Every year since 2015 I’ve written a round-up of the best exhibitions and artworks I saw that year. It’s a fulfilling exercise, and even though I always underestimate how much time it takes to write, I’ve come to cherish the process of forcing myself to think about what I saw and why it mattered to me. I love art, but I love art in an outward-looking way. I want art to intersect with other ideas and get knocked off balance. I want art that avoids insularity and struggles to stay relevant in a place where its methods and assumptions are not taken for granted. So, is it relevant? The answer is not a given. Plenty of art I see in a year is pleasant and amusing, but this is my chance to make myself decide which art mattered to me and take a shot at explaining why. I’m never entirely successful.

These entries are listed chronologically in the order I saw them, so they’re not ranked. Some of these works are new, some are not, the common thread is that I saw them in 2019.

Julian Rosefeldt, Manifesto, at Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal

This multi-channel video installation was produced and first exhibited in 2015. It consists of thirteen 10-minute long videos that play simultaneously in a big dark room, each one featuring Cate Blanchett dressed as different characters reciting historic political and artistic manifestos. On one screen she appears as a disheveled homeless man reciting Guy Debord’s Situationist Manifesto, on another she’s a television news anchor reading Sol LeWitt’s Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, and many more. Viewers wander from screen to screen listening to one bit of manifesto after another. Every few minutes all the videos sync together and all thirteen Cate Blanchetts speak in unison, which is incredibly jarring. It’s the kind of installation in which you can spend a long time lingering, and I did. It works on one hand because Blanchett is just so good, it’s like a catalogue of her range as an actor. But it’s also unsettling and feels much more fake than watching her in a typical movie. This is probably because of the disconnect between what she’s saying and what she’s doing is so acute (people don’t usually recite the Dada Manifesto at a funeral, as one scene depicts). 

Nina Katchadourian, On Hold Music Dance Party, Fridman Gallery, New York

This was a performance at Fridman Gallery in New York that happened around the same time as the Armory Show. Katchadourian is one of my favorite artists because of the way she takes mundane everyday things and turns them into something remarkable with what looks like very little effort. Her work is poetic but it’s also very, very funny. One of her better known series of works are photographs of herself wearing a napkins on her head to look like Flemish renaissance portraits. In Fridman Gallery in March there were a series of photographs she had taken of collages made on the tray table in front of her while flying on commercial airlines. On Hold Music Dance Party was exactly what is sounds like. Katchadourian and some collaborators recorded music and automated messages heard while waiting on hold with various corporate callcenters and chopped them up into danceable beats. There was free wine. I didn’t know anyone, but everyone seemed a little nerdy and we all had fun.

But I suppose it’s not enough to say it was a fun dance party. There are plenty of dance parties, and they’re not necessarily art. Reflecting on Katchadourian’s performance now, I’m reminded of something I read recently by the art critic for the New Yorker, Peter Schjeldahl. Schjeldahl published a devastating piece titled “The Art of Dying,” where he reflects on his terminal lung cancer diagnosis. He takes the opportunity to meander through art, life, love, and facing the inevitable. One of my favorite passages is this (although the whole thing is quotable): “The aesthetic isn’t bounded by art, which merely concentrates it for efficient consumption. If you can’t put a mental frame around, and relish, the accidental aspect of a street or a person, or really of anything, you will respond to art only sluggishly.” He’s talking about looking at art (and life), but this is exactly how Katchadourian makes art. She can put a frame around anything, and she does it with such wit and joy that I can’t help but feel lucky to have encountered it.

Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future, Guggenheim Museum, New York

This was a very popular show, and for good reason. Klint was a Swedish painter who began producing spiritually-infused abstract canvases in 1906, decades before the broadly recognized turn to abstraction led by artists like Kandinsky, Malevich, and Mondrian. Klint felt that the world was not ready for her paintings, and they were rarely exhibited during her lifetime. In fact she stipulated that they not be shown publicly until 20 years after her death, and most of the work wasn’t shown until 1986. The Guggenheim show was the first major solo show of Klint’s work in the United States. Klint’s paintings were heavily influenced by spirituality and the occult. A large series of works in the show are known as The Paintings for the Temple, which she intended to one day install in a spiral temple. The exhibition felt so relevant and urgent, despite showing canvases that are more than a century old. Paintings for the Future was one of those exhibitions that rewrites our understanding of art history by pointing out what was previously overlooked. It also worked so well in the Guggenheim; the paintings made it to their spiral temple after all.

Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Walled Unwalled, Venice Biennale

Lawrence Abu Hamdan made news recently as one of the four nominees for the Turner Prize who collectively decided that they should share the award. Hamdan’s video Walled Unwalled was probably a big reason why he was on the Turner Prize shortlist to begin with. The single channel video installation was part of the Venice Biennale main exhibition, May You Live in Interesting Times. The video was shot in a recording studio in Berlin, and features Hamdan’s narration, experimental sounds, and interviews with scientists about the nature of sound. Hamdan observes two recent trends related to walls. The first is that border walls have proliferated around the world in the last two decades. At the same time, scientists worked out a way to use muons, elementary physical particles similar electrons, to penetrate and produce images through what were previously thought to be impenetrable materials, like lead-lined shipping containers and the stone walls of ancient pyramids. The legal implications of this technology are vast, because it essentially renders all walls invisible, meaning that images can be created through the barriers that once separated public and private space. Walls are everywhere, walls are nowhere.

Stan Douglas, Doppelgänger, Venice Biennale

This two channel video installation was presented in a room where viewers could see either side of the screen depending on where they stood. The looping scenes tell the story of a solitary astronaut who is sent to a distant planet through quantum teleportation. The ground crew and the explorer assume something went wrong when the ship unexpectedly returns shortly after the teleportation. But upon closer examination the scientists realize that the astronaut and the ship that returned are an exact mirror image of the ones that left. The text printed on the ship’s control panels is backward, the screw threads go the wrong way, the position of the astronaut’s stomach and liver are swapped within her body. The looping film has no clear beginning and end, and as I watched it for a while it dawned on me that there wasn’t an error, the quantum teleportation worked as planned. But instead of arriving at an uninhabited earth-like planet as intended, the astronaut arrived at a world exactly like her own, but where everything is reversed, even the planet’s orbit around the sun goes the opposite direction. At the same time, the mirror image world sent an astronaut through quantum teleportation to Earth, who confused the scientists by being the exact mirror image of the astronaut they had just sent away.

This is a relatively simple science fiction conceit, but it work so well here. The way the video installation is displayed is crucial. Because you can watch the video screens from either side, one of them appears “normal” and the other appears as a mirror image, with text and everything else reversed. But it’s impossible to determine which video screen is depicting events in the “normal” world and which one is the mirror image, because it depends on your position relative to the screen in the gallery. It’s a simple trick, but its effect was breathtaking. A lot of video art installations would be more pleasant to view in a traditional theater setting, but this one would fall apart. The looping nature of the work and the ability of the viewer to change positions relative to screen are both essential, it would be impossible really see it any other way.

Anton Vidokle, Immortality and Resurrection for All!, The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, South Korea

Anton Vidokle is a Russian born artist and cofounder of e-flux who has produced a series of video works in recent years about a nearly forgotten early 20th century Russian philosophy called Cosmism. Cosmism was influential in the early days of the Soviet Union, but fell victim to Stalinist repression in the 1930’s. Cosmism sought to meld Western Enlightenment with Eastern philosophy to promote space colonization, immortality by technological means, and the resurrection of dead ancestors. MMCA was showing all three of Vidokle’s video works on Cosmism when I visited in June, but I only had the opportunity to see the most recent one. Immortality and Resurrection for All! shows scenes inside several Moscow museums, overlaid with the narration from a text by Cosmism founder Nikolai Fedorov about the importance of museums as sites of resurrection. A mummy walks the galleries, a dog scampers among the exhibits. Cosmism is weird. But the more I learn about it, it seems like a potentially fruitful way to think about science, spirituality and politics that isn’t beholden to the divisions we tend to place between those domains.

