Uh-Oh, Get Your Knives Out: ARTnews’ List Of The 100 Best Works Of Art In The 21st Century

The protagonist of Wildness is not a person but a place: the Silver Platter, a Los Angeles bar that narrates the film. Founded in the 1960s in the city’s MacArthur Park neighborhood, the Silver Platter has long offered a safe haven to LA’s queer and trans communities, as well as to immigrants from Latin America. (The bar shut down in 2010 and has since reopened under new management.) The film’s backdrop is the bar’s weekly “Wildness” party, organized by director Wu Tsang, who also stars, and DJs NGUZUNGUZU & Total Freedom. Noirish shots of the bar and its environs, weekly drag performances, and people dancing are interspersed with talking-head interviews. Amid all this is a moody narration spoken by Mariana Marroquín and drawn from oral histories by Tsang. Wildness is a portrait of both a bar and a community built by it, where “the struggle to find adequate labels/identities/descriptors for this ‘community’ is precisely what the film is about,” as Tsang once put it. —M.D.

Posters and ephemera salvaged from the streets of Mark Bradford’s South Central Los Angeles neighborhood are layered to form the surface of this unconventional painting, which he made by sanding down its various strata, exposing fragments of information embedded between them. The result looks like a form of cartography—a map, perhaps, of a dense network found in the vast metropolis that Bradford calls home. Yet the painting is not only a celebration of South Central: Its title refers to a Roman term of appeasement used to distract the public from more substantial issues, like poverty and disenfranchisement. The work’s beautiful surface could serve as a similar kind of distraction, but his materials make clear that he’s dealing with real problems impacting his community. —F.A.

We may want to imagine that nostalgia-inducing franchises from the past are set in stone. But Cory Arcangel suggested with his 2002 installation Super Mario Clouds that everything is inherently fungible. To make the work, Arcangel undertook the laborious process of hacking a Super Mario Bros. cartridge, removing every element except the game’s pixelated clouds and vibrant blue sky. Presented on monitors and projected on nearby walls simultaneously, those clouds now float on without Mario, Luigi, or their cohort to race around beneath them. From the detritus of consumerism, Arcangel forged something new: an artwork that resembled its source material in spirit alone. —A.G.

The sculpture represents a person with the creviced face of a 50-year-old man and the body of a grade-school boy—the contrast would be jarring enough even if it weren’t, well, him. Cattelan himself said he nearly destroyed the piece depicting Adolf Hitler after completing it, but in the end, he made it in an edition of three (a fourth copy, the artist’s proof, sold for $17 million at Christie’s in 2016). We think of Hitler as a dark cloud looming over history, but here we are able to look down on the man, who is posed as a supplicant. Cattelan called the piece “a test for our psychoses.” He completed it in early 2001; a half year later came 9/11 to prove that, pace Fukuyama, history had not ended. We live in it still. —S.D.

Some 15,000 objects—roughly half of which remain at large today—were looted from the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad after the American invasion of the country in April 2003. A few years later, Michael Rakowitz set out with the goal of creating to-scale reproductions of every stolen artifact, a project so epic that it is still ongoing. Each replica is made using Middle Eastern commercial packaging for foodstuffs and local Arabic newspapers that were then exported to the US. Though these looted artifacts are now made visible once more, Rakowitz’s efforts also underscore the fragile nature of the originals, which may never return to the Museum. The piece doubles as both a form of institutional critique and a kind of research art: Accompanying labels reveal each original object’s status, and provide additional contextual information about its whereabouts from experts. —F.A.

One way to establish intimacy with an audience is to stage an artwork that revolves around plaintively strumming a guitar while naked in a bathtub and singing a song that tugs at the heart and explodes with emotion. That is what Ragnar Kjartansson did for The Visitors, a mesmeric nine-screen video installation that features the Icelandic artist and a cast of his friends bowing, plucking, and picking their way through a cryptic piece of music whose soft spot for slyness and sentiment is clear. Though the title alludes to the name of Swedish pop group ABBA’s last album, the lyrics draw from a poem written by Ásdís Sif Gunnarsdóttir, Kjartansson’s ex-wife, with whom he had recently split. The words aren’t easy to decipher (they’re both sad and uplifting, and the breakup was said to be amicable), but they strike an improbably moving chord when they cycle back around to a much-repeated chorus: “once again I fell into my feminine ways.” —A.B.

When Jill Magid was denied access to the professional archives of Mexican architect Luis Barragán—which were bought by the Swiss furniture company Vitra—she turned the problem into an opportunity, steering the genre of institutional critique away from museums and toward corporations. First, she contrived clever ways to get around copyright restrictions. Instead of paying a licensing fee to reproduce a photograph, for instance, she bought a book that had already printed it, then framed the whole book. Forbidden from re-creating his iconic pyramidal lectern, she skirted copyright law by adjusting the scale—that is, until a French show under new jurisdiction required she throw a blanket on top. Despite these persistent public pleas, archival access remained restricted. Then, Magid managed permission for something even wilder: with the consent of Barragán’s family, she exhumed his ashes and turned them into a diamond, which she then used to propose to the archive’s keeper. The offer of her proposal still stands. —E.W.

