2024 was a bustling year for art in New York, with blockbuster exhibitions at museums, museum-level shows at galleries — especially a few new, nearly museum-sized galleries in Tribeca, the city’s reigning art hub — and nonprofits and artist-run spaces presenting some fresh faces and engaging programming. Art censorship also came to the fore this year as we got a glimpse into the interests and politics of museums, but despite it all, there was so much great art to see. It was hard for Hyperallergic’s staff and contributors to compile our favorites with so many strong shows to choose from, but below are the ones that made us think, nourished our souls, introduced us to under-recognized artists, cultures, or histories, and most of all, just blew us away. —Natalie Haddad, Reviews Editor
Joyce Kozloff: Collateral Damage
DC Moore Gallery, January 6–February 3, 2024
Organized by the gallery
I arrived on the last day of this beautiful exhibition to find a series of map works by the veteran of the Pattern & Decoration movement. Kozloff turned each graphic into a rich surface teeming with danger, cultural memory, and possibilities. Joyce Kozloff demonstrates how painting continues to be a point of conflict — not only in art but in the way we see the world or, as we’re bombarded with information, the way we refuse to look away. —Hrag Vartanian
Apollinaria Broche: In the distance there was a glimpse
Marianne Boesky Gallery, January 24–March 2, 2024
Organized by the gallery
A moving display of whimsical ceramic and bronze sculptures that seem to have stepped out of someone’s dreamspace. There’s a sense of romanticism throughout Apollinaria Broche’s art and in this show an eerie pop soundtrack helped to transport the viewer into a space of wonder. The title was swiped from Frances Hodgson Burnett’s 1911 children’s book The Secret Garden. It is a good choice as it captures the spirit of awe, tinged with fragility, that was very much a part of this show. I still think about it, not only for the wistful figures and plants that appear to be on the verge of almost disappearing, but for that spirit. —HV
Medieval Money, Merchants, and Morality
The Morgan Library & Museum, November 10, 2023–March 10, 2024
Curated by Diane Wolfthal and Deirdre Jackson
This unexpectedly in depth exhibition focused on the culture of money in the European Medieval and early Renaissance eras, and included numismatic displays, old manuscripts, prints by Albrecht Dürer, paintings by Fra Angelico, Jan Gossaert, Hans Memling, and even Hieronymus Bosch’s riveting “Death and the Miser” (c. 1485–90) on loan from the National Gallery of Art in DC. The Morgan did a fantastic job of introducing the culture of commerce and early capitalism without falling for clichés. I left this show understanding the complexity of money and its role not only in life but in the art of the era. —HV
Richard Mosse: Broken Spectre
Jack Shainman Gallery, January 12–March 16, 2024
Organized by the gallery
This exhibition was the soft launch of Jack Shainman Gallery’s new space by City Hall, and it seemed perfectly in tune with a collective desire these days for spaces that allow the viewer to reflect and process the world around them through art. Irish artist Richard Mosse gave us a multi-channel exploration of the environmental devastation in the Amazon. The visuals were gorgeous even when we were faced with the anger of a young Indigenous woman who will not let you forget your privilege as consumers of her resources. —HV
Aki Sasamoto: Point Reflection
Queens Museum, December 6, 2023–April 7, 2024
Organized by Hitomi Iwasaki, Head of Exhibitions/Curator
Aki Sasamoto’s wacky humor about the drudgeries of middle-class life reached peak existentialism in her first museum exhibition. The show played a sneaky trick on viewers: Sure, you get amused by installations showing Magic Eraser cubes dancing in the air with snail shells, or by watching the artist crawl in and out of industrial pipes in her performances, but soon after leaving you struggle to push away the question: What kind of life am I living? —Hakim Bishara
Kay WalkingStick / Hudson River School
The New-York Historical Society, October 20, 2023–April 14, 2024
Curated by the artist and Wendy Nālani E. Ikemoto
