We live in a world being ripped apart by violence, most of which is carried out by states and corporate conglomerates. Forensic Architecture’s visually compelling and technologically sophisticated application of a “counter-forensic gaze” demonstrates how art can unmask the workings of state power in our time.
Tai Shani, Helen Cammock, Oscar Murillo and Lawrence Abu Hamdan. Photo by Stuart C. Wilson/Stuart Wilson/Getty Images for Turner Contemporary.
Collectives, alliances, initiatives and artists-run spaces, such as Art Labor Collective, Chimurenga, Dirt Palace, Forensic Architecture, Green Papaya, Lifepatch, Mujeres Creando, and, last but not least: this year’s Turner Prize nominees. These collectives do not even necessarily produce artworks, but rather devote their collaboration to critical debate, and to the sparking of public critical discussions on social and political issues above all else. This is a clear statement for solidarity and social responsibility, and the only way out at a time where environmental change and social injustice are the biggest problems of the entire planet, which can only be faced collectively.
—Anna-Catharina Gebbers, curator of the Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin
In our society, there are very few fields left that are free from the acceleration caused by economic interests, and that have the power to guide our senses, thoughts, and perceptions of the world around us into new categories. What art has taught us in the last 10 years is to understand how important diversity is, to constantly change our point of view, to face the unknown (and thus try to meet it as often as possible), to show solidarity and humanity, and to refuse to exclude one another.
Today, at the end of 2019, as I sit at my desk and think about which artworks, exhibitions, and people in the art world have been most influential this decade, I’ve come to the conclusion that it is a multitude of each rather than just a few. So I’d like to emphasize that none of the following examples can claim to be superlative, objective, or unique. For me, all those who recognize the crisis and are ready to face it resonate between the lines of my answers, too.
As the joint winners of the 2019 Turner Prize wrote in a letter: “At this time of political crisis in Britain and much of the world, when there is already so much that divides and isolates people and communities, we feel strongly motivated to use the occasion of the Prize to make a collective statement in the name of commonality, multiplicity, and solidarity—in art as in society.”
—Joanna Kamm, director of Liste
Steve McQueen
Steve McQueen in Year 3 at Tate Britain. ©Tate. Photo Jessica McDermott.
Steve Rodney McQueen, British artist, film director, and screenwriter who won an Oscar, among other prizes, has transcended all possible boundaries of what it means to be an artist of global influence at a time when boundaries are there to be broken. He is an exemplar of what is possible.
—Julia Peyton-Jones, senior global director at Thaddaeus Ropac
Lisa Reihana
![Installation view of Lisa Reihana's <i> In Pursuit of Venus [infected]</i> (2015-17). Courtesy of Auckland Art Gallery.](https://ci5.googleusercontent.com/proxy/AZc_fQvx0tBgQcu0zrHNAjI-LKEYMpKzojsVunUqtxc9UYPnFgcLwPSF2mCvtti-Q0npBO0fz7dLrExyGsCdacnU2w9xpQr2DG1lEsgE_wy4xoXSsFSa5yTtlHvYJ7c=s0-d-e1-ft#https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2019/12/maxresdefault-2-1024x576.jpg)
Installation view of Lisa Reihana’s In Pursuit of Venus [infected] (2015-17). Courtesy of Auckland Art Gallery.
Having been a leader in the development of contemporary art and contemporary Māori art in Aotearoa New Zealand since the 1990s, Lisa Reihana has planted those interests firmly on the global stage with her work In Pursuit of Venus [infected] that evolved from a two-channel video in 2012 to the 60-foot-long hit of the 2017 Venice Biennale (Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, New Zealand). Through such persuasive storytelling and the groundbreaking use of highly sophisticated technology, she has both challenged outdated colonial views of the Pacific, and created new ways for artists to create in the coming decade.
—Michael Brand, director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales
Anne Imhof
Anne Imhof. Photo by Nadine Fraczkowski.