If you needed a reminder of the sheer power of this artwork, you had a chance to see it last year during Paul Pfeiffer’s survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. I saw that show, and can report that John 3:16 has aged exceptionally well, given that, if anything, we revere sports stars even more now than we did at the turn of the millennium. On a tiny screen, a basketball appears to dart around a court in the absence of players, their hands merely hinted at. You have to get up close to see this little screen, as you would with a liturgical manuscript. (The piece is named for the famous biblical passage: “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”) In casting basketball as revelation, Pfeiffer mined footage from the NBA, splicing together clips with the utmost meticulousness, doing for the game what Christian Marclay did for time with The Clock. —S.D.

After the Yes Men made DowEthics.com, a website spoofing Dow Chemicals, they received an invitation from a BBC journalist who was apparently not in on the joke. Andy Bichlbaum, a member of the art collective, gleefully accepted, appearing in front of 350 million viewers on the 20th anniversary of the 1984 Bhopal disaster that exposed hundreds of thousands of Indians to toxic gas. The artist, pretending to be a businessman, took “full responsibility” for the gas leak at a pesticide plant and issued an apology to the thousands killed and the many more rendered chronically ill. Stocks plummeted; the Dow retracted. The Yes Men highlighted the authority we bestow on white men in suits, then wielded that power against, well, power itself. —E.W.

In the 1980s, after retiring as a machinist at the Pullman boxcar factory in Bessemer, Alabama, Thornton Dial started making assemblage sculptures and reliefs. By the time of his death in 2016 at the age of 87, he had been widely recognized as a major contemporary artist whose work—materially inventive, formally rigorous, and politically astute—rendered the distinction between trained and self-taught immaterial. In 2011 Dial embarked on a series of reliefs inspired by natural disasters, including the Tuscaloosa tornadoes of 2000 and the Japanese earthquake and tsunami of 2011. In this piece, an undulating wave of tree branches, torn metal, and scraps of sequined fabric set against a watery blue and white painted background, he memorialized the devastation Hurricane Katrina caused in New Orleans in 2005 and its disproportionate effect on the city’s largely Black Lower Ninth Ward. —A.D.

When the Statue of Liberty reopened following its eight-year hiatus, the mood was tense. Though the destruction of the 9/11 attacks that prompted the closure was in the distance, the trauma of that fateful day remained present. Steve McQueen captured the spirit of this post-9/11 moment with Static, a film in which the camera circles the motionless Lady Liberty pinned to a tiny island not far from Manhattan. Shot from a helicopter, McQueen’s film takes on the perspective of the surveillance technology that became pervasive after the Twin Towers fell, but offers no direct statement on wounded national pride, and thus comes off confounding rather than clarifying. Therein lies its power: It’s a disorienting gesture for a directionless time. —A.G.

Jana Euler has strategically deployed ugly images, sometimes in bad taste, as a means of aesthetic assault, and though nearly every one of these efforts is a banger, her most provocative pictures are the ones in her “GWF” series (2019), in which elongated sharks leap out of the ocean. There can be no mistaking the fact that these sharks, with their ribbed gullets and raging heads, look more than a bit like erect phalli. Yet these sharks are hardly seductive: the one shown in GWF 1 flails ungracefully, bearing its teeth and gazing down at the viewer, who seems poised to become the fish’s lunch. Large for a phallus and agile for a shark, Euler’s apex predator is no object of admiration. Instead, it’s simply a dick joke. —A.G.

On its face, Daniel Joseph Martinez’s The House America Built seems like a simple, large-scale installation of a small cabin split in two and painted in complementary colors. But what house is this, really? That’s the point of Martinez’s inquiry: the place could belong to just about anyone, even though his reference points are highly specific to American history. The structure is a 1:1 replica of the remote cabin that Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, built and lived in, and the color palette draws from Martha Stewart’s seasonal collection of interior paints. Kaczynski and Stewart are both Polish Americans, born within a year of each other, and while they took very different paths in life, both were incarcerated in 2004, the year Martinez made the original installation. The piece presents the ends of what Martinez sees as the spectrum of Americanness: Stewart and high capitalism on one, Kaczynski and anarchy and domestic terrorism on the other. —M.D.

El Anatsui has made an artistic practice out of stringing together thousands of metal bottle caps to form large, vibrant tapestries, and while he’s repeated the format many times over, it never gets old. Anatsui’s oeuvre reached new heights with this 24-foot-long sheet of caps, which was originally created for the central exhibition in the 2007 Venice Biennale. This work, like his others, cleverly references contemporary overconsumption in material resulting from that consumerism, and is fashioned with gentle folds in a way that recalls traditional Ghanaian craft traditions, like kente cloth. But here, more so than in other works, Anatsui also makes clear that the strung-together caps nod specifically to his own community, whose many members help him make his grandly scaled art. The title, he has said, could be translated from the Ewe to “communal patchwork made by a team of townspeople.” —F.A.

Before 3D printing was widely accepted as an artistic medium, Josh Kline embraced it for this unsettling sculpture of a Manhattan hotel housekeeper named Aleyda, whom Kline interviewed and scanned. Featuring to-scale, 3D-printed versions of several of Aleyda’s body parts along with cleaning supplies arrayed on a janitor’s cart, the piece comments on how technology has forever altered the workforce. The plastic cart was purchased and will last, but the body parts and tools of her trade are disposable prototypes about which a question looms: What role will the human hand play in the future of our lives and our art? —A.G.

