It’s time for a cherished annual tradition, recounting the best art I saw this year. These are listed in the order I saw them, they’re not ranked. I’m not attempting to make a definitive list of the best art of the year overall, I never see enough for that. These lists always end up reflecting where I happened to travel in a year. As usual, I managed to see art on a few unrelated work trips. One thing that was new this year was that I made three trips (New York, Toledo, and Miami) for the sole purpose of seeing and writing about art. I used my press pass to get into MoMA, Whitney, and Art Basel Miami for free. It felt like progress for my little side gig 🎉.
- Andrea Fraser, Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk (1989), Grand Rapids Art Museum
I was surprised to see this Andrea Fraser video at GRAM. It wasn’t part of any larger exhibition, it was just playing in a small gallery. The video shows Fraser acting as a tour guide in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. At first her monologue seems pretty standard, but the longer you watch the weirder it gets. She talks about the bathrooms and the coat closet, and just generally meanders from a standard tourguide script into bizarre tangents. The result is funny and a little unsettling. It’s ultimately a work about museums and how they try to present a dignified front despite all of the contractions and absurdities they contain.
2. Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Always to Return, National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC
I went to Washington DC in May and got to see a remarkable Felix Gonzalez-Torres retrospective called Always to Return at The National Portrait Gallery. Rather than decicate a temporary gallery space exclusively to Gonzalez-Torres’ work, the curators decided to place works throughout the museum, interminglign them with the much older, more traditional permanent collection. I had seen a lot of these works before, but never in this context, and it was stunning.
“Untitled” (Portrait of Dad) (1991), a pile of white candy, installed on the floor in front of a stately portrait of Teddy Roosevelt. “Untitled” (Portrait of Robert Vifian) (1993), consists of text installed high on the gallery wall that lists formative and significant events. Each time it’s installed the curators can update the text, adding and removing events. I noticed that this instance included “January 6, 2021.” One of the permanent collection works installed among the Gonzalez-Torres installations was a 1984 photograph of Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush by Dirck Halstead, which was used at the cover of Time Magazine on the occasion of the Republican National Convention. Pretty standard faire for the National Portrait Gallery, but in the context of a Felix Gonzalez-Torres exhibition, I couldn’t help but think about the Reagan administration’s calous failure to address the AIDS crisis, resulting in the unnecessary deaths of many gay men, including Felix Gonzalez-Torres himself.
The thought I kept coming back to while viewing this exhibition (and an exhibition on sculpture and race called The Shape of Power at The Smithsonian American Art Museum, which shares a building with The National Portrait Gallery) was surprise that the Smithsonian was able to stage such bold and progressive exhibitions despite the fascism emerging from the Trump Whitehouse only a few blocks away. The Smithsonian is under direct ideological attack from the Trump administration. Just a month after I saw this show, the director of the National Portrait Gallery, Kim Sajet, resigned after Trump claimed to fire her for embracing diversity, equity, and inclusion (he didn’t have authority to do that).
I don’t want to conclude that a show like Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Always to Return can never happen again, but it’s becoming clear that it could not happen in the country we have now (see Amy Sherald below). I’m glad I got a chance to see it.
3. Laurie Anderson, Four Talks (2021), Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC
In 2021 the Hirschhorn held a retrospective for Laurie Anderson, the legendary musician, performance artist, visual artist, multimedia pioneer, and all-around genius. I missed that show, but one installation she created for it is still on view, titled Four Talks. It’s a room containing four sculptures and the walls and floor are completely covered with words and images scrawled in white paint over black. The paintings contain many song lyrics from her long history of recordings, illustrations, and other streams of consciousness.
This room was incredibly moving to me because I grew up listening to Laurie Anderson, my dad has been a huge fan of hers for my whole life. He and I saw her in concert one time in Kalamazoo in 1995 when I was 13 and when she was touring for her album Bright Red, a formative experience. Lines painted in the installation from her songs, like “I dreamed I had to take a test in a Dairy Queen on another planet,” and “When my father died, we put him in the ground / When my father died, it was like a whole library had burned down,” were quite literally the soundtrack of my life growing up. It’s impossible for me to encounter this work with any kind of objectivity. I can give no dispassionate account of its success as an artwork, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I cried.
4. Mitchell F. Chan, Zantar (2025), Nguyen Wahed Gallery, New York
In May I went to New York to write about an exhibition of video game artworks by the Canadian artist Mitchell F. Chan. The piece was published in the November 2025 issue of Artforum, here and in print(!). Read the full review to get a better sense of what’s going on. For this list I’ll just say that Chan managed to create a playable video game that gradually changes states from game to movie. As you experience the narrative as player/viewer, you gradually lose agency. While this happens, the story reveals that the protagonist is also losing agency within the story. It’s a relatively simple trick, but it’s executed perfectly, and the effect is devastating.
5. LoVid, Mycotechnology: The Work of Wires in the Age of Secondary Decomposition, Various/Artists Gallery, New York
When I was in New York I saw a very small show by the artist duo LoVid which consisted of a series of photographs documenting a performance involving wearable sculptures the artists made in 2004. The costumes consisted of hand-sewn outfits of vibrant patterns inspired by video feedback, along with small LCD screens strapped to foreheads, knees, arms, and other bodyparts, all playing abstract video compositions. Twenty years later the DIY tech aesthetic looks charmingly dated. But what really made this exhibition of archival photographs pop was that the original negatives were damaged by water and mold sometime over the last two decades. When the artists discovered this mishap, they decided to create large prints from the damaged negatives and exhibit them with all their flaws. The result is a look back at the relatively recent past of hi-tech art which now looks quaint and archaic, but with an extra layer of organic decomposition. This work was documented in a way that should have been quite resilient–photo negatives being impervious to the kind of obsolescence that plagues digital file formats–but the images were corrupted anyway. Nothing lasts forever, but we can look back at the past even as is dissolves.
