The Defining Artworks of 2023

Betye Saar, Drifting Toward Twilight, 2023

Tucked away in its own room in the Huntington Library’s American art galleries is a new commission (and acquisition) by longtime LA-based artist Betye Saar, whose childhood visits to the Huntington in the 1930s proved to be an informative experience. At the center of this blue-lit gallery is a 17-foot vintage wood canoe that Saar had had in her collection for a number of years. Inside are three wood chairs atop which are three birdcages, each filled with a large tree branch; sandwiching them are sculptures of Saar’s own making. The canoe sits on a bed of branches, sourced from around the Huntington’s grounds, and strips of neon lights; a diagram of different moon cycles rises high in one wall. An accompanying short documentary by Kyle Provencio Reingold provides a soothing jazz soundtrack to the experience of viewing the work. Where is this boat going? Saar has left it intentionally open ended, but in the room there is a palpable sense of hope—of a new beginning just on the horizon. —Maximilíano Durón

Edgar Calel, B’alab’äj (Jaguar Stone), 2023

Those who entered SculptureCenter’s cavernous ground-level gallery this summer were greeted by this room-filling piece, composed of shaped mounds of dirt interrupted by rocks and lit candles. Edgar Calel, a deft creator of sculptural works that bring his Mayan Kaqchikel heritage to the rest of the world, was here referencing a stone that can be found in Chi Xot (San Juan Comalapa), the Guatemalan town where he was born. Seen from above, the installation even looked like that stone, and the candles were themselves a reference to the offerings that are left by the local community at the piece’s namesake landmark. In tethering an art space in Queens, New York, to the natural environment of Chi Xot, Calel suggested that art can be a portal to places far afield. He also implied that art can be generous: he enlisted SculptureCenter workers in the daily act of lighting the candles, effectively asking them to perform a thanksgiving ritual that he and others in Chi Xot regularly undertake. —Alex Greenberger

Matthew Barney, Secondary, 2023

Football and dance have more in common than might seem to make sense, as evidenced by the famous ballet-lesson-taking Pittsburgh Steelers star Lynn Swann and, even more so, this hour-long video work by Matthew Barney. The story, such as it is, follows a dark bit of football lore dating back to 1978, when Oakland Raiders defensive back Jack Tatum (nicknamed “The Assassin” in his day) tackled New England Patriots receiver Darryl Stingley and left him paralyzed. But Barney’s approach to any particulars of narrative and tone is more like poetry in a wordless fever dream set in the artist’s former studio along New York’s East River. (The studio and the river both count as characters of a sort.) The work distills a lot of Barney’s interconnected interests, and certain sights and sounds within it stand to linger in the mind for a long time to come. —Andy Battaglia

Hannah Gadsby, copy of Large Bather with a Book, ca. 1995

The Brooklyn Museum’s “It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby,” arguably the year’s most notorious art exhibition, opened not with Picasso but with Gasby aping Picasso. According to the lore put forward by the exhibition, this painting was done on a wall in Gadsby’s parents’ home when the comedian was a teen. It’s a not-so-bad copy of a Picasso painting showing a partially nude person reading. Do not call this an example of hero worship or artistic appropriation: Gadsby wrote off their work in its wall text as “shitty,” and encouraged viewers to see the painting as an example of how deeply engrained Picasso, a misogynist, had become in the public consciousness. Then again, so what? Gadsby told us nothing we didn’t already know, but the painting’s exhibition in 2023 pointed up a crucial problem in all the Picasso festivities that were staged this year: attempts to destabilize his reputation as a genius still accidentally ended up affording him too much attention. —Alex Greenberger

Tyler Mitchell, Ferragamo FW23 Campaign, 2023

Tyler Mitchell is one of the few young photographers in the past decade to ascend to the top of the fashion industry’s ranks, while at the same time establishing a foothold with major players in the art world. In August, when the Italian luxury house Ferragamo unveiled a campaign for its Fall/Winter 2023 collection, the closely watched image-maker—best-known for his 2018 Vogue cover of Beyoncé, the first time a Black photographer shot the esteemed American fashion magazine’s cover—was as much a starring centerpiece of it as the campaign’s idyllic backdrop: Florence’s Uffizi Gallery. The label’s artistic director Maximilian Davis and Mitchell placed models before 15th- and 16th-century scenes, including works by Botticelli and Piero della Francesca.  —Angelica Villa