Animators Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki created this series of eight short videos during the first months of the 2020 Covid-19 lockdown in New York City. The videos portray friends, strangers, and the artists themselves as digitally created avatars superimposed on real-life footage. Bennani and Barki star as the titular lizards; friends appear as a snow leopard and a hummingbird, among other creatures; and Dr. Anthony Fauci is depicted as a fanged green snake. Strangely, this approach conveys the weirdness of that time and place more effectively than if the artists had made a straightforward documentary. Moments of panic (the lizards freak out during a nighttime drive through a depopulated Brooklyn) and distress (a hospital-nurse cat recalls helping a wife put through a call to her husband, who is on a ventilator) alternate with scenes of resilience: a Zoom birthday, a stoop meet-up, an impromptu street concert. It is a piercing reminder to anyone who was in the city at that time of just how bizarre things were. —A.D.

Pope.L began crawling urban streets in 1978, and though much of his work was made in the 20th century, his influence grew wider after the turn of the millennium. He was overlooked before in part because his public performances were easy to read as regular New York nonsense—and because the art world was not yet ready for his abjection, his pranks, or his Blackness. For this particular Crawl, he shimmied up the entire length of Broadway, going at it in chunks over the course of nine years. And he did so alone, on elbows and knees in a Superman suit. The cartoon-reference humor was strategic: in New York, a Black man on the ground is too likely to be ignored. Pope.L refuted this with a Superman suit that screamed: Look at me. —E.W.

To experience this work by Sondra Perry, one must climb onto an upright stationary exercise bicycle, thereby experiencing a degree of discomfort. And discomfort is the point, as Perry’s digitally produced avatar, appearing on the video screen that replaces the bicycle’s control panel, demonstrates when it asks “How does your body feel inside us?” The avatar is an imperfect simulacrum of Perry: Its movements are stuttering, its voice robotic, its body thinner than the artist’s and hairless. This is not Perry’s fault, the avatar tells us, but the fault of the program that created it, which had no preexisting template for Perry’s body type. Over the course of a 9-minute video, the idea of discomfort is expanded to include the question of whether racial uplift must entail making a Black body a neutral body, a process that the avatar likens to working on an exercise machine with its pedals installed backward and no hex key. “We are not as helpful or Caucasian as we sound,” the Perry avatar says. “We have no safe mode.” —A.D.

In 2001 Palestinian artist Emily Jacir, who holds an American passport, asked Palestinians unable to enter to Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip, as well as Palestinians in those three places whose movements are restricted, “If I could do anything for you, anywhere in Palestine, what would it be?” For the next six months, she did her best to fulfill their requests, documenting her attempts in text and photos. One man asked her to visit his mother; another asked for a photo of his family (they gave her strawberries and lemons grown on their land to take back to him). A third asked her to pick an orange in Jericho and eat it (this, she was unable to do). About this piece, the late Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said wrote, “[Jacir’s] compositions slip though the nets of bureaucracies and nonnegotiable borders, time and space, in search not of grandiose dreams or clotted fantasies, but rather of humdrum objects and simple gestures like visits, hugs, watering a tree, eating a meal—the kinds of things that maybe all Palestinians will be able to do someday.” —A.D.

Many artists this century grappled with how painting for its own sake is seen as a Western construct, with Frieda Toranzo Jaeger’s contribution being among the most articulate. In altarpiece-style works with panels on hinges, she renders her subjects in a manner that appears amateurish; she then hires family members to embroider her surfaces using a traditional Mexican technique. Here, her altarpiece format approximates the shape of a Tesla, a subject Toranzo Jaeger took on after noticing that many fellow Indigenous artists were at work to preserve history in the face of erasure. She wanted to supplement these efforts by ensuring that Indigenous imaginations had a voice in visions of the future, and indeed, her Musk mockery would prove prophetic. In the background of her painting, a mansion standing in for the old world order is on fire; in the foreground, a fast car promises both a getaway and an intimate interior, or a private reprieve. —E.W.

When Julia Child’s cooking show aired on TV, her network briefly experimented with open rather than closed captions, meaning they could not be turned on and off. Lazard, a disabled artist, picks up here, remixing an episode of Child’s show but taking its commitment to access one step further. Child already describes her actions, since the show is didactic. But where the captions fail to describe sound (only dialogue) and Child’s monologue neglects the scenery (only directions), Lazard fills in the gaps, looping in D/deaf and blind audiences. All this quickly accumulates into cacophony, which Lazard embraces. The crescendo, narrated by artist Constantina Zavitsanos, is a manifesto overlaying it all. Lazard revealed the limits of treating access as an afterthought; other artists—Zavitsanos among them—followed, making work that Geelia Ronkina dubbed “access materiality.” A movement was born, centered around works taking up captions, ramps, image descriptions, and so on as a medium—all recently chronicled in The Agency of Access, a book by art historian Amanda Cachia. —E.W.