It was fantastic to see Kay WalkingStick paired with the artists of the Hudson River School, because it allowed her art to be in direct dialogue with much of the imagery she has grappled with for decades. Juxtaposed with canvases by Asher B. Durand, Albert Bierstadt, and others, WalkingStick challenged us to question what is “objective” in the colonial gaze and how the lies of “manifest destiny” continue to infect our ideas of nature in North America and beyond. —HV
Jim Dine: The ’60s
125 Newbury, March 15–April 20, 2024
Organized by the gallery
Jim Dine’s career has gone through many changes since his first exhibition at the Reuben Gallery in the 1960s, where he also staged the performance “Car Crash” in 1960. Because of all these transformations, and the wide range of techniques he has mastered, from printmaking to drawing to painting to sculpture, not to mention his poetry, his art cannot be characterized. What would a retrospective of his work like, if it were to cast a backward gaze from the vantage point of 2025, when the artist, who shows no sign of slowing down, turns 90? These questions occurred to me when I saw this show, which revealed two aspects of the artist’s work that I had not fully grasped in the past. First, drawing was there from the beginning. Second, Dine believes physical labor and art making are essentially interchangeable. On Templon gallery’s website, he is quoted as saying: “When you paint every day, all year long, then the subject is essentially the act of working.” For Dine, there is neither a gap between art and life (as with Robert Rauschenberg) nor a disdain for labor (as with Andy Warhol). Dine’s belief in labor explains why many of his works project a sense of joy, as the sheer act of making is one that gives the artist pleasure. Many pleasures are to be found in Dine’s work, which is far more complex and varied than the art world has given him credit for. He attached objects to all 11 paintings in the exhibition (which also included two sculptures incorporating tools or workmen’s clothing and two pairs of drawings — one based on color charts, the other depicting a paintbrush). His commemorations of industriousness are at fundamental odds with the art historians, critics, and curators who have asserted that Pop Art is about boredom and picks up where Marcel Duchamp left off; he celebrates labor while eschewing commercial products and mechanical means. As the art world focused on erasing the hand from art and championed fabrication, Dine neither wavered from nor fetishized his belief in the bond between art and labor. —John Yau
Mira Schor: Wet
Lyles & King, March 27–May 4, 2024
Organized by the gallery
Over the last five decades, Mira Schor has forged a body of work rooted in feminist thought and encompassing its evolutions. The fact that her deceptively delicate rice-paper Dresses from the 1970s pulse with relevance today (and that her canvases from the past year, portraying faceless women in deeply hued expanses, are just as timeless) made this thematic survey an ambitious undertaking — and all the more thrilling to take in. The show captured visitors from the start with a salon-style hang of framed works at its entrance and a riveting selection of Schor’s expansive multi-paneled canvases, including “Pardon Me Ms.” (1989), in which an ear metamorphosing into a penis zooms through space like a projectile, inseminating a smaller ear with the liquid red stripes of the United States flag. Tender, funny, tough, and serious, WET was a spirited tribute to an artist’s living legacy. —Valentina Di Liscia
Beatrix Potter: Drawn to Nature
The Morgan Library & Museum, February 23–June 9, 2024
Curated by Philip Palmer
For many, the name Beatrix Potter will immediately evoke a whimsical, cozy world of personified bunnies gathering blackberries and getting tucked into bed by an apron-wearing Mrs. Rabbit, or a group of dapper toads at a tea party. But the universally cherished British children’s book author and illustrator was also a mycologist, botanist, and committed land preservationist, among other lesser-known roles brought to the forefront in this exquisite survey. The exhibition encompassed not only artworks from Potter’s most beloved tales, but also early sketches, letters, manuscripts, books, and photographs that radiated with her deep affection for the natural world. Carefully curated, the show was tender and heartfelt, but not the least bit cutesy. —VD
None Whatsoever: Zen Paintings from the Gitter-Yelen Collection
Japan Society, March 8–June 16, 2024