Lee Bul, Gravity Greater than Velocity I, at Leeum Samsung Museum, Seoul, South Korea

This piece is a functioning karaoke booth that can only be used by one person at a time. The booth is soundproof, so people outside the booth can’t hear what song is being performed inside. I went in, closed the padded red door behind me, and belted out Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run for an audience consisting only of myself. I love this piece because it’s interactive and it repurposes common objects and rituals (the karaoke machine looked to be a widely available model), but it’s decidedly not social. Most artworks that incorporate audience participation do so to create a unique temporary social reality, a social sculpture. But Gravity Greater than Velocity I employs common tropes of social sculpture to create an experience for a single participant at a time. You’re alone with your voice.

Anonymous painting of James Earl Jones as Othello, at Ramsdell Regional Center for the Arts

This summer I had the chance to visit the Ramsdell Regional Center for the Arts in Manistee, Michigan, where I received a tour of the historic theater, galleries, and community spaces from the director and a board member. The theater is beautiful and has a rich history. James Earl Jones grew up in a tiny town nearby and acted in his first theater production at the Ramsdell in 1955, playing Othello. In the lobby hangs a painting of Jones (identified as “Todd Jones,” the name he used at the time) dressed for his role as Othello. I asked who painted the picture, but the staff didn’t know. The only clue is a set of initials in the bottom corner, GSKA. The painting is brushy and expressive, but it’s still recognizable as Jones, even though it’s a much younger version of him.

When I first saw the painting I thought it was an interesting curiosity, like the architectural details of the theater or the odd mishmash of props backstage. But the picture stuck with me. Othello is about a Moorish general in Venice, it’s a tragedy about race, jealousy and betrayal. Othello is an outsider. I couldn’t help but think about apt it was for Jones to begin his career playing this character in Manistee County, a place where 95% of the population is white. Painting and theater are both about the fluid relationship between artifice and reality. A painting is only ever pigment on a canvas, but we’re pulled from that material reality into the image it presents. On stage the actors are real people, but they conjure another reality and we get sucked in. The painting of Jones as Othello is so good because it manages to be both a painting of Othello the character and Jones the person, while perfectly employing loose brushwork and a slightly unfinished feel to remind us of the central contradiction of representative painting–between the flatness of the object and the depth of the image it depicts. 

The Edge of Things: Dissident Art Under Repressive Regimes, Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan

During a brief stop in Lansing I had the chance to see an exhibition at the Broad Museum at Michigan State called The Edge of Things: Dissident Art Under Repressive Regimes. The exhibition surveyed the rise of conceptual art in Latin America and the way that work responded to dictatorships in Chile, Argentina, and Brazil. These artists employed their own bodies, like Elias Adasme photographing himself hanging by the ankles next to a map of Chile. Images and materials of the street were also a recurring theme, a site that serves as space for protest and a reminder of the freedom of movement lost under dictatorships. I was particularly moved by Regina Vater’s Para un tempo guerra (For a Time of War), a mandala-like installation of paving stones and little loaves of bread. The stones are a particular kind used on the streets of Portugal and the old settlements of its former colonial cities in Brazil. The bread loaves are Brazilian-style French rolls, an ubiquitous and inexpensive staple. On the wall was a passage by Peruvian writer Cesar Vallejo in Spanish. The wall label held the English version, which read:

And in this cold hour, when the Earth
Transcends human dust and is so sad,
I would like to touch all the doors.
And plead to I do not know whom, sorry,
And make him pieces of fresh bread
Here, in the oven of my heart…!

The Plot: Miracle and Mirage by Alejandro Celedon, Nicolas Stutzin, Javier Correa, Chicago Architectural Biennial

This year’s Chicago Architecture Biennial, titled …and other such stories, focused historic, environmental, and political conditions of cities far more than it focused on the physical form of buildings. Many exhibits presented dense research findings, wall-sized infographics, long videos, reading rooms. Others, like the one by the group Forensic Architecture, seemed to partially collapse under it’s own critical approach, when they concluded that it would be irresponsible to show a video they’d produced which investigated a police shooting in Chicago (the work consisted of wall text and some audio). The piece that really stuck with me was The Plot: Miracle and Mirage by Alejandro Celedon, Nicolas Stutzin and Javier Correa. A video projected onto the floor was surrounded by waist-high wooden walls, the interior of which were covered with a mirrored surface. Looking over the walls and down on the video, it reflected, reversed and repeated infinitely in all directions. The video was about experimental urban development in Santiago, Chile that took place in the 70’s and 80’s, coinciding with that country’s violent far-right dictatorship. This approach to urban planning had a direct link to Chicago, and was implemented by a group of Chilean economists known as the “Chicago Boys” who were educated in neoliberal free market thinking at the University of Chicago. The promise of radically de-regulated urban planning turned out to be a mirage with far-reaching consequences. The video was short and not overly didactic. The connection between Chicago and Santiago began to seem like a sort of ideological colonialism, the North performing thought experiments on the global South, which paid in blood. 