Terrible question. If you twist my arm to name one, I would single out Anne Imhof for the intensely charged performance-installations she created, inventing a new format of an exhibition, a veritable post-internet experience.
—Nina Zimmer, director of the Zentrum Paul Klee and the Museum of Fine Arts Bern
Wu Tsang
Germany Berlin American artist Wu Tsang during her stay at the Martin-Gropius-Bau. Photo by: Karsten Thielker MacArthur Foundation, Courtesy of John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
A crucial aspect of Wu Tsang’s practice is her radical approach to documentary film. Her work allows cinematic parallels to emerge between the construction of the moving image, the movement of the performing body and the movement inherent to migration. The way she uses the camera enables gesture, choreography, and dance to serve as narrative forces.
—Stephanie Rosenthal, director of Gropius Bau, Berlin
Cory Arcangel, Kerry James Marshall, Wu Tsang, Maurizio Cattelan.
—Lisa Schiff, art advisor
Kerry James Marshall
Kerry James Marshall with A Monumental Journey model. Photo courtesy of Kerry James Marshall Studio.
Chicago-based artist Kerry James Marshall most certainly paved a path for the much-needed increased visibility of artists from the Black diaspora this decade, particularly those working in figurative painting. A major touring exhibition of his paintings, “Kerry James Marshall: Mastry,” was one of the highlights of the decade and gave context for a wave of artists from a younger generation such as Amy Sherald, Kehinde Wiley, Jordan Casteel, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, among others, but also opened doors to overlooked artists from the 1960s and 1970s such as the Africobra artists from the south side of Chicago.
—Julie Roidrigues Windholm, director and chief curator of the DePaul Art Museum
Even though Marshall’s career has been established for a while now, it really hasn’t been until the past decade that we’ve seen his influence spread so widely. In just about every graduate school I’ve visited recently, there is someone making representational, allegorical paintings about identity.
—Jason Stopa, artist
Marshall’s mission to represent the black figure and black life within the wholly white painting canon has been hugely influential on all aspects of current art making and art narratives. It is nothing less than an imperative to recognize black humanity. His influence has made certain modes of painting a political act.
—Gina Beavers, artist
Kerry James Marshall set a sea change in motion in 2018 when, with the sale of Marshall’s monumentally scaled “Past Times”, a record was set at Sotheby’s for the highest price paid, $21m, for a work of art by a living African American artist. In Marshall’s wake the art world became hungry for a new generation of African and African American artists whose figurative paintings depict black people in everyday scenes at home in urban, suburban, and interior settings, in states of rest and leisure. Marshall also set a high bar for anyone interested in pictures and picture making. His 2016 retrospective at the MCA Chicago and the Metropolitan Museum of Art was universally praised and led to the beautiful 2018 retrospective of one of Marshall’s teachers, Charles White, at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Met.
—Arnold Kemp, dean of graduate studies, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Nan Goldin
Nan Goldin leads a demonstration at the Harvard Art Museums on July 20, 2018, to protest the benefactor of the Sackler Art Museum. Photo by Erin Clark for The Boston Globe via Getty Images.
The rise in artistic action and activism centered on museum ethics and governance has marked the last half of the decade. The protests against Big Pharma staged at major museums around the world by Nan Goldin’s P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) demonstrate the power of art and one individual to make change.
—Olga Viso, independent curator
Zhang Enli
Zhang Enli in London, 2019. Photo by David M. Benett/Dave Benett/Getty Images for Fortnum & Mason.
To say Zhang Enli is a leading Chinese contemporary artist is an understatement. His work in the past decade is the lens through which the world sees China’s meteoric social and economic advancement, and how that has changed people’s lives.
—Adrian Cheng, founder of the K11 Art Foundation and K11
Yayoi Kusama
Installation view of “YAYOI KUSAMA: Life is the Heart of the Rainbow” at the National Gallery Singapore. Courtesy of the Museum.
There are few artists in their nineties who can speak to a new generation about the importance of art and life!