For several centuries in the West, history painting was considered the highest form of art-making. Yet its scope was narrow, leaving so much history always overlooked. Artists like Marakatt-Labba revisited the genre in the 21st century, filling gaps by depicting histories that had not yet been told widely. Historjá is a 77-foot-long embroidered epic that translates the tradition into fiber, and ambitiously aims to depict the whole of the Sámi people’s history: their Nordic Indigenous lore, rituals, prosperity, and oppression rendered scene-by-scene via spare tableaux stitched into linen in a manner not unlike the canonical Bayeux tapestry. Refuting any narrative of progress that might posit modernism over Indigeneity, it begins and ends in a forest, whence the Sámi came. —A.G.

The 7th Havana Biennial, at which Tania Bruguera’s Untitled (Havana, 2000) debuted, invited artists to explore mass communication in the new millennium. But rather than a great connector, Bruguera framed communication as a tool for exploitation in Cuba. Bruguera’s work comprised fermenting sugarcane piled several inches high in a darkened tunnel in the Cabaña fortress, a military bunker once used to jail prisoners of conscience. At the end of the space was its sole illumination: a small television monitor suspended from the ceiling that played footage of Fidel Castro, who was still in power at the time. Only as they approached the monitor could visitors notice several nude male performers fiercely rubbing their hands together. The piece spoke to all that lay at the limits of vision in Cuba, a country whose repressive leadership has long tried to keep dissent out of sight, out of mind. Untitled (Havana, 2000) didn’t stay on view long—it was shut down by authorities hours after going up—but it was enough to spur on many dissident Cuban artists after Bruguera. —T.S.

Cremaster 3 is a strong candidate for the best movie ever about lamb-eating giants, balletically crashing cars, and Richard Serra flinging molten petroleum jelly inside one of our most august sanctuaries for the appreciation and narrativization of art. The longest feature film in a five-part cycle and the last to be released, the 3-hour fantasia plays as a sort of wordless cinematic tone poem filled with considerations of human evolution and reproduction (the “cremaster” muscle controls male testicles, and figures in the sexual differentiation of an embryo) and interconnected allusions to Matthew Barney’s expansive artistic universe. Starkly divergent vignettes vary from mysterious happenings within New York’s iconic Chrysler Building (the site of a surreal staging of six automobiles smashing into one another, over and over again) to an extravagant set piece in the Guggenheim Museum’s famous rotunda that features Busby Berkeley–style dancing, a hardcore-punk battle of the bands, and Barney himself climbing up and down the walls while interacting with a spectral woman who changes form into a cheetah. While it’s far from easy to apprehend, the film proves transfixing in its elusive and hyper-imaginative flights of fancy. —A.B.

For an ambitious undergraduate senior thesis, Shvarts artificially inseminated herself each month for nine months—a routine she followed up with an herbal abortifacient. Her work highlighted the uncertainty that accompanies having a body, especially one that can become pregnant, and it drew attention to those womanly experiences that can be traumatic and ordinary at the same time. Each month, she would bleed heavily, not knowing whether the blood signaled a period, a miscarriage, or an early-stage abortion. Shvarts’s interventions lay bare the ways that bodies rub up against ideologies, existing in ways for which we often lack the language or knowledge to express. Or so argued Harvard art historian Carrie Lambert-Beatty in her 2009 October article defending the young artist, who’d been subjected to vitriol, even death threats. —E.W.

For a show at Kunsthalle Portikus, located on a small island in Frankfurt, Germany, Raza rerouted the Main River so that it ran right through the museum. He didn’t stop there: inside, he filtered the water through a very fine coffee filter, then boiled it and added some minerals. Suddenly, the hydrologist-approved water was drinkable; guests were offered glasses of it. It was at once a mind-blowing feat and an extremely simple gesture. Beyond that, Diversion was galvanizing for the way it made survival and reconnecting with nature seem well within reach. —E.W.

In 2001, a shocking item appeared in eBay’s “Black Americana” category: an object that was labeled “Keith Obadike’s Blackness (Item #117601036).” It came with an opening bid of just $10 and a list of potential benefits and warnings, including one that read: “The Seller does not recommend that this Blackness be used in the process of making or selling ‘serious’ art.” In placing the work for sale on eBay, the Obadikes drew a connection between the history of enslavement, the auction block, and the website’s “Black Americana” category. The listing did not last long: eBay removed it after four days, by which point bidding had risen to $152.50. Yet Blackness for Sale has had a more enduring legacy, serving as an important intervention in the history of net.art, which had until then mostly avoided discussions about race. In doing so, the work prefigured later conversations around Blackness on the internet. —M.D.

The practice of quipu-making comes from pre-Columbian Peru, wherein various Andean peoples tied cords and colorful strands into knots to record events, information, and stories. For decades, Cecilia Vicuña has been making sculptural works that bring this age-old format into the present day, often with a feminist undercurrent. This work, one of the biggest pieces in the “Red Thread” series, was made for Documenta 14. Vicuña created 52 red wool strands, or chorros, and suspended them in a circular ring that hangs from the ceiling. The cascade of red fiber recalls the tenuous nature of life itself, bringing to mind flows of blood that result from wounds and menstruation; from certain angles, her wool forms even look like umbilical cords. Vicuña powerfully connects Indigenous modes of communication and feminine wisdom, suggesting that there are forms of knowledge that exist beyond history books and archives. —F.A.