Joshua Reynolds, Portrait of Omai (Mai), ca. 1776

In April, the National Portrait Gallery in London and the Getty Museum in Los Angeles jointly acquired a prized Joshua Reynolds painting, Portrait of Mai (Omai), concluding a tense race to keep the painting within England before its export ban expired in July.  Against considerable odds, the two museums raised the £50 million ($61.9 million) necessary to keep the painting from disappearing into private hands. The acquisition garnered international attention given the painting’s huge art historical importance: it depicts the first Polynesian to visit Britain, and some historians even believe it is one of the earliest portraits of to depict a person of color as its subject in Britain. The collaborative, multinational nature of the deal, too, was highly unusual. The painting went on view at the National Portrait Gallery when it reopened in June and will travel for the first time in Los Angeles in 2026 and also be on view when the city hosts the Summer Olympics in 2028. —Tessa Solomon

Agnes Martin, Grey Stone II, 1961

The buzz during New York’s marquee fall auctions this year was not about speedy flips, young hotshots, or a dour market downturn, as has been the case in recent years. It was about something more enduring: Agnes Martin’s Grey Stone II (1961), which was sold at Sotheby’s from the estate of Emily Fisher Landau. While Picasso’s Femme à la montre (1932) stole the headlines ahead of the evening sale, it was Martin’s work that set tongues wagging afterward.

Selling for a whopping $18.7 million after a fierce bidding war, Grey Stone II stole the show, breaking Martin’s auction record, and a small sign of changing times as work by women artists like Martin, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler continue to sell for higher prices than ever before. Sotheby’s David Galperin dubbed Grey Stone II a “unicorn,” marrying the market’s craving for rare finds and a recognition of Martin’s ability to conjure beauty at its most minimal. —Daniel Cassady

Faith Holland, Artificial Intelligence Forced to Confront Its Own Death, 2023

At Microscope gallery, Faith Holland’s solo exhibition “Death Drive” served as a clear-eyed spectacle that probed the intersection of tech and mortality. Drawing inspiration from Freudian theory, Holland delved into the speculative decay of our electronics and handheld devices, sparking a conversation between the physical and digital. Her sculptures, a fusion of discarded gadgets and robust mold, serve as a poignant symbol of our environmental mess—a concoction of obsolete electronics interlaced with resilient mycelium. These eerie yet thought-provoking pieces are meant to remind us that some parts of the devices we hold so dear (but continue to update every few years) are expected to take over at least a million years to decompose. Holland’s sublimation prints, titled Artificial Intelligence Forced to Confront Its Own Death, depict an AI’s attempts to simulate mold growth, contemplating the eerie inevitability of tech meeting an organic end. Throughout the exhibition Holland invited us to ponder the whimsical yet disconcerting and seemingly impossible idea of technology’s mortality. —Daniel Cassady

Emilie L. Gossiaux, White Cane Maypole Dance, 2023

With its audio descriptions and tactile interventions, Emilie L. Gossiaux’s debut institutional solo at the Queens Museum is an exemplary model for accessible art. Her new work explores the twinned ways in which both nonhuman animals and disabled people experience oppression: both groups are seen as lacking certain capacities, and for this, denied various rights. In response, Gossiaux celebrates the beautiful interdependence that disabled people and their nonhuman companions often enjoy. Her giant maypole sculpture replaces a regular rod with a monumental, 15-foot version of her white cane, and around it, human-sized sculptures of her guide dog London leap and dance. In a world that too often views disabled people as tragedies, Gossiaux gives us a powerful portrait of disabled joy. —Emily Watlington

Josh Kline, Climate Change Is Personal Responsibility, 2023–present

This bracing new work, which capped Josh Kline’s survey at the Whitney Museum, offers disquieting testimonials from a dystopian future in which victims of imaginary climate disasters tell harrowing tales of displacement and despair. The setting is alarming and stark, with would-be refugee tents burning in shades of emergency orange, and videos featuring characters speaking in shocked tones about their fates play as disquieting dispatches from a future that is far too like the present. —Andy Battaglia

Stephen Thaler, A Recent Entrance to Paradise, 2016

Sometimes, an artwork is important less for its, let’s say, aesthetic value than its legal import. Such was the case with A Recent Entrance to Paradise, a two-dimensional image of train tracks stretching beneath a verdant stone arch. The work was, according to computer scientist Stephen Thaler, created completely autonomously by an artificial intelligence system he designed called DABUS, or Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience. For years, Thaler has asserted in courts around the world and with the United States Copyright Office that he is not the author of Recent Entrance, DABUS is. His quest to have DABUS recognized as the work’s author, if successful, would have upended established copyright law that states that copyrightable works must be the product of “human authorship.”

