello, and Nadia Nascimento—took on the responsibility to bring visibility to underrepresented artists in their community. In the years since,…

After a high-profile run as the head of Creative Time, a public art organization that during her reign presented such works as Kara Walker’s A Subtlety in a disused sugar factory and Paul Chan’s Waiting for Godot in post-hurricane New Orleans, Anne Pasternak took her current position as director of the Brooklyn Museum. Since 2015, the historic institution inside a grand Beaux-Arts building has played home to some very contemporary and otherwise unorthodox shows, such as “KAWS: WHAT PARTY,” “Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams,” “Studio 54: Night Magic,” “Jacques-Louis David Meets Kehinde Wiley,” “Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving,” and “Something to Say: Brooklyn Hi-Art! Machine, Deborah Kass, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, and Hank Willis Thomas.”…

Jodi Archambault grew up on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota as a member of the Hunkpapa Standing Rock Sioux tribe before becoming an artist and policy adviser to former president Barack Obama. The beaded yoke dress she designed in 2005 using Adobe Illustrator featured prominently in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2015 exhibition “The Plains Indians: Artists of Earth and Sky” (and is now part of the museum’s permanent collection in the American Wing). “Adding our contemporary Native art to the American Wing is recognizing the people of today, the survivors of colonialism, and changing the narrative of how the Met sees America,” she said at the time. During her tenure at the White House, Archambault worked in roles including Special Assistant to the President for Native…

Christine Sun Kim’s Instagram profile image is a simple black-and-white icon: <0/. It’s a clever rendering of the sign for “deaf power,” representing a person covering an ear with one hand while the other forms a fist raised in the air. Inspired by the powerful simplicity of <0/, Kim and fellow deaf creative Ravi Vasavan (describing themselves as “passionate about Deafness and everything connected to it”) launched an online project in 2020 to promote it as a symbol of unity among deaf communities, using a website and Instagram page—both under the mantles deafpower.me—to share resources and build solidarity with the Black Lives Matter and Stop Asian Hate movements. As Deaf Power has become a burgeoning movement of its own, Kim has served as one of its main faces. The Berlin-based…

THERE IS SOMETHING reassuring about living in a city stretched along a lake. In Chicago, once you figure out where you are in relation to Lake Michigan, your sense of direction crystallizes. Streets snap against a grid whose point of origin is downtown at the intersection of State and Madison. Addresses increase or decrease from that center, with odd numbers on the south and east sides of the streets, and even numbers to the north and west. A longtime graphic designer who grew up here once told me that he could determine exactly where he was in the city just by looking at the addresses. That might seem mundane—and we do of course now have Google Maps—but I believe this sense of order in Chicago has a grounding effect in…

Born in Israel and based in New York, Naama Tsabar enlists aspects of sculpture, installation, architecture, and performance in interactive works that often involve music and sound. Her art aims to subvert gender norms related to matters of sound and space as both physical and conceptual entities, and her focus is rooted in forms ranging from large-scale objects to performance works of a more fleeting nature. Tsabar’s solo show “Perimeters” opened at the Bass museum in Miami in November and runs through April 17, 2022. She also recently presented a solo show at Goodman Gallery in London and made work for a group exhibition called “The Musical Brain” on the High Line in New York. What is your earliest memory? Mud. Where are you most content? In my lover’s arms.…

Jerica D. Wortham is a poet and the director of the Greenwood Art Project, a citywide public art installation comprising 30-plus projects to commemorate the 1921 Tulsa race massacre in Oklahoma. She is also the founder and director of J’Parlé Art Group Inc. I wasn’t trying to be revolutionaryI was just trying to say somethingTo share somethingBe something more than that moment It was for meI wasn’t trying to transform anyone’s lifeBut my ownBut then it happened I opened my mouthAnd there it wasArt Now it took me a minute to call it thisI hadn’t at that point considered myself an artistI was just a little black girl with big ole hair with something to sayDidn’t necessarily matter who listenedIt needed to be saidAnd then it happenedThe connectionSoul to soulBreath…