It’s become my own little tradition to round up my favorite exhibitions and artworks of the year. I know, I know… listicles. But the format is convenient, and it’s a way for me to reflect on what I saw and what stuck with me. This list is not meant to summarize the best exhibitions of the year overall, because I didn’t see nearly enough to pretend to make a definitive list. This list is personal, it’s the best of what I saw. It’s also not ranked, they’re listed in the order I saw them through the year.

1.Harald Szeemann: Museum of Obsessions at The Getty Research Institute and Grandfather: A Pioneer Like Us (1974) at Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

Harald Szeemann was a Swiss curator who lived from 1933 to 2005. His method of exhibition-making, particularly in the 1970s, became incredibly influential. What we know now as conceptual, global, curator-driven exhibitions would not have been possible without his pioneering work, particularly in shows like Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form (1969) and documenta 5 (1972). When I was in LA in February I had the chance to see two concurrent exhibitions about Szeemann, both organized by The Getty Research Institute, which houses Szeemann’s archives. Museum of Obsessions at The Getty Center was survey of objects, texts and artifacts relating to the breadth of Szeemann’s career, including a christmas-tree-like hanging sculpture assembled from hundreds of luggage tags from his extensive travels. Across town, at ICA LA, was Grandfather: A Pioneer Like Us, a full-scale replica of the interior space of Szeemann’s apartment in which he curated a dense exhibition of artifacts and photographs to tell the story of his late grandfather, Etienne Szeemann, a famous hairdresser.

It was a remarkable pair of exhibitions. One presented a survey of Szeemann’s influence and impact, showing that he was the originator of the auteur-curator archetype, and an artist in his own right. The recreated apartment show about his grandfather, on the other hand, was an example of how he could apply his particular craft to something incredibly personal.

2. Stories of Almost Everyone at Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

Stories of Almost Everyone was a group exhibition about the way objects and the stories we tell about them interact. Nearly every work appeared to be mundane, found, or otherwise unassuming. It was an odd collection of objects, each with its own story. A large wall held a recessed vitrine, behind its glass a diamond ring sat under crisp light. The ring was Jill Magid’s The Proposal (2016), where the artist retrieved the ashes of famed Mexican architect Luis Barragán and had them made into a 2.02 carat diamond and set into a ring. The ring was then offered to the current owner of Barragán’s archives, who is based in Switzerland, so that in exchange for the ring the archives could be repatriated to Mexico. The offer of exchange has not been accepted.

Nearby a large, cold war era globe glows from within. The label explains that the globe belonged to Robert McNamara, the US Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1968 and architect of the Vietnam War. It was purchased and repurposed as a readymade artwork by the artist Danh Vo, whose family fled Vietnam for Denmark during the war.

While I was perusing one gallery I noticed out of the corner of my eye that a security guard was beginning to dance. I thought it was odd, but figured he was just moving a bit out of boredom. It quickly became clear it was something more. His moves were intense and skilled, and he began taking his clothes off. A small, stunned crowd gathered. He gyrated and stripped all the way down to a very small speedo then loudly declared, “Untitled, Tino Segal!” before collecting his uniform from the floor and exiting the gallery.

3. Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire at the Met, New York

The Course of Empire is a series of five paintings by Thomas Cole made between 1833 and 1836. Each canvas shows the same fictional river valley at different points in time. The scene is at first almost entirely wild and untamed, with a few primitive inhabitants. By the third picture a glorious city is celebrating with a triumphant parade among towering marble colonnades. Then destruction and war, followed by desolation and natural forces reclaiming the valley. There’s so much to love about these paintings. First of all, they’re essentially a comic strip, even though they were painted decades before anyone thought of making comic strips. These paintings are epic and allegorical. They’re about both the past and the future at once, they describe a cyclical reality at the core of all civilizations. We look to history–and its accounts of culture, politics, and religion–to tell us how empires run their course. But Cole seems to suggest we should learn from biology, meteorology, and geology as well. Course of Empire shows that we’re not above the cycles of nature, in fact we’re a part of them and entirely at their whim.

4. Danh Vo – Take My Breath Away at the Guggenheim, New York

As mentioned above in the entry about Stories of Almost Everyone, Danh Vo is Danish Vietnamese artist whose family fled the Vietnam War. Vo collects objects and artifacts that relate to particular slices of religious and national identity. The Guggenheim show presented a lot of readymades, non-art objects represented as artworks, but he used this approach in a way that was personal, urgent, and finely calibrated. In his hands the readymade gesture felt nothing like a conceptual stunt. He presented the chandeliers that once hung in the ballroom of the Hotel Majestic in Paris, under which the 1973 Paris Peace Accords were signed, ending American involvement in Vietnam. Several large copper sculptures, supported by wooden armatures, were 1:1 scale replicas of fragments of the Statue of Liberty. There were broken pieces of ancient statuary, the Unabomber’s typewriter, and an ongoing series where the artist’s father repeatedly copies the text of a letter from a French missionary to Vietnam, written shortly before he was martyred. I love the Guggenheim because it has a way of slowly building the case for an exhibition by presenting the works in an unbroken line. Vo plays a lot with repetition, so gestures that seem mildly interesting at first compound their conceptual and emotion pressure as you descend the spiral of the gallery.

5. Dear Listener: Works by Nicholas Galanin at the Heard Museum, Phoenix

This was my first visit to the Heard Museum, whose mission it is to advance American Indian art. They have a remarkable collection, including an informative (and devastating) exhibition about the history of Indian boarding schools. They also show contemporary work, like this solo show by Nicholas Galanin. Galanin is an artist unbound by medium. He effortlessly floats from sculpture, to performance, to fashion design, to video, to textile. At one moment, Galanin dryly riffs on the role of contemporary indigenous identity in American culture, the next moment he’s deadly serious, reflecting on generations of genocide and displacement. This show dealt with incredibly heavy subjects, ghosts of history that continue to haunt us because dominant American culture still refuses to acknowledge the legacy of these traumas. Galanin works with this material in a way that avoids being austere or gloomy. I would almost call it playful, but that seems far too flippant. There was something punk about it. The anger was real, but so was the spirit of creativity and improvisation.

6. Cagnacci: Painting Beauty and Death at the Cincinnati Art Museum

I stumbled upon this small special exhibition at the Cincinnati Art Museum and it really knocked me back. Set in a dark gallery with sharp spots on the works, the show only featured four Italian Baroque paintings, three by Guido Cagnacci and one by Bernardo Strozzi. Two of the paintings depicted the death of Cleopatra, the other two showed David posing with the head of Goliath. I was completely unfamiliar with both Cagnacci and Strozzi, and apparently I never knew (or had forgotten) how Cleopatra died. Cleopatra committed suicide by allowing an asp (an Egyptian viper) to bite her in the breast, rather than be paraded through Rome as a prisoner of Octavian. Of course I would like to know more about Baroque painting and ancient Roman and Egyptian history, but the fact that I don’t know much about either made this small exhibition so much more surprising. It felt like stumbling into Cleopatra’s chamber and discovering her there, limp and oddly peaceful, with the asp slithering away from her breast.

7. A Color Removed by Michael Rakowitz at Front International Triennial, Cleveland

This year I visited the inaugural editions of two contemporary art triennials in the midwest, Front International in Cleveland, and Opens Spaces in Kansas City. It’s exciting to see new, serious citywide exhibitions popping up. The first of the two was Front, which opened in July. Front was curated by Michelle Grabner, and while there were hiccups here and there, overall it was very good. The exhibition was spread out, occupying multiple neighborhoods in Cleveland, along with components in Akron and Oberlin. Because of that, the best parts of the exhibition felt discreet, and not necessarily like part of a larger whole, which wasn’t necessarily bad.