Curated by Tiffany Lambert; the presentation at Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, was curated by Bradley M. Bailey and Yukio Lippit
The collection of Alice Yelen Gitter and Kurt Gitter was a great introduction to zenga, which is what the painting associated with Japanese Zen Buddhism is called. Hakuin Ekaku, considered one of the most influential figures in the genre, was showcased with his excellent “Two Blind Men Crossing a Log Bridge” (18th century), which curator Yukio Lippit explained is one of the best known zenga works outside of Japan. Among the other works on display, a large cross section of scroll paintings highlighted the intellectual interests of Zen. This show was a great exploration of the themes that illuminate why the Japanese understanding of Zen continues to have wide appeal. —HV
Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946–1962
Grey Art Museum, March 2–July 20, 2024
Curated by Lynn Gumpert and Debra Bricker Balken
Starting at the end of World War II, more than 400 servicemen went to Paris to study art, subsidized by the G.I. Bill, including artists of color, as well as many women. As demonstrated by this landmark exhibition, this resulted in racial and gender diversity in Paris that was not mirrored in the ascending New York art world. Among the 70 artists included, viewers got to see early pieces by James Bishop, Norman Bluhm, Ed Clark, Ralph Coburn, Shirley Goldfarb, Carmen Herrera, Sheila Hicks, Shirley Jaffe, Kimber Smith, and Shinkichi Tajiri, all of whom went on to create singular bodies of work. With the exception of Herrera, who received a major exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight (September 16, 2016–January 9, 2017), curated by Dana Miller (though Herrera was more than 100 years old by then), the artists I listed deserve to be better known, even though not all of them returned to the United States or settled in New York. Being in Paris was instrumental for many, as they gained firsthand experience of different European traditions, from the chance operations of Hans Arp to the saturated colors of Henri Matisse. What this exhibition conveys is the cross pollination that took place in Paris after their eyes were opened to new possibilities. —JY
The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism
Metropolitan Museum of Art, February 25–July 28, 2024
Curated by Denise Murrell
At the Metropolitan Museum, curator Denise Murrell arranged an enlightening collection of artworks representing a pivotal cultural era following World War I: the Harlem Renaissance. The artistic, literary, and scholarly movement traversed Black America and beyond, with the namesake New York City neighborhood at its center. The exhibition posits Alain Locke, author of The New Negro, as a vanguard of the landmark movement, highlighting his philosophies on class and racial uplift alongside the movement’s prolific development of arts and literature. Borrowing from the repositories of Historically Black Colleges and Universities like Howard, Hampton, and Fisk, the exhibition is decorated with works revealing the day-to-day curiosities, experiences, and philosophies of 20th-century Black life, like Laura Wheeler’s pensive portraits and photographs by James van der Zee. “The Block” (1971) by Romare Bearden, offers a stretching view of a bustling Harlem street across six panels; Aaron Douglas’s massive canvases depict Black American history through grandiose, mythic visuals. Other collected works help make sense of sociocultural trends — like the Great Migration, famously represented by collagist Jacob Lawrence — giving a peek at, and helping conceptualize the larger ethos of, a burgeoning Black modernism. —Jasmine Weber
Video Works at the 2024 Whitney Biennial
Whitney Museum of American Art, March 20–August 11, 2024
Curated by Chrissie Iles, Meg Onli, Min Sun Jeon, and Beatriz Cifuentes