For a formative show at Essex Street Gallery in New York (now Maxwell Graham), McArthur gathered 20 ramps, most of which had been improvised to accommodate the artist, a wheelchair user, during her visits to otherwise inaccessible art spaces between 2010 and 2013. The makeshift ramps were made of materials including plywood boards, a cupboard door, and handmade wedges. The show took place more than 20 years after the Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law, and highlighted both the inaccessible entrances that still punctuated McArthur’s every day and the caring improvisation that ensued. But it was more than an autobiographical show or a complaint about lack of compliance, with McArthur’s most crucial gesture easy to miss: Printed on one wall was the URL for the Wikipedia page McArthur built for Marta Russell, a disabled activist who wrote Beyond Ramps (1998), a book arguing that certain American economic policies are greater threats to the quality of disabled life than impairment itself. McArthur shined a spotlight on how disability is politically constructed, and a whole artistic movement took off in the wake. —E.W.

Vertigo Sea seems to take place in the past, present, and future simultaneously, clocks ticking throughout the duration of this arresting three-screen video. Archival oceanic images of whales, seals, and enslaved people recur alongside newer shots of people in 19th-century European garb pondering cloud-covered landscapes. The soundtrack features quotations from the abolitionist Olaudah Equiano and novelist Herman Melville alongside other musings on the ocean, ranging from maritime disasters during the transatlantic slave trade to rising sea levels now and in the future. This haunted 48-minute installation can feel too intense to bear as interwoven historical strands accrete. Akomfrah presents history as an unstable narrative, filled with bits and pieces that get dispersed, reassembled, and reshaped in the wake of so much death and destruction. Conventional senses of time and chronology offer no aid in wading through the roiled waters of history. —A.G.

No material is more elemental than earth, which Colombian artist Delcy Morelos enlisted to alternately exhilarating and disquieting effect with El abrazo, an enormous arrangement of dirt (or, more properly, a mix of clay and soil laced with hay and coir) that filled a building in the Chelsea gallery district of New York. Commissioned by the Dia Art Foundation, the work was a sort of counterpoint to Walter De Maria’s New York Earth Room—another Dia installation that is basically the soil-filled floor of a building in Soho on view since 1977. But its purview ventured into more worldly, even cosmological, terrain in the way it channeled Andean, Amazonian, and many other belief systems that have been cultivated through the ages. El abrazo was also a rare artwork that granted permission to touch: as Morelos stated in a brochure, “Let the hands listen, see the smell of the earth with the fingertips, let its taste be savored by the skin.” And then, at the end: “To touch the earth is to be touched by her.” —A.B.

During the late 2000s, beer gardens became a familiar motif in works by Nicole Eisenman, who sought to vividly evoke contemporary society; this one is her most poignant. Overtly modeled on Renoir’s Bal du moulin de la Galette, the painting updates that famous tableau for modern times. Eisenman masterfully throws art history into a blender, evoking Impressionism, Expressionism (channeling Munch in particular), and contemporary cartoons all at once. The forlorn tank-topped figure in the foreground, fiddling with his BlackBerry while gazing vacantly at the viewer, is a subtle reminder of the backdrop of this gathering: a global recession. Thus, the painting recognizably belongs to a specific time and place, and fulfills Eisenman’s goal of creating art that belongs distinctly to the present. —S.D.

Airport blueprints from around the world form the basis of this 20-foot-wide abstract painting. The emphasis on travel appears biographical: Julie Mehretu and her family fled political instability in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and wound up in East Lansing, Michigan, and the artist is now based in New York. But, ultimately, almost everyone is migratory now, and the painting is an apt reflection of our time. The painting is engrossing up close—its intricate marks draw the eye in—but from afar, the work appears even more resonant. Its dramatic scale mimics the sheer vastness of our world, which seemed to grow ever wider as the economy became more global during the 2000s. —F.A.

At the start of this video, nearly all the foul-mouthed, catty protagonists seem to be named Jenny. By the end, they take on other aliases. The fka-Jennys film each other, partake in dance-offs, lob insults, and drunkenly run through chroma-key green halls. Along the way, these characters paint their faces in tones ranging from pewter to green, don wigs, sport fake facial hair, and apply garish makeup. Like all Ryan Trecartin’s videos, Center Jenny epitomizes the frenetic pace and glut of options the internet enabled, emblematizing how people began to adopt personas as they broadcast themselves to the world. No surprise that most TikToks now look a lot like this video, with its chatterbox youths, cacophonous soundtrack, and twitchy editing style. —A.G.

The water crisis in the majority-Black Michigan city Flint began in 2014 and remains ongoing. That year, the water source for locals was switched from Lake Huron to the Flint River, whose contaminated flow was soon consumed as drinking water. The community was forever altered by resulting illnesses and death. To offer visual evidence of all the destruction, photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier documented the lives of those impacted by the crisis. The resulting photographs were not only touching and deeply personal but also doubled as a means of exposing environmental injustice. Initially released as a photobook, this series showed that documentary photography need not be either objective or impersonal, plotting a fresh path for this 20th-century genre in a new era. —F.A.