ARTnews: Let’s talk about the Deciders list. What was your first reaction to the invitation from ARTnews? Hank Willis Thomas: My first reaction was, “Oh, hell no, I’m not doing that! I don’t believe in lists!” The most important people are always left off or made to feel less important. I detest the thought. But then I flashed back to our first conversation 15 years ago when I was just getting started in the art world and decided that you were offering me a gift that I couldn’t refuse. It’s an honor and also an opportunity to embrace my hypocrisy. That’s something I am wanting to do nowadays. So, thank you. ARTnews: Lists can be vexing undertakings. Willis Thomas: Lists are very limiting. This list is incomplete. Almost none of…

In her roles as an independent curator, cultural strategist, artist, and organizer, Ashara Ekundayo creates spaces that invest in the artists she works with in the public and private sectors. These have included galleries in Oakland—her hometown for more than a decade—like the now shuttered Omi Gallery and Ashara Ekundayo Gallery, which between 2017 and 2019 exhibited works by Black women artists. Ekundayo also runs Artist as First Responder, a platform that supports artists whose practices heal and save lives. Through AAFR’s monthly online forum called Blatant, Ekundayo engages with cultural workers and archives their care solutions in zines. Ekundayo also cofounded Black [Space] Residency, a space for creatives from the African diaspora housed in the San Francisco Minnesota Street Project. By building infrastructure for those often working on the…

Cameroonian curator Koyo Kouoh was appointed executive director and chief curator of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town, South Africa, in 2019 after a successful stint as a curator on her own. Previously, she was the founding artistic director of the women-run independent art space RAW Material Company in Dakar, Senegal, and curator of the education program for London’s 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair. Kouoh was born in the port city of Douala, Cameroon, and moved as a teenager to Switzerland, where she went on to study business administration and banking. She started working as a curator, writer, and editor in Senegal in the 1990s. At the Zeitz, Kouoh tends to focus on the work of individual artists as opposed to group shows, which have often…

Despite its reputation as a bastion for architectural experimentation, the Museum of Modern Art in New York had never in its history organized an exhibition specifically devoted to Black artists working in the field until 2021. One person to thank for that change is architect and historian Mabel O. Wilson, who, with MoMA curator Sean Anderson, curated “Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America.” With works by Walter Hood, V. Mitch McEwen, and Amanda Williams, the show spotlighted various approaches to community-building in areas populated by African Americans and members of the African diaspora, and was labeled a breakthrough by figures such as architecture historian Jay Cephas, who remarked in Artforum that the show “stands to play a pivotal role in the critical discussions of race.” Wilson’s first thought for “Reconstructions”…

New York City is one of the world’s cultural capitals because of people like Margaret Morton. After joining as a program officer in 2015, Morton is now the director of creativity and free expression at the Ford Foundation, where she has recently been instrumental in the expansion of the Disability Futures initiative, a fellowship established in partnership with the Andrew Mellon Foundation that provides disabled artists, filmmakers, and journalists with $50,000 unrestricted grants. Previously, Morton was both deputy commissioner and general counsel to the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. There, she supervised arts and cultural program funding, restructured grant programs, and designed new models to support arts administrators. Morton has also managed capital campaigns for Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Brooklyn Academy of Music, and BRIC arts…

An associate professor of art history and African American studies at Harvard University, Sarah E. Lewis has been a key figure in rethinking how photography and other kinds of imagery inform the way people—and Black people in particular—navigate the world we live in today. Her thinking manifests in her scholarship but also through her groundbreaking Vision & Justice project, an expansive, education-focused initiative that has taken many forms. Among those is a course she teaches at Harvard and a special issue of the photography magazine Aperture that came out in 2016 and will soon become a book series to be coedited by Lewis, Leigh Raiford, and Deborah Willis for Random House’s One World imprint. The volumes in the series, to be published beginning in 2024, will “consider all the different…

After making his name as a curator at the storied Los Angeles nonprofit space LAXART, César García-Alvarez set out with artist Glenn Kaino to create an alternative model to support artists that led to the creation of the Mistake Room, which opened in 2014. “We’ve always thought about our program as creating exhibitions for an audience that doesn’t yet exist, that people will appreciate in retrospect,” said García-Alvarez, who serves as the Mistake Room’s executive and artistic director and has also been a cocurator for the Made in L.A. and Desert X biennials. Among pivotal Mistake Room exhibitions are early showings of Vivian Suter and Ed Clark, years before major galleries began to represent them. And the Mistake Room’s curatorial team aims to explore thematic questions over an extended length…

The Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) is an imposing structure, with a large glass facade and a spacious concrete plaza in front. But as the newly appointed director of Spain’s most important museum for contemporary art, Elvira Dyangani Ose wants to make MACBA more welcoming. Known primarily for surveys of European conceptual artists whose works go heavy on documentation, MACBA, as Dyangani Ose envisions it, will become more global in its scope by presenting offerings intended for new and wider audiences. “We are being extremely self-critical of the way that the apparatus of the museum works,” said Dyangani Ose, who is the first woman and the first Black person to lead MACBA. Prior to joining MACBA this past summer, Dyangani Ose led the Showroom, an alternative space in London…

Kristin Sakoda is ushering the cultural sector in Los Angeles into a new era after overseeing the Los Angeles County Arts Commission’s recent transition to a full-fledged department, for which she serves as director. With a law degree from New York University, the attorney-turned-arts-executive has brought to L.A. experience as commissioner and general counsel at the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the largest municipal funder of the arts in the U.S. It was there that Sakoda led a range of strategic and policy initiatives in New York City’s cultural circuit, including spearheading capital campaigns for cultural facilities, commissioning public art, and securing affordable working spaces for artists. In L.A., she is now leading the city’s initiatives around issues relating to access and inclusion as well as recovery from…

Since her time as a curator at the Whitney Museum in the 1980s and ’90s, Thelma Golden has been instrumental in helping usher a generation of Black artists to the fore, simultaneously honoring the plurality of Black art and refusing the peripheral attention offered by too many institutions. Since joining the Studio Museum in Harlem as deputy director in 2000, Golden has been almost peerless in continuing to shape the increasing centrality of Black modern and contemporary artists. Alongside Lowery Stokes Sims, Golden’s mission in her early years with the museum focused on diasporic inclusivity, highlighted by the inclusion of numerous young artists from the United States and abroad. But rather than reading Golden’s impact solely from the perspective of championing Black expression, it is important to note how she…

The New Orleans–based organization BreakOUT! works in line with a mission statement that “envisions a city where transgender, gender non-conforming, and queer youth of color can live without fear of harassment and discrimination.” Taking cues from “the rich cultural tradition of resistance in the Deep South,” the group raises money for individuals—such as those helped by its Trans Defense Fund—while also partnering with fellow activist organizations and presenting programming, workshops, and coalition-building exercises—such as “healing nights and pillowtalks for LGBTQ communities” under the name Healing as Resistance Together (HART).…

When Danyelle Means was named executive director of the Center for Contemporary Arts (CCA) in Santa Fe, New Mexico, this past summer, she became the first Indigenous person to lead the multidisciplinary institution that mounts exhibitions and hosts a renowned film program. She also established an elemental goal. “I want to come up with exhibitions that foster a sense of inclusivity rather than a narrow vision of what contemporary art can be,” Means said of her vision for CCA. “The position will allow for me to change things from within.” An enrolled member of the Oglala Lakota Nation of South Dakota, Means grew up on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota. Several of her family members were involved in the American Indian Movement in the 1970s. “Activism was a way…

When Nicole Fleetwod’s exhibition “Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration”opened in 2020 at MoMA PS1 in New York, the show seemed to be all that anyone was talking about. Critic Johanna Fateman was among the show’s biggest fans, writing in the New Yorker that it was “hard to imagine a show more essential.” And the exhibition and a related book published by Harvard University Press figured in Fleetwood’s winning a MacArthur fellowship in 2021. Though “Marking Time” included some non-incarcerated artists, Fleetwood, who is now a professor at NYU, organized the show with the aim of highlighting an often-invisible crop of artists who have produced creations while in prison. Many of the artists Fleetwood featured—among them Jesse Krimes, Ronnie Goodman, Tameca Cole, Russell Craig, and Gilberto Rivera—were…

The granddaughter of Israeli-American billionaire benefactors Ted and Lin Arison, Sarah Arison represents a new generation of philanthropists in the arts. Based in New York, she now runs the family-founded Arison Arts Foundation as well as YoungArts, an enterprise established by her grandmother in 2005 to provide funding and mentorship to teenage artists. Entrance into the organization begins with a competitive application process for U.S. high school students, who are selected by a panel of artists (many of whom were YoungArts recipients themselves). In addition to heading the family organizations, Arison was appointed board chair of MoMA PS1 in 2020, adding to an already impressive resume of board memberships that include the Museum of Modern Art and Americans for the Arts. In her multiple roles on the MoMA board, she…