If anything stood out at this year’s Whitney Biennial, it was the videos. Artists including Sharon Hayes (Ricerche: four, 2024), Nyala Moon (“Dilating for Maximum Results,” 2023), and Penelope Spheeris (“I Don’t Know,” 1970) all showed works that navigated LGBTQ+ themes with nuance and humor, while Christopher Harris (Still/Here, 2001), Edward Owens (“Remembrance: A Portrait Study,” 1967), Diane Severin Nguyen (In Her Time (Iris’s Version), 2023–24), and many more explored racism, memory, and colonial histories, to name a few topics with which most of us can connect in some way. Hayes’s engrossing two-channel video installation had a homey feel, with mismatched chairs inviting visitors to listen to different generations of queer people in discussion (it’s a shame that the 60-minute film itself couldn’t be streamed on Mubi, like many of the videos). Other standout works included Seba Calfuqueo’s visually stunning “Tray Tray Ko” (2022), Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s poetic look at Suzanne Césaire, “Too Bright to See (Part I)” (2022), and Isaac Julien’s grand, room-sized installation Iolaus/In the Life (Once Again. . . Statues Never Die) (2022). While we all enjoyed works in various media, film and video really made this biennial. —NH
Painting Deconstructed
Ortega y Gasset Projects, May 18–August 24, 2024
Curated by Leeza Meksin
What is a painting? That was the question posed by this exhibition, answered spectacularly by 45 envelope-pushing artists from various backgrounds and disciplines. Their paintings jumped out of the walls, burst out of their frames, or cosplayed as sculptures. It was a remarkable feat by this artist-run gallery, and a joy to behold. —HB
Suchitra Mattai: We are nomads, we are dreamers
Socrates Sculpture Park, May 11–August 25, 2024
Curated by Kaitlin Garcia-Maestas
Half a year has passed since I visited Suchitra Mattai’s sculptures in Queens. They’ve been taken down, a chill has settled over the park where they once stood, and much has changed in both my life and the world around me. I still think about them every day. The Guyanese-American artist’s intuitive approach to line and color endowed these mirrored forms with a heartbeat. Woven from everyday saris that were previously worn and loved, they recall the ocean’s linkage to histories of Indo-Guyanese indentured labor and the shape of both South Asia and South America. The more time I spent with them, the more new interpretations they conjured. They could be coral reefs, clouds, continents, or creatures from another world, but one thing was certain: They were alive. —Lakshmi Rivera Amin
Pacita Abad
MoMA PS1, April 4–September 2, 2024
Curated by Ruba Katrib and Sheldon Gooch; the presentation at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, was curated by Victoria Sung and Matthew Villar Miranda
Filipina artist Pacita Abad was an empath, a roving intellectual, a truth-teller, a soul queen, a woman of the world. She journeyed between continents, visiting some 60 countries, to soak up local traditions and feel the pain of others on her skin. She stitched all these experiences into spellbinding quilt-like trapunto paintings, using everything from shells and beads to water bottle caps and toothpaste tubes. New Yorkers had a rare chance to see so many of her magnificent works in one place thanks to this unforgettable exhibition. —HB
LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity
Museum of Modern Art, May 12–September 7, 2024
Curated by Roxana Marcoci, Caitlin Ryan, and Antoinette D. Roberts
LaToya Ruby Frazier’s MoMA retrospective lived up to its title in many ways. Monumental in scale and scope, the exhibition, featuring works from across two decades of the artist’s career, asked big questions about the meaning and enactment of solidarity, and the reasons why it’s so deeply necessary in a world that feels ever more atomized. While many know the intimate black and white photographs Frazier has taken over the years in her Rust Belt hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania, they might be unaware of her three-act series on the Flint, Michigan, water crisis through the experiences of Shea S. Cobb, a poet, activist, and mother from the city; her moving collaboration with fellow artist Sandra Gould Ford focused on the racially segregated and dangerous realities of work inside the steel mills that once dominated the region where they both grew up; her steady and probing gaze as the final car left the line at the now-shuttered General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio; and her pilgrimage to capture the legacy of United Farmworkers Association co-founder Dolores Huerta. Viewers got a taste of how the artist builds intimacy, connection, and a shared sense of struggle with those she features and collaborates with in her work; we were also pushed to ask ourselves about our own community ties, and about where and when we would act for those with whom we live, work, and love. —Alexis Clements
Frank Walter: To Capture a Soul