For her breakout show at the Kitchen in New York, Yi swabbed DNA from 100 women in the art world and mixed all the samples together. Working with synthetic biologist Tal Danino, Yi installed the bacteria in a glass vitrine, where it bloomed to spell out the titular phrase. The show ushered in a whole new generation of bio art, work that involves using living material as a medium. But unlike the bio art of yore, exemplified by Eduardo Kac’s glowing green bunny, this new wave drew less from synthetic biology and resisted dominating nature. Rather, the bio art Yi heralded reveals and reveres the dense networks of organisms that we depend on to survive. You Can Call Me F melds this idea with a feminist critique of the lone genius, highlighting the support network behind the artist. —E.W.

Eight hands draw crooked lines that connect disparate countries. Eight disaffected voices narrate tumultuous journeys—across seas, through cities, into and out of refugee camps. Eight hanging screens feature unbroken takes of hands running markers across maps. Such are the elements of Bouchra Khalili’s Mapping Journey Project, a video installation that concisely highlights the geographic (and bureaucratic) barriers faced by people who left their homelands for new lives in Europe. Khalili captures the difficulties of these voyages, as well as the long-term impact of the pain experienced along the way, playing recorded testimonials from migrants in European cities. Khalili asked all her interviewees to draw using permanent markers, their lines lingering forever on the artist’s maps, like scars running under vast oceans and across mountain ranges. —A.G.

What happens when music becomes a weapon of war? This video offers one answer. Here, Tony Cokes draws on the accounts of Iraqi and Afghan civilians who endured a form of torture that involved playing American tunes at a deafening volume. Chart-topping hits from the likes of Eminem and Britney Spears, Metallica and Bruce Springsteen roared as text excerpts from “Disco Inferno,” Moustafa Bayoumi’s 2005 article from the Nation flashed by, slideshow-style. “Disco isn’t dead,” the video informs us at one point. “It has gone to war.” Cokes shows that mainstream music—heard daily on the radio, where it seems so innocuous—can be used as a weapon, a form of psychological manipulation, and a means of American imperialism all in one. —F.A.

The task of choosing one Deana Lawson work was excruciating. Unlike most photographers, whose sensibilities are best portrayed through whole projects rather than single images, nearly every Lawson photo holds its own, triumphant in scale and offering lots to look at. Here, as in most of her portraits of Black people in domestic interiors, you are left to wonder what of it is staged. Lace curtains sag awkwardly and seem candid, yet our subject is dressed up in a satin gown with a hole in the front, where her pregnant bare belly protrudes. The outfit is clearly a choice—hardly what one expects in a photo of a person at home—yet its significance is elusive. As ever, Lawson might get you to believe at first that you are seeing an intimate scene. But incongruous details—wearing heels in bed, posters hung upside down—make it clear the setup is contrived, reminding just how little you can know of a person from a picture. —E.W.

Maria Eichhorn lent the phrase “paid time off” new meaning with this piece, for which she shuttered London’s Chisenhale Gallery for the time span noted in the work’s title. Employees were directed not to answer phones, not to reply to most of their emails, and not to report to work at all. Instead, Chisenhale’s staff was given five weeks of free time with pay. Meanwhile, the gallery remained shuttered to the public; all there was to see was a sign with a short text that explained the staff was “not working.” The piece was a salient reminder that any artwork exhibited is indebted to the labor of others. —A.G.

Rare are the gestures profoundly poetic and political at once, affecting and effecting without compromising one for the other. Mirror Shield Project is among the finest such examples. Luger, a member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold, was born on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, whose name made headlines during the 2016 #NoDAPL movement protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline, which was scheduled to run through sacred land and disrupt water supply. Inspired by civil unrest that unfolded in Ukraine, Luger made a video showing masses how to construct DIY mirrored shields from simple materials. Protesters arrived in droves, holding the mirror shields up against officials in riot gear, building a barrier while inviting those on the other side to reflect. —E.W.

The Atlas Group is credited with numerous artworks concerning the 1975–90 Lebanese Civil Wars. Often, these are detailed and painstakingly comprehensive research-based works: a journal tracking every car bomb detonated during the conflict, photographs of bullet-hole-pocked buildings overlaid with color-coded dots that correspond to different types of ammunition, clues to who fired the shots. The Atlas Group, though, was mostly the work of a single artist: a carefully crafted persona named so that you might trust its authority; the Group is an artwork unto itself. You might wonder how an artist could gather data this definitive or, perhaps, how anyone could. It takes only a mildly studious eye to catch the farce: the date of the group’s origin varies in different shows. The Atlas Group parodied the absurdism in claims to comprehension, and pointed to how facts and data can be hardest to procure when they are most urgent, most politicized. This may seem more obvious today than when the project began, but it isn’t any less essential. —E.W.

Over the past 35 years, Andrea Fraser has critiqued the systems and structures of the art world, offering biting commentary on its pretensions and class distinctions largely through venturesome video performances. In Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk (1989), she passed herself off as a docent at the Philadelphia Museum, flummoxing visitors with an unhinged commentary on the institution and its history as well as social and political issues. More notoriously, in Untitled (2003), she videotaped herself having sex with the anonymous art collector to whom she presold the piece, literalizing the blurred lines between personal and financial relationships in the art business. In this video from 2001, Fraser takes on the Guggenheim Bilbao and its audio guide extolling the glories of the Frank Gehry–designed museum building. Fraser pantomimes exaggerated responses to the guide’s litany of wonders, until, prompted to stroke one of the museum’s pillars, she lifts her skirt and ecstatically rubs herself against it. “Critique,” Fraser told ARTnews in 2016, “at its best is a verb.” —A.D.