Earlier this year, a US district court judge sided with the Copyright Office’s earlier decision to deny copyright protections to the work. Still, Thaler has not given up on the effort and, with image-generating AI only increasing in number and complexity, it is all but certain that the courts aren’t done tackling the thorny question of who is responsible for the creative process when we create with machines. —Harrison Jacobs

Kay WalkingStick, Niagara, 2022

Across several notable exhibitions of contemporary Native art held in the US this year, one recurring figure was Kay WalkingStick (Cherokee), whose paintings gently explode the notion that the American landscape was unpeopled and fresh for the taking when colonists arrived. Niagara, which appeared in her New-York Historical Society show this year, was made in response to Louisa Davis Minot’s Niagara Falls (1818), in which a largely white cast of people surveys a rocky outcropping beside the famed waterfall. WalkingStick flips Minot’s viewpoint for her painting, instead presenting the other side of the falls from above. This perspectival shift is mirrored by a formal one: rather than portraying any people at all, WalkingStick stencils atop her falls a pattern derived from the Haudenosaunee, the confederacy of peoples native to the area where Niagara Falls is located. In so doing, WalkingStick asserts that the land represented here cannot be separated from the Native peoples who were there first. —Alex Greenberger

Tiona Nekkia McClodden, DOUBLE BIND, 2023

Debuting as part of Tiona Nekkia McClodden’s Kunsthalle Basel show this past summer, DOUBLE BIND is a nearly half-hour video work that shows the artist at sleep. While the piece might immediately call to mind Warhol’s five-hour-plus film, McClodden’s video is more a self-portrait that responds to her diagnosis of sleep apnea about two months before the show opened. In the film, McClodden sleeps while wearing a CPAP machine; at certain points throughout the film she stops breathing, at which point the machine kicks in. Based on the data that the CPAP machine collects, her doctor controls how much air she gets while she sleeps, anywhere in the world. —Maximilíano Durón

Lauren Halsey, the eastside of south central los angeles hieroglyph prototype architecture (I), 2023

Lauren Halsey’s site-specific installation commissioned for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s rooftop garden explored connections between the iconography and infrastructure of ancient Egypt and those of the artist’s hometown, Los Angeles. While recalling ancient forms that could be found in the museum below, Halsey offered a new space infused with images and ideas that pick up on the Afrofuturist movement, which aims to connect the ancestry of the African diaspora with an historical sci-fi future. The installation, the eastside of south central los angeles hieroglyph prototype architecture (I), highlighted Black American life by uplifting and evoking a vibrant sense of community—Halsey’s community, in fact—with more than 700 engraved and sculpted panels. The faces of the sphinxes that guard this 22-foot-high temple, for example, capture the likeness of the artist’s mother, cousin, brother, and partner. With this work, Halsey created a must-see haven traversable to visitors at their leisure. —Francesca Aton

Doris Salcedo, Uprooted, 2020–22

Visitors to the 15th edition of the Sharjah Biennial had to queue to enter the gallery containing Doris Salcedo’s latest installation, and their time inside was counted, to the chagrin of more than a few. That work was Uprooted, an installation on view at the Kalba Ice Factory and comprising 804 dead trees sculpted into the shape of a shelter that symbolize the refugee’s plight—a permanent state of displacement. Among the questions the work posed: Can something be ghastly but organic? In the semblance of a home but lacking any warmth? The uninhabitable structure alluded to the desperate search for resources forced on refugees, as war and capitalist destruction reduces once-abundant lands into a shell of itself. “Uprooted is thus a site of extreme contradiction—at once immoveable and rootless, violent and passive,” the Sharjah Art Foundation wrote in its citation of the award-winning piece.  —Tessa Solomon

Pippa Garner, Haulin’ Ass!, 2023

Pippa Garner’s big year has long been overdue. Alongside one new and one reprinted Garner book, hr solo shows at both White Columns in New York and Art Omi in the Hudson Valley, plus a splashy Times Square performance, confirm that the world is finally ready for the ingeniously silly inventions by this bona fide trans elder. The LA-based artist has explored themes like body hacking, transportation, and human power. And Art Omi helped her remake her iconic Backwards Car (now titled Haulin’ Ass), which appears to drive in reverse, with its engine in the trunk. The ever-clever prankster made sure it’s all legal and up to code. —Emily Watlington