The standout work for me was Michael Rakowitz’s A Color Removed. This is a work that had been a proposal for a number of years, and it was finally realized at Front. The work consisted of donation boxes placed around Cleveland where people were asked to donate orange objects, in hopes of removing the color orange from the city of Cleveland. An installation of donated orange objects in a gallery served as a meeting place for community programming around safety and violence. The Sisyphean task of attempting to remove all orange objects from Cleveland was a response to the police killing of Tamir Rice, a 14 year old boy who was murdered in Cleveland in 2014 while playing with a toy gun that lacked an orange safety tip. I attended the opening reception, which felt very much like a wake. Rakowitz served Tamir’s favorite foods, community members and Tamir’s mother were in attendance. The goal of A Color Removed felt both urgent and impossible, inspiring and devastating, not unlike the fight for gun control, the fight for black lives, and the fight for more sensible policing.

8. Hy-Dyve by Nick Cave at Open Spaces, Kansas City

Another new citywide exhibition I visited this year was Open Spaces in Kansas City, curated by Dan Cameron. Like Front, Open Spaces was pretty spread out, and a few works rose above the rest. The first that really stood out was Nick Cave’s video installation Hy-Dyve. Sited in an empty chapel, kaleidoscopic videos were mapped to the interior walls and ceiling, while images of rushing water flowed over the floor. It was rhythmic, pulsing, and a little overwhelming, like seeing one of Cave’s sound suit dances through a prism and from the inside.

9. …called up by Ebony G. Patterson at Open Spaces, Kansas City

Another stand-out piece at Open Spaces was Ebony G. Patterson’s “…called up.” A portion of Open Spaces was sited in Swope Park, a huge park south of downtown Kansas City that includes steep hills covered in dense forest. Patterson’s installation was on top of a wooded hill, and it required a long trip from a confused Uber driver to access. Patterson and curator Dan Cameron found a long-abandoned swimming pool that was once used for therapy and recreation for children with disabilities. Patterson installed a false bottom in the pool and covered it with silk flowers and candles. It was a remarkably beautiful burst of color embedded in the ground, like a giant memorial to distant memories of play, compassion, and pain.

10. A Logo for America by Alfredo Jaar at Faena Festival, Miami Beach

A Logo for America is a 42-second video loop originally commissioned for Times Square by the Public Art Fund in 1987. Programmed for what now look like ancient LED jumbotrons, the animation cycles through images of the American flag, a map of North and South America, and the text “THIS IS NOT AMERICA.” In its original incarnation, it played on the Times Square screens between ads for unsuspecting tourists and shoppers. When I saw it this year it was playing on a small barge slowing tacking back and forth along Miami Beach in front of the Faena Hotel. I’d seen the boat a few years ago, trawling back and forth in front of South Beach playing ads for nightclubs and nail salons. Faena Festival, organized by the hotel, coincided with Art Basel Miami Beach and featured several public art commissions on the beach, film screenings, talks, and other events. I was skeptical about Faena Festival, thinking it might be a fluff project. It turned out to be the highlight of my trip to Miami this year. A Logo for America worked particularly well just off the coast of Miami, broasting its message back to South Florida, that weird, hyperactive nexus of North America, the Caribbean, and the world.

Each year I do a list post about the best art I saw over the past twelve months. I don’t claim that these are the best exhibitions of 2017, because I don’t see nearly enough to make that claim. But I still think it’s worth keeping a log of the exhibitions and artworks that moved me this year. These are listed in the order in which I saw them. Most are newly created, but some are… definitely not. I always see good work at ArtPrize, but I never include it on these lists because that would seem a little too insular.