Simone Leigh won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2022 for this sculpture, a 16-foot-tall, 5,900-pound bronze bust. The work originally presided over the High Line in New York City; it is part of a larger series by Leigh in which female forms fuse with historical and contemporary signifiers of Africa and the African diaspora. Here, cowrie shells, a reference to a material used widely in African art, adorn the figure’s cornrows; its skirt honors the architectural traditions of Benin, Togo, Chad, and Cameroon, among others. Few of these references were made plain to viewers, however—if they knew, they knew, and if they weren’t curious, they wouldn’t learn. Brick House evinced a kind of withholding that was widely seen in art of the past decade, rarely with such grace as in Leigh’s sculpture. —T.S.

Technically, this piece had a mouthful for a full title: “the Marvelous Sugar Baby an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant.” Certainly, with this sculpture, Kara Walker gave those artisans their due. It was with this piece that Walker, who had become known for her work in silhouetted paper cutouts that told harrowing stories of enslavement, made a radical shift in scale to the monumental. Drawing on the history of labor in sugar processing, and leaning heavily into the metaphor of its refinement (bleaching from brown to white), Walker created an object that may have tasted sweet but smelled acrid and looked formidable, almost menacing. A sphinx sculpture made from 160,000 pounds of sugar, it was a great artwork—and a controversial one too, many claiming that its highly sexualized representation of a Black woman worked to no end. Like it or not, however, it was a statement of intent from an artist who was just 44 at the time. Walker went on to make other enormous pieces, including a fountain shown at the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, and remains a force to be reckoned with. —S.D.

It was one of those experiences that was so cool you couldn’t believe you got to be part of it. Ace Gallery had a cavernous space in downtown Manhattan, and for this work, it was kept pitch-dark. You were given a little blue penlight and permission to navigate. Here and there, you’d see other blue pinpricks of light—other humans!—but the light was not quite enough to fully illuminate them. There were almost no other objects in the space. By the time he made this piece, David Hammons was already a master of audience participation or, put another way, audience provocation, Exhibit A being a 1983 piece in which he sold snowballs on the sidewalk in New York’s East Village. This work, though, was stranger and more subtle, made during a time—just after 9/11, just after anthrax in the mail—when, in New York, it felt as if we were all fumbling in the dark, wondering what would next happen, what kind of world we lived in, even who among us was safe and who might pose us harm. This Century artwork list was being compiled long before Hauser & Wirth decided to re-create Hammons’s Concerto in Black and Blue at its LA gallery during Frieze Los Angeles this past February; the gallery did well to do so. —S.D.

For the 2003 Istanbul Biennial, Doris Salcedo piled 1,550 wooden chairs in a gap between two buildings in the city’s center. Rising almost three stories, the chairs pressed right up against the edge of the sidewalk. The work built upon one made the year prior, in which Salcedo lowered dozens of chairs from the roof of Bogotá’s Palace of Justice to commemorate a siege there. In Istanbul, the historical reference point was more ambiguous, hinting at the city’s history of migration and displacement while also speaking to a desire to “represent war in general” and create a “topography of war,” as Salcedo once said. The totality of this work, in both its location and size, made it hard to miss, a reminder that these histories and the people they affect can be overwhelming when made manifest. —M.D.

Sometimes, masterpieces create monsters. So it was for Harun Farocki, whose style of essay film many have emulated, few successfully. The late German filmmaker was deft at exposing the industry of images, and at revealing various systems of power often hidden in plain sight. Eye/Machine I is the first video in a trilogy, and it highlights footage that is more data than aesthetic, with blurry clips of airports unintelligible to the untrained eye. It opens with found footage—aerial surveillance collected by the US in 1991, during the war on Iraq—and features an unseen narrator calling such pictures “devoid of social intent.” Yet Farocki masters the art of show, don’t tell, with Eye/Machine’s narrator intervening strategically, decrypting only the images that are illegible to the human eye. As for the rest, he lets you see for yourself. —E.W.

With this piece staged for the Mexican Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Teresa Margolles transformed the grisly residue of death into art. Known for addressing violence fueled by Mexico’s narcotics trade, Margolles here used materials like bloodstained cloths and shattered glass to expose the human cost of systemic inequities. The piece included fabric soaked in blood from murder sites, along with an accompanying performance that impressively—and grotesquely—involved a man mopping the floor with fluid from the dead acquired from morgues in Mexico. For even greater effect, Margolles distributed cards that doubled as cocaine cutters, suggesting that global consumer culture itself was complicit in sustaining the very carnage she highlighted. It was all unsettling and deeply uncomfortable because it offered material proof of violence that is sometimes tough to see. —D.C.