The Drawing Center, June 21–September 15, 2024
Curated by Claire Gilman
To Capture a Soul packed in a lot. Along with dozens of the late Antiguan artist’s paintings and drawings, two walls and multiple vitrines displayed archival materials documenting his labyrinthine genealogy, which he had made efforts to trace; his professional life — in 1948 he became a rare person of color in a managerial position at the Antiguan Sugar Syndicate; his travels throughout the UK to study industrial technology; other creative outlets, including books and poetry; and the home studio he built later in life in rural Antigua. Although Walter’s aesthetic can evoke naive art, particularly in his simplistic renderings of the human figures that occasionally enter his imagery, he was no hobbyist. Creativity flowed through his veins, and he honed it whenever he had the chance. The archival materials were important context, but his mostly small landscape paintings are Walter’s great legacy. Thin layers of oils, often with visible brushstrokes adding texture, transform abstract color fields into idyllic realms — Antigua, Scotland — pared down to basic forms and awash in radiant color. In “Untitled (Lavender sky, black bird formation),” birds blackened by the dusk light soar in formation from a black landmass against a dark mauve sky, above a crimson sea. The painting holds Rothko and Turner in the balance, but that’s beside the point: It’s sublime on its own. In another work, among the archival materials and easy to miss, Walter created an entire bucolic landscape through nothing but strata of grayish white and grassy greens. His paintings are less to look at than to live within. —NH
Sonya Clark: We Are Each Other
Museum of Arts and Design, March 23–September 22, 2024
Organized by the Museum of Arts and Design; Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan; and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta
Sonya Clark has a unique ability to hack our culture by finding a contentious form that forces us to reconsider what we thought we already knew. Her “Monumental” (2019) project about the actual white dishcloth flag of surrender used by Confederate forces is a good example. She also frays Confederate flags in a way that makes them appear very fragile and vulnerable, while her work with Black hair is striking in the way that it renders a symbol of racist hierarchies into something that turns it into a beautiful object deserving careful attention. Each one of her projects was a delight to explore in this compact show that gracefully demonstrated her brilliance. —HV
Leon Golub: Et In Arcadia Ego
Hauser & Wirth, September 5–October 19, 2024
Conceived by Rashid Johnson
As I wrote in September, Golub’s art “aims at the gut more than the mind.” The paradox of this show is that these searing political works were all the more gutting because Hauser & Wirth — a blue-chip commercial gallery — has the means to showcase them properly (the up side is that commercial galleries are free to enter). Still, there’s nothing like the experience of being surrounded by these massive, vitriolic paintings from the 1980s, in a space that lets them breathe but allows them to feel monumental, even overwhelming. At the right time, they could be seen in relative solitude, and in those moments the paintings’ brute figures or crimson color fields seemed to teem with perverse energy. Golub’s art treads a fine line between condemning and fetishizing violence, and the mercenary paintings on view here may be his ultimate achievement. In this fairly intimate space they were visceral enough to bring their chilling realities of police brutality, war crimes, and torture — everyday events, then as now — up close, in all their nauseating grandeur. —NH
Nan Goldin: You never did anything wrong
Gagosian, September 12–October 19, 2024
Organized by the gallery
To be enraptured by art’s sublime beauty is the dream of anyone who’s tired of seeing things as they are. Nan Goldin had that experience in the palatial museums of Paris, where she began seeing the faces of friends and lovers from over the years in classical masterpieces portraying gods, nymphs, and satyrs. Her short film “Stendhal Syndrome” is an entrancing record of that episode. It was juxtaposed with “you never did anything wrong, Part 1” (both from 2024), a moving video work that gazes empathetically into the expressive eyes of animals during a total solar eclipse. Both films were a generous invitation to take part in a transcendental moment. —HB