1. Richard Misrach and Guillermo Galindo, Border Cantos: Sight & Sound Explorations from the Mexican-American Border, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas

I visited Crystal Bridges in Bentonville, Arkansas for the first time this year. When I was there they had a temporary exhibition called Border Cantos. It was a collaboration between photographer Richard Misrach and sculptor/sound artist Guillermo Galindo. Misrach provided stunning large-scale photos of the US-Mexico border, while Galindo exhibited sculptures that doubled as musical instruments made from detritus collected from the borderlands. The images and objects were creative, playful, sorrowful, and devastating all at once, over and over again (it was a big show). The curation and didactics were also wonderful. Here in this deep red state was a show that unapologetically humanized the experience of the people who cross this border for a chance at a better life. It’s a landscape packed with stories of struggle for freedom and opportunity. What could be more American than that?

2. Irena Haiduk’s SER (Seductive Exacting Realism), Documenta 14, Kassel, Germany

I visited Documenta for the second time this year. Documenta is the massively influential exhibition that takes place in Kassel, Germany once every five years. Except this year it was split between Kassel and Athens (I didn’t see the Athens part). Overall the Kassel portion was a little underwhelming, but there were some really powerful moments. One of my favorite works was a multifaceted project by Irena Haiduk called SER (Seductive Exacting Realism). It consisted of installation, performance, crayon rubbing, sitting in a dark room listening to recorded voices, and a merchandise line of shoes and dresses. I wrote about it on my blog earlier this year, in a post called Art is a Waiting Room. The piece seemed to sum up a certain uneasiness in a way very few artworks do at the moment.

3. Lorenza Böttner, various works, Documenta 14, Kassel, Germany

Another part of Documenta 14 that really stuck with me was an installation of photographs, paintings, drawings, and artifacts from Lorenza Böttner. Böttner was a local trans and disabled artist who was active in the 80’s and 90’s until eventually losing her life to AIDS in 1994. It was a smart choice to include a dense collection of images and text–only a small portion of which is shown above–as it gave viewers the chance to grasp Böttner’s important biography. She was born male, lost both her arms in an electrocution accident as a child, then went on to forge a career as an artist and a woman who challenged one convention after another. The work was funny and harrowing and felt way ahead of its time.

4. Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler’s Flora, Swiss Pavilion, Venice Biennale

After Documenta I went on to the Venice Biennale. The main show was alright, but nothing stood out as a real show-stopper. There were some wonderful national pavilions, however, which are organized independently of the main show. My favorite was the Swiss Pavilion, which had sculptures by Carol Bove and a two-channel video installation by Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler titled Flora. Two videos were projected on the opposite sides of a single screen, which shared one audio track. One video takes the form of a documentary, the other is a reenactment. Together they tell the story of Flora Mayo, and relatively unknown American artist who studied in Paris in the 1920’s, when she was briefly Alberto Giacometti’s lover. The piece takes what was an art historical bit part and reveals a complex and tragic story of a remarkable woman. There’s an interview with Flora’s son, who is still alive, that brought me to tears. It occurred to me that art history must be riddled with other “Floras,” mostly under-appreciated and forgotten women, erased from the dominant narratives of the male artist geniuses.

5. Jacobo Tintoretto’s portrait of Doge Marino Faliero, Doge’s Palace, Venice

In Venice I visited the Palazzo Ducale, or Doge’s Palace, a massive 14th century gothic complex in central Venice. For centuries it served at the residence of the Doge, the ruler of the Republic of Venice, before being turned into a museum in 1923. The tour is very long, passing through many intricately ornamented chambers, medieval armories, and dungeons. Eventually I reached the Chamber of the Great Council, an enormous room containing what they claim is the world’s largest painting on canvas, Tintoretto’s Il Paradiso. Every other surface is covered by paintings as well, including a row of 76 portraits near the ceiling depicting each Doge in the order of their rule, along with a scroll saying what they accomplished. Near one corner a portrait is missing, and in it’s place is a painting of a black cloth with the latin inscription, “Hic est locus Marini Faletro decapitati pro criminibus,” or, “This is the space reserved for Marino Faliero, beheaded for his crimes.” Faliero was the Doge for only a few months from 1354-55, when he attempted a coup d’etat. The coup failed and he was beheaded. A label on the wall below explains that Faliero was considered a traitor to the Republic, and was condemned not only to death but also “damnatio memoriae, the total eradication of his memory and name.” There’s a certain irony to this, of course, because I only learned his name by seeing his lack of a portrait, which contains an inscription that includes his name. I won’t go too far into it here in this list post, but being in Europe in the midst of the slow-motion train wreck of the Trump administration afforded me a welcome dose of historic and geographic perspective. Sometimes great societies have terrible leaders. Empires survive, but the stains linger. How will we remember the things we want so badly to forget?