I probably watched Grosse Fatigue in its entirety three times during the 2013 Venice Biennale (curated by Massimiliano Gioni), and with every viewing, new elements of the piece came to the fore. Against a techno/jazz beat by Joakim Bouaziz, artist Akwetey Orraca-Tetteh recites a poem written by Henrot and poet Jacob Bromberg that begins with the first words of the Bible: “In the beginning…” We start on a computer home screen, from which blossoms a mesmerizing bouquet of images. It is impossible to catalog them: snippets of old master paintings, a copy of The Origin of Species next to a Charles Darwin bobblehead, a fish head, a sculpture of an ancient god. (Much of the imagery came from objects Henrot encountered during a residency at the Smithsonian Institution.) What is most striking about the piece is the way it seems to echo the process each of us goes through every day in our digital age in our attempts to make sense of an image-saturated world, to create some kind of narrative out of chaos. In an art world that was going increasingly online (remember all those articles about art on Instagram?), Henrot’s work struck just the right chord. It still does. —S.D.

Time flies when you’re having fun watching time—or so it seems when in the thrall of The Clock, a 24-hour assemblage of found footage starring timepieces of different kinds from the past century of film and TV. Drawing on his legacy as a maestro of remix culture (both musical and other), Christian Marclay spent three years combing the annals of moving-image history for brief clips he sequenced together. The result is a cinematic collage made up of appropriated scenes of actors glancing at their watches or waiting for seconds and minutes to tick down on clocks, alarms, and more. Each scene corresponds with the progression of a full day, so that the times in the clips sync up with the points at which they appear in Marclay’s work. While The Clock is an organizational and technical marvel (how did he find the thousands of clips, and how did he piece them all together?), the experience of watching the work as a movie of its own is just as awe-inspiring as the process. Taking stock of time manages to capture the essence of suspense and turn it inside out, leaving a viewer to wonder what it is about viewing that can leave us so rapt. —A.B.

This sculpture appears innocuous, as though merely a simple metal corner desk. But a text provided by the artist reveals that it was produced by inmates at the Attica Correctional Facility in New York, who at the time were given hourly rates between $0.16 and $1.25. Rowland was working within the tradition of the readymade sculpture, but unlike Marcel Duchamp and his ilk, the artist was questioning more than artistic authorship, showing instead that everyday objects such as desks could unfurl knotty, horrifying histories of systemic exploitation. When the work was initially exhibited at New York’s Artists Space, it was no coincidence that the desk might have been mistaken for a staffer’s workstation. It was a reminder that objects produced through systems of underpaid, even forced, labor are just about everywhere. —A.G.

With a series of essays and videos produced during the early 2010s, Hito Steyerl became the greatest observer of the state of total visibility brought on by the internet and rampant surveillance. Is it possible not to be seen today? Steyerl’s 2013 magnum opus asked that question, then offered a few tips, some practical, others absurdist—like “being female and over 50.” The video demystifies optical engineering by the US Air Force, green-screen technology, and more, all in 15 minutes, so as to suggest that in the age of image overload, none of us will escape becoming pixels to be played with. Her attempts to escape feel comically futile: in one memorable sequence, she smears her face with green paint, revealing color charts that were added in post-production. She goes invisible, becoming a part of the digital ether. —A.G.

Completed the year before Kerry James Marshall’s midcareer retrospective at the Met, which went on to acquire this work, Untitled (Studio) exemplifies the noun referenced in the intentionally misspelled title of that show, “Mastry.” There is mastery in the whole, and in all its glorious parts: the crisply modeled dog, the bouquet out of an old master painting, the drapery, the paintbrushes, that Tiepolo sky glimpsed through a window, the uncompleted canvas on an easel, passages of which, viewed up close, can read as pure abstraction. And that is to say nothing of its subject. Here, Marshall took on a scene that to date had mainly been the province of white artists: the studio. He stepped into the pantheon of Matisse, Courbet, and their ilk, inserting and asserting the Black artist as a protagonist in art history. It’s the kind of painting that makes you say to yourself: OK, now he’s just showing off! Shouldn’t he be allowed to do just that? —S.D.

Adrian Piper’s conceptual art of the 20th century may have made a bigger mark on art history, but this video is significant for the way it throws all that work into sharp relief. The artist is known for pointed work that tackles serious subjects, from racial inequity to transcendental philosophy. But her sensibility was often playful and irreverent, even when her work was sharp and intense, and this video makes that much obvious. It shows Piper dancing improvisationally in Berlin’s Alexanderplatz, the center of the city she has called home since fleeing the US in 2006. Piper dances for an hour, and she dances quite well, accompanied by 2000s Berlin house music. This is an artist who sees the world’s evils as clearly as she does its joys. —E.W.

A scorching sun; Notorious B.I.G. rapping; Martin Luther King Jr. riding in a car; police committing violence; protests raging for civil rights and Black Lives Matter; Barack Obama grieving the victims of the Charleston church shooting; Mahalia Jackson performing. These are among the memorable clips packed into this video, which aspires to distill the rich range of Black experience in the US into just seven minutes. Working from his extensive archive of other peoples’ pictures, Arthur Jafa offered a full gamut of experiences from death to celebration, at a time when footage of Black Americans dying violent deaths at the hands of police proliferated in the media. Set to Kanye West’s “Ultralight Beam,” Jafa’s video is a sublime artwork that teeters between abject horror and bona fide beauty. Its final image is tough to shake: a clip of James Brown performing his ecstatic music until he collapses. —A.G.