Something about 2024 warped our collective sense of time, making it feel like three years jammed into one. Remember Kamala’s defeat in the US presidential election? Seems like a distant memory, but it happened just a few weeks ago. Trump’s assassination attempt, the Paris Olympics, the Whitney Biennial, and the Venice Biennale? That was all this year, somehow.
Throughout this barrage of events, I got to work with excellent writers on compelling essays and opinion pieces. One of those was Coco Fusco’s story about a sinister letter she once received from Minimalist Carl Andre, who died in January. His death resurfaced the decades-long accusations that he had a hand in the death of his former wife, Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta in 1985 (he was acquitted in a non-jury trial in 1988). In October, I worked with Haitian-American artists Rejin Leys and Vladimir Cybil Charlier on their uncompromising response to Trump and JD Vance’s xenophobic remarks about their community. More recently, Latin American art scholars Juanita Solano Roa and Blanca Serrano Ortiz de Solórzano wrote a scathing rebuke of banana brand Chiquita’s cynical sponsorship of Art Basel Miami Beach. In a
groundbreaking exposé, Moustafa Bayoumi shed light on the dark practice of “atrocity photography” in prisons and black sites across the world. There are many more memorable pieces from this year, including religion scholar Emma Cieslik’s essay on the political nature of the Vatican’s Nativity scenes, lacemaker and art historian Elena Kanagy-Loux's defense of grandmotherly crafts as a legitimate art discipline, philosopher and critic David Carrier’s analysis of what went wrong at Pittsburgh’s Andy Warhol Museum, art historian Pamela Karimi on what she calls the “gestural feminism” of Iranian women, and Sháńdíín Brown and Zach Feuer on the “settler gaze” plaguing the Indian Market in Santa Fe, New
Mexico.
I myself got to write reviews of the 2024 Whitney Biennial, Armory Show, Lee Bul’s Met Museum façadecommission, Jenny Holzer at the Guggenheim Museum, Ai Weiwei in Brooklyn, and more.
And today, we’re proud to present the 2024 edition of the 20 Most Powerless People in the Art World. It’s a list that celebrates individuals and groups in our art community who’ve been left in the shadows of the powerful. And there’s much more, as usual.
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