Judith F. Baca, The Great Wall of Los Angeles, 1974–present

Chicana artist Judith F. Baca first conceived of what would become the half-mile-long Great Wall of Los Angeles in 1974, with the first stretch of it being painted in 1976. Beginning in prehistoric time and extending into the 1950s, the now iconic mural presents a retelling of the history from the perspectives of people of color, women, and queer people, highlighting the stories and peoples who have been intentionally erased and marginalized. In 2021, the Mellon Foundation gave Baca and the Social and Public Art Resource Center, the arts nonprofit she cofounded, $5 million to extend the imagery into the present. Over the past two years, Baca and her team have been hard at work to conceptualize and develop the new imagery. The first scene, A Murder of Crows: The “End” of Jim Crow, along with preparatory drawings for several other scenes, was displayed this year at Jeffrey Deitch’s LA space. And, since October, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Baca’s team have been painting additional scenes on-site, turning the gallery into an artist’s atelier. Given the state of the world, these new images and recovered histories have never been more urgent to tell—and to see. —Maximilíano Durón

Ishi Glinsky, Inertia—Warn the Animals, 2023

Featured in this year’s Made in LA biennial at the Hammer Museum, Ishi Glinsky’s Inertia—Warn the Animals served as its own mini-biennial within the exhibition. Affixed to the back of this towering, larger-than-life Ghostface sculpture (whose stark white face has been replaced a by turquoise-like mosaic) are the works of 11 other Indigenous artists. Among them are Teresa Baker (Mandan/Hidatsa), Demian DinéYazhi’ (Diné), River Garza (Tongva), Eric-Paul Riege (Diné), Sarah Rosalena (Huichol), and Sheridan MacKnight (White Earth Chippewa / Hunkpapa Lakota). In convening this intertribal delegation of artists, Glinsky (Tohono O’odham) looks at the Grand Entry, a moment of anticipation ahead of the powwow, in which the regalia affixed to the back would start to make noise as the dancer begins to move; the use of Ghostface furthers that sense of anticipation that something is about to happen. —Maximilíano Durón

Nicholas Galanin and Merritt Johnson, Creation with her Children, 2017

The 2017 sculpture Creation with her Children shows a child whose 17th-century dress is cut away to reveal animals’ mouths being pried open—a metaphor for a figure who has “endured hundreds of years of colonization, corporatization, commodification, and subjugation,” according to artists Nicholas Galanin (Lingít/Unangax) and Merritt Johnson (who is not affiliated with a tribal nation). While the work was a showstopper in the National Gallery of Art’s first show devoted to Indigenous art in 30 years, Galanin and Johnson thrust it into the national conversation when the artists announced in November that they had asked the NGA to remove the piece “due to US government funding of Israel’s military assault and genocide against the Palestinian people,” as they wrote on Instagram. In an autumn full of fallout over various artists, dealers, and curators’ responses to the Israel-Hamas war, Galanin and Johnson made an unequivocal statement of where they stand. —Harrison Jacobs

Marguerite Humeau, Orisons, 2023

Marguerite Humeau’s sprawling, 160-acre earthwork in the Colorado desert demands that visitors tread lightly. If you don’t attend to your environment, you might miss one of the 80 kinetic sculptures that sparsely populate the barren land, or else fall into an ankle-deep hole burrowed by a kangaroo mouse. While so many earthworks preceding hers have an air of conquer and control about them, Humeau’s evokes the kind of care necessitated by a planet in—to borrow her words—“incurable pain.” All the while, the artist poignantly carves space for beauty in a decidedly inhospitable environment. —Emily Watlington

Refik Anadol, Unsupervised – Machine Hallucinations – MoMA, 2022

For nearly a year, the Museum of Modern Art’s lobby was dominated by one work that was hard to ignore: Refik Anadol’s Unsupervised – Machine Hallucinations – MoMA (2022). The work, a generative artwork by arguably the premier digital artist of the moment, uses the museum’s visual archive to produce a machine-learning model that interprets and reimagines images of artworks in MoMA’s collection. Since going on view, critics have eyed the work with suspicion. New York magazine’s Jerry Saltz compared it to a “lava lamp,” while R.H. Lossin critically observed in e-flux that the “spectacular” mode of Unsupervised turns a heavily militarized, “environmentally devastating” surveillance technology “into something pleasing and even soothing.” Artnet News’s Ben Davis suggested that Anadol’s works are a “purely decorative, cheerleader-ish style of A.I. art” and that Unsupervised, specifically, mines MoMA’s archive in such a way that it shears off the meaning behind different aesthetic modes, leaving behind only “context-free visual inspiration.” 