—Melissa Chiu, director of the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden
Oscar Murillo
Oscar Murillo, 2018. Photo by Greg Lin Jiajie. © Oscar Murillo. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner.
Oscar Murillo is an inspiring and inspired artist that continues to thrill me with every new body of work.
—Javier Peres, founder of Peres Projects
Kehinde Wiley
Kehinde Wiley at the opening ceremony for Rumors of War (2019). Photo: Ian Douglas for Times Square Arts.
From this year’s Rumors of War to his portrait of President Barack Obama and Kehinde Wiley’s inclusion in the ground-breaking touring exhibition “30 Americans,” Wiley’s artwork has touched nearly every critical aspect of American society over the past decade: politics, history, social justice, inclusion, and more.
—Salvador Salort-Pons, director of the Detroit Institute of Arts
Carmen Herrera
Carmen Herrera in her New York studio. Photo: Jason Schmidt © Lisson Gallery.
Although she’s been working for almost seven decades, she was only “discovered” quite recently. Her story— as a Cuban-born woman abstract artist working in a male, Euro-US-dominated art world even still at age 104—has opened the floodgates of galleries and museums reexamining the work of let’s say “non-young” artists, many of whom have been under-recognized for decades.
—Estrellita Brodsky, collector and art historian
Mark Bradford
Mark Bradford speaks in front of “Tomorrow Is Another Day,” his project for the U.S. Pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale. Photo by Awakening/Getty Images.
There is a broad recognition that Mark Bradford has redefined and expanded the terms of abstract painting, opening that rarefied world to the themes and concerns of mainstream culture, and making those concerns co-equal on his complex surfaces. His social abstraction, rendered entirely in paper, directs us back to Norman Lewis and Alma Thomas, and forward to Kevin Beasley and Firelei Báez, all of whom refuse (and refused) the division between the socio-political and the draw of pure formal invention to conjure riveting worlds that exist right on that threshold.
While his work on canvas is an ongoing analysis of our present, Bradford’s work as co-founder and visionary force behind the LA-based not-for-profit Art + Practice sees the artist investing in social change itself by supporting the needs of the foster youth community in his native Los Angeles. Bradford’s daily dual focus on studio work and on need-based philanthropy has redefined what it means to be an artist in the 21st century.
—Christopher Bradford, director of the Baltimore Museum of Art
Ai Weiwei
Chinese Artist Ai Weiwei holds some seeds from his installation Sunflower Seeds at Tate Modern in 2010. Photo by Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images.
Gosh, influential can mean so many different things. In terms of global reach, Ai Weiwei has transformed how social media is used by artists, harnessing platforms like Instagram for both his artwork and, perhaps more importantly, for his activism in China and abroad.
—Alexis Lowry, curator at Dia Art Foundation
In recent years, Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei has been one of the most bald and influential voices inside and outside the art world. He was one of the first to use the web and social media as an artistic/political tool, and his art, bridging and challenging Western and Chinese culture, became internationally acclaimed when China was growing as the main playground of the art system.
—Arturo Galansino, director of Palazzo Strozzi in Florence
James Turrell
Portrait of James Turrell. Photo by Grant Delin.
Calder, of course! But if I must choose a living artist, I would say James Turrell. His work, including his decades-long Roden Crater project located in the middle of nowhere, has inspired people far outside the bounds of the art world. His genius lies in creating, through his installations, a real-time experience unique to each viewer—and to every moment.
—Alexander S.C. Rower, president of the Calder Foundation
Titus Kaphar
Titus Kaphar, a painter and sculptor at his studio in New Haven, Connecticut. Courtesy of John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
Between the development of his work in painting, sculpture, and installation, his MacArthur Genius award, and the development of [New Haven art space] NXTHVN, Kaphar’s success has had a ripple effect on the next generation of public artists and curators.
—Bridget Cooks, professor of African American studies and art history, University of California, Irvine