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Caressing the Circle
Bitforms Gallery, September 4–October 26, 2024
Organized by the gallery
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer is always on the cutting edge of art and tech, but in this show his “Transparency Display” (2024), which he developed with his own “pixel glass” technology, suggested that he might be considering industrial uses for this attractive technology, potentially influencing the way we interact with windows. Lozano-Hemmer always sparks excitement and wonder in his projects, which often look like they emerged from an inventor’s laboratory. Always an innovator, his latest show was a welcome peek at the tinkering going on in his studio. More please. —HV
Manoucher Yektai: Landscapes
Karma Gallery, September 12–November 9, 2024
Organized by the gallery
Iranian-born Manoucher Yektai is the Abstract Expressionist who is in the midst of a comeback: his gestural paintings offer a fresh chapter of the story of the New York School that has floundered in obscurity for decades. In this exhibition, his rhythmic landscapes charted a journey from European-inflected modernism to more abstract compositions that distill the mid-20th century energy of post-World War II painting. Yektai’s best paintings are situated between legibility and pure abstraction, and always made with heaps of paint. —HV
Miatta Kawinzi: Numma Yah
Smack Mellon, September 28–November 17, 2024
Organized by Smack Mellon
Filmed in both Liberia and the US, “to trust the ground might free us (begin again)” (2024) is a moving short video that seems to wish for a world beyond flags and borders, one that heals as much as fractures. Artist Miatta Kawinzi brought a diasporic sensibility to ideas around space and belonging with this show, and transformed the Dumbo exhibition space into an otherworldly terrain that seemed to breathe with the rustle of fermenting ideas and connections. —HV
Auriea Harvey: My Veins Are the Wires, My Body Is Your Keyboard
Museum of the Moving Image, February 2–December 1, 2024
Curated by Regina Harsanyi
Any child of the early internet will find a lot of familiarity in digital artist and sculptor Auriea Harvey’s retrospective that spanned the aesthetics of the early World Wide Web to more immersive worlds that transport you either through screen or artifact. Unlike many other digital artists, Harvey demonstrates an emotional depth that connects her work to other eras through its storytelling or metaphors. The show was a real tribute to an artist at the height of her powers. —HV
Mandalas: Mapping the Buddhist Art of Tibet
Metropolitan Museum of Art, September 19, 2024–January 12, 2025
Curated by Kurt Behrendt
A stunning installation in the middle of the atrium in the Robert Lehman Wing of the Met Museum illustrates a thought in the process of becoming and dissipating. “Biography of a Thought” is artist Tenzing Rigdol’s atrium-size mandala bringing viewers on a journey through climate change, gun violence, and even George Floyd, as waves crash through the four sets of paintings. Throughout the installation, figures bear hand gestures that Rigdol calls “ASL [American Sign Language] mudras,” referencing natural elements and our own interdependence. Further into the exhibition, viewers are treated with a detailed view of mandalas — diagrams of the cosmos — from places like Tibet, Nepal, and China, spanning the centuries, along with physical objects, like the ritualistic vajra and a traditional trumpet, that would appear in mandalas. With 100 objects on display, plan to stay a while (it’s up into January 2025); this show rewards careful study of the various symbols, signs and images painted and woven into each mandala. —AX Mina
Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies
Brooklyn Museum, September 13, 2024–January 19, 2025
Curated by Dalila Scruggs, Catherine Morris, Mary Lee Corlett, Rashieda Witter, and Carla Forbes
Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary and All That It Implies succeeded at portraying the aesthetic brilliance and political depth of the distinguished artist’s work across a career of 50 years. The massive retrospective displays Catlett’s prints and sculpture depicting Black and Indigenous lives and struggles for liberation. Interactive spaces for immersion, play, and reflection follow the presentation of Catlett’s immense oeuvre. The exhibition provides didactic information to narrate the leftist politics and artistic traditions undergirding the artist’s consistent references to anti-imperialist and socialist movements as well as African and Mesoamerican artmaking traditions. The exhibition accurately historicizes Catlett as a Black American feminist artist adopted into a Mexican leftist community of artists, and a true renaissance woman whose artwork transcended both medium and national boundaries. —Alexandra M. Thomas
Edges of Ailey
Whitney Museum of American Art, September 25, 2024–February 9, 2025
Curated by Adrienne Edwards, Joshua Lubin-Levy, and CJ Salapare
Dance and visual art — two forms in close kinship but often treated as disparate — are considered anew in Edges of Ailey, a deeply moving curation of Black diasporic art anchored by the legacy of late choreographer Alvin Ailey. Despite its ambitious range of materials, this exhibition deftly stitches together artistic traditions from the diaspora and incorporates new works made specifically for the show by Karon Davis, Jennifer Packer, Mickalene Thomas, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. Some of my favorite moments during my visit were encounters with familiar works in new contexts, like the 1979 Bayou Fever collage series by Romare Bearden, a close friend and collaborator of the choreographer. Situated below a clip of performances orchestrated by Ailey, Bearden’s figures, too, seemed to dance. —LRA
Flow States – LA TRIENAL 2024
El Museo del Barrio, October 10, 2024–February 9, 2025
Curated by Rodrigo Moura, Susanna V. Temkin, and María Elena Ortiz
One of the anchor works of El Museo del Barrio’s triennial survey of Latine contemporary art this year is Esteban Cabeza de Baca’s “Seven circles” (2023), an 18-foot-long, multi-panel painting rendered in the artist’s idiosyncratic mode of landscape abstraction. In his vision of the US-Mexico border, he warps the region’s topographical features into a wormhole composition that dizzyingly collapses distinct spaces and times — a fitting and disconcerting image for the fate of immigrant communities at the brink of a second Trump presidency. Featuring 33 artists from around the world, this exhibition is filled with wildly inventive and truly original work, from Norberto Roldan’s haunting ziggurat-shaped altars to Magdalena Suarez Frimkess’s hand-crafted ceramics unexpectedly adorned with comic-book references. La Trienal’s curators seem to have figured out that you can’t change people’s minds or engage them in dialogue without first drawing them in, and this show does exactly that. —VD
Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now
Metropolitan Museum of Art, November 17, 2024–February 17, 2025
Curated by Akili Tommasino
Curator Akili Tommasino’s large show examines the reception of Ancient Egyptian art by Black artists. He placed Fred Wilson’s “Grey Area (Brown Version)” (1993) at the symbolic core of this show and then included a very wide range of artists, including Betye Saar, Renee Cox, Irene Clark, Damien Davis, Kara Walker, and EJ Hill, to illustrate the real impact of Egyptian art today. His exploration of the legacy of historical Egyptian art is a good reminder of how the spirit of one of the world’s oldest civilizations continues to resonate with those who can find empowerment in its imagery and stories. —HV
Vital Signs: Artists and the Body
Museum of Modern Art, Nov 3, 2024–Feb 22, 2025
Curated by Lanka Tattersall, Margarita Lizcano Hernandez, and Simon Ghebreyesus
Organized by Lanka Tattersall with Margarita Lizcano Hernandez, this exhibition avoids the splashy expectations of other exhibitions focused on the body, instead offering a more archival and cerebral take that explores absences and residues of the human form as much as its agency or volume. While some inclusions were expected, such as Jasper Johns’s “Painting Bitten By a Man” (1961) and Nancy Grossman’s “Untitled (Double Head)” (19171), others, like Blondell Cummings’s excerpt from “Commitment: Two Portraits” (1988) and Bhupen Khakhar’s “Kali” (1965), were welcome surprises, suggesting an expansive view of the topic. Take your time here, and hopefully you’ll find some quiet moments, as the work on display benefits from your careful attention. And be sure to see the large mural project by Martine Syms outside the main galleries and overlooking the museum’s garden. —HV