Anadol, for his part, in a recent interview, seemed to suggest that critics have misunderstood the work, which he sees both about “finding a new form” beyond modern and contemporary art and  demonstrating how artists can create responsibly with AI. “It is a work that was cocreated,” Anadol told ARTnews. “This is not just an AI doing something. It took 14 people one year to deep dive into one of the best art archives in the world, to imagine an AI that is inspiring, rather than mimicking, reality.” And, at the end of the day, there’s no denying the work’s hypnotic effect, with crowds of people entranced in front of the work at any given time. In October, the museum acquired the work for its permanent collection. —Harrison Jacobs

Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Until we became fire and fire us, 2023

One of several major new works commissioned for the 15th Sharjah Biennial, this sprawling, elegant video installation—fragmented across overgrown ruins in Sharjah’s Al Mureijah square—narrates Palestinian histories that have been quite literally buried. Beaches that used to be villages and parking lots that used to be graveyards figure in a poem that is repeated and fractured across videos, sounds, and images tucked into various crevices throughout the ruins. The work’s fragmented nature poignantly evokes the ruptured relationship between Palestinians and their land. The work debuted in March when the world was paying much less attention to Palestine; in the past three months, the poignancy of this work has only become more apparent. —Emily Watlington

Cameron Rowland, Depreciation, 2018

Though it dates back to 2018, Depreciation took a timely turn this year when it came under the stewardship of the Dia Art Foundation, which brought Cameron Rowland’s conceptual enterprise into the same care as Land art masterworks, like Walter De Maria’s The Lightning Field and Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. The land in this case—designated as “not for visitation” by the artist themself—is one acre of a former plantation site on South Carolina’s Edisto Island, which Rowland purchased at market value and, after stipulating that it never be developed or used in any way, appraised it at $0. “As reparation,” Rowland wrote in a description that charts the history of land conflicts starting with the abolition of slavery in 1865, “this covenant asks how land might exist outside of the legal-economic regime of property that was instituted by slavery and colonization.” —Andy Battaglia

Hajra Waheed, Hum II, 2023

In any group exhibition, even one as vast and materially ambitious as the 15th Sharjah Biennial, the sharpest entries transcend the crowd—especially when that entry is a towering conical structure vibrating with elegiac whispers. That was Hajra Waheed’s Hum II, a hauntingly beautiful meditation on the universality of grief, which won the 2023 Sharjah Biennial Prize alongside works by Doris Salcedo and Bouchra Khalili. Hum II invited viewers into a bone-white sound chamber that played a polyphony of seven songs popularized at women-led protests. There were no devices provided to translate, but meaning was thoroughly transmitted via atmosphere. Anguish—the sort that motivates civilians onto the street, where resistance may mean death—is universal. —Tessa Solomon

Miriam Cahn, fuck abstraction !, 2022

Because her figures tend to be shown in voids, where they scream, cavort, and tumble sans context, Miriam Cahn is not often thought of as a chronicler of current events, even if many of the Swiss artist’s images are often based on contemporary conflicts. Certainly, when most viewed fuck abstraction ! in her Palais de Tokyo survey in Paris this year, they did not see an image of Russian war crimes in Ukraine. No doubt the painting is meant to be a stomach-churner—it depicts a kneeling figure with their hands bound fellating a muscular man. Cahn painted it as a response to the mass graves in Bucha and reports of sexual violence committed against Ukrainian women; that context was made evident in a wall text accompanying the piece.

But many in France, including a number of right-wing politicians, willingly misconstrued the work as promoting pedophilia, with some even seeking a court directive to get the work taken down. A a former politician associated with the far-right National Rally party even went so far as to deface the work. Ultimately, the painting remained on view, but the debate proved Cahn right about one thing: images of power at work are ugly, and when shown with clarity, some would rather look away altogether. —Alex Greenberger