6. Amy Sherald, American Sublime, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
This was a phenomenal show by a phenomenal painter. Sherald is probably best known as the artist commissioned to paint the official portrait of Michelle Obama, and that painting was on view, along with her moving portrait of Breona Taylor, and so much more. Sherald is a figurative painter who gives just as much weight to verisimilitude as she does to the pure pleasure of arranging colors and shapes on canvas. The pictures have depth and flatness in equal measure, but there’s no conflict, the images just sing. They’re almost too perfect. The inclusion of Michelle Obama drives home the sense that the show is a portrait of a certain kind of impeccable black excellence–in fashion, in political clarity, in artistic vision–that feels very endangered now. We’re living a the post-Obama era, we’re living through the rancid backlash against “wokeness.” I kept wondering if this show was a distillation of a period of time that was now over, like a time capsule of a utopian dream we failed to realize.
But a defeatist reading isn’t fair to Sherald and it’s not fair to our country, either. Sherald’s vision has not expired, she just has to fight much harder to keep it alive in the current political climate. We all do. Once a court painter for the Obamas, she’s now doing battle with the censors of the Trump administration. American Sublime was set to travel to The National Portrait Gallery in the fall, but Sherald backed out when she learned that her painting Trans Forming Liberty, an image of a trans woman posing as the Statue of Liberty, might be excluded from the Smithsonian’s staging of the exhibition. In a statement Sherald said, “At a time when transgender people are being legislated against, silenced, and endangered across our nation, silence is not an option.” American Sublime found a new home not far away, at the Baltimore Museum of Art, where it is on view uncensored until April, 2026.
7. Infinite Images: The Art of Algorithms, Toledo Museum of Art
In July I went Ohio to see Infinite Images: The Art of Algorithms at the Toledo Museum of Art. The show traced generative art back to the 1960s, when artists like Vera Molnar and Sol LeWitt were using algorithmic rule sets to create art before having access to computers. Much of the focus was on the last decade of generative art, most of it amplified by the NFT market. I wrote a review of the show for Le Random. It was a good exhibition and a fun trip where I got to meet lots of people I know from the internet.
8. Otto Dix, Self Portrait (1912), Detroit Institute of Arts
I went with my wife and some friends to Detroit to see LCD Soundsystem (great show) so of course we had to stop at the Detroit Institute of Arts. A large part of the museum was being renovated, so they had selections of the permanent collection hung salon style in a small gallery. I was a little disappointed, but it was fun to see a dense hang of absolute bangers. The painting that really caught my eye was a self portrait by the German painter and printmaker Otto Dix from 1912. What’s so eerie about this painting is that it was created before World War I, where Dix served in a field artillery regiment. The horrors of that war had a profound impact on his work, check out his Der Krieg engravings. But the self portrait was made before all that. It shows a young man who looks serious, skeptical but green, unaware of the terror that awaited him.
9. Jack Butcher, Self Checkout (2025), Art Basel Miami Beach
I went to Miami in December to write about a new program at Art Basel Miami Beach dedicated to digital art called Zero 10. I wrote two essays about it for Le Random, the first about Beeple’s robot dogs, and the second about the rest of Zero 10. In the second piece I spent a lot of time discussing a participatory installation by Jack Butcher called Self Checkout. It used common point-of-sale technology to allow visitors to buy a receipt for any amount of money they wanted using a credit card. What was the receipt for? Conceptual art! The receipt was the work. But it also created an NFT. But it was also a sculpture. A large split-flap display on the wall tracked the amount of money earned by the work, starting in negative territory to reflect the cost the artist paid for the booth and to produce the work. Eventually the ticker moved to positive territory and everyone could see exactly how much money Butcher made from this strange experiment. In my piece about it I wrote:
There is no posturing, no tricks, no irony and no activist pretense. Butcher, who has worked as a designer, approached participating in an art fair as a design problem and devised a solution with an uncommon level of transparency and precision. Art fairs are commercial endeavors and Butcher seemed to be saying, “This is what it cost me to be in this fair; would you like to buy a part of that experience?”
10. Auriea Harvey, Untitled Art Miami Beach
Auriea Harvey is an artist who seems to exist in several different millenia at once. She’s a digital art pioneer, creating video game artworks, 3D printed sculptures, and other cutting edge technological explorations. But she also creates marble sculptures, drawings, and taps into ancient and mythological subject matter, like satyrs, cyclopes, and classical architecture. At the Heft Gallery booth in Untitled Art Miami Beach she presented several works in a small black space. A flat screen showed an irredescent rotating head that seemed to incorporate a skull along with the artist’s own face. There was a small marble head of a mythical beast, an ornate hand mirror, a 3D printed head of a smiling cyclops. The piece that really stopped me in my tracks was a small drawing of an ornate ancient doorway, topped with a piedmont and bordered by columns wrapped with complex patterns. In the doorway was utter darkness, a black much darker than the lines used to render the rest of the picture. It’s so refreshing to see an artist who is capable of deploying countless hi-tech effects but who also remembers the power and simplicity of a good drawing. What’s in that door? Is it a tomb? A portal? I could stare at it for hours.
kevinbuist.com 