6. Philip Guston and the Poets, Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice

Another show I saw in Venice that was not part of the Biennale was this stunning Guston show that traced his relationship with the work of five poets: D. H. Lawrence, W. B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, Eugenio Montale and T. S. Eliot. I already liked Guston, but this show revealed remarkable things about the work I hadn’t seen before. The wall text, which included plenty of poetry, was the best I’ve seen.

7. Walter De Maria’s The New York Earth Room, New York

A few weeks ago I went to New York for a screening of the ArtPrize documentary, More Art Upstairs. I figured out that my hotel was a few blocks from De Maria’s New York Earth Room, which I’d never seen before. The work is relatively large apartment on the second floor of a building in SoHo that’s filled with about two feet of dirt. It’s maintained and staffed by the Dia Art Foundation, and they keep regular open hours. You have to buzz in to an inconspicuous doorway, then follow signs leading up a narrow flight of stairs. The apartment contains a small lobby with the attendant’s desk, and the rest is filled with dirt. You can’t walk on the dirt, and you’re not even supposed to photograph it. The same dirt has been sitting there since 1977. There’s something very comforting about know that that mass will always just sit there, impenetrable, oblivious to everything around it. My favorite feature is that the dirt extends into another room. You can see some of the room through an open doorway, but most of the dirt in there will never be visible to anyone. It just exists.

8. Pedro Lasch’s Reflections on Time, Prospect.4, New Orleans

In November I went to New Orleans for the opening of the Prospect.4 triennial. The entire show was excellent, and a lot of the best people I know in the art world were there. I’m highlighting two works on this list that really stood out. The first is Reflections on Time by Pedro Lasch. Prospect.4 is staged in venues across the city, including museums and less traditional spaces. This project was installed in an antique shop in the French Quarter, and Lasch took that opportunity to collaborate with the shop and integrate their collection into the work. A small gallery is lined with black mirrors, dark reflective rectangles of glass, each with a faint image printed on them. In front of each glass is a pedestal containing an ornate antique clock, the faces of which can best be seen as a reflection in reverse. The images printed in the mirrors are also borrowed, from art history and popular culture, each one relating to the theme of time in a different way. The gallery containing the installation was at the very back of the store, so that in order to see it I had to wander through a labyrinth of ornate artifacts. Once I finally made it to the artwork, I was ready to think about time.

9. Naama Tsabar’s Composition, Prospect.4, New Orleans

For Prospect.4, Tsabar staged a performance in her ongoing Composition series. About twenty local musicians, all women, stood atop amps or small platforms in a triangular arrangement in a city park. A drone began emanating from the amps, as the crowd moved around the stoic musicians, they began playing songs commissioned by Tsabar. There were three groups and three songs. They went one at a time around the circle, then they all played all three songs at once, layering and looping the sounds together. Each audience member heard their own audio mix depending on where they stood. At first, the crowd only moved around the periphery, positioning itself in front of whichever musicians were playing. But shortly after they all started playing at once, a group of five or six junior-high aged girls walked right into the array of amps and platforms. It was like membrane suddenly ruptured, and the whole crowd suddenly flooded in. The emotional resonance of certain keys of music is something I don’t fully understand, but there was some magical version of it happening there. I cried.

10. The Music Box Village, New Orleans

The artist party for Prospect.4 was held at an incredible venue that doubles as an artwork. The Music Box Village is a collection of bespoke buildings, forts, gazebos and other structures that are all functional musical instruments. It’s a fusion of sculpture, architecture, and endlessly creative musical instrument design. The installation is build by a local nonprofit called New Orleans Airlift, and was not a part of Prospect.4 (except as an event venue). Toward the end of the party the building/instruments filled with performers and a raucous, site-specific concert commenced. Like Tsabar’s Composition, the sound depended on where you were. It was like the party was happening inside the musical instrument.