Top 10 of 2024

Installation view of “Shinkichi Tajiri: The Restless Wanderer” at the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht, the Netherlands.
 
New York! Last January, I moved back here from South Korea, and so my top 10 list for 2024 is focused largely on the city, with some other shows I visited while traveling also in the mix. I had almost (but not quite) forgotten just how art-rich New York is. Whether measuring by quantity or quality, there is no place like it, and so assembling a top 10 was difficult. But I managed. It follows below. Before that, though, here are a few other exhibitions (plus a performance and a television show) that have stuck with me from the past 12 months: 

Anicka Yi's potent retrospective at the Leeum in Seoul, as well as the museum's "Dream Screen" exhibition of young Korean artists, curated by Rirkrit Tiravanija, with one of the most unusual exhibition designs I have ever seen; a trio of Jacob Kassay outings, at Mr. Fahrenheit, an empty apartment in Brooklyn Heights, and 303; the glorious "Edges of Ailey" at the Whitney Museum; William Kentridge's The Great Yes, The Great No (2024) opera at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts in Miami; Peter Doig's majestic "The Street" show at Gagosian; Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie's awfully of-the-moment The Curse, which began in 2023 but ended in January; Galleria Mattia De Luca's Giorgio Morandi blowout on the Upper East Side; Park Seo-Bo's enigmatic and moving final works at White Cube; Nate Boyce's shapeshifting video in a pitch-black Lomex; Hung Liu at Ryan Lee; Darcy Morelos at Dia in Chelsea (which opened in 2023); Nolan Simon at the new 47 Canal; the masterpiece-heavy "Enchanted Reverie: Klee and Calder" at Di Donna Galleries; John Duff at Reena Spaulings; the touring "Martin Wong: Malicious Mischief" at the Stedelijk; the melancholy Rudolf Stingel installation at Gagosian; Diane Simpson at James Cohan; "Bill Traylor: Works from the William Louis-Dreyfus Foundation" at David Zwirner; Win McCarthy at Francis Irv; the Francis Picabia feast (all portraits of women) at Michael Werner; Lee Shinja at Tina Kim; "Make Way for Berthe Weill" at the rechristened Gray Art Museum; Anna Rubin at Essex Street; "Arshile Gorky: New York City" at Hauser & Wirth (not least for its sumptuous foldout poster showing the artist's old haunts); Daniel Pommereulle at Ramiken; and last but not least, the old-school and not-unrelated Greene Naftali outings by two stalwarts, Michael Krebber and John Knight.

  Installation view of “Shinkichi Tajiri: The Restless Wanderer” at the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht, the Netherlands.

10. “Shinkichi Tajiri: The Restless Wanderer” at the Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht, the Netherlands 
Revelatory. Shinkichi Tajiri was born in Los Angeles in 1923, was interned during World War II as a Japanese American, fought in Europe, and faced discrimination when he returned home, so he decided to settle in the Netherlands, where he died in 2009 at 85. He was a winningly restless sculptor, almost too inventive, as this retrospective, curated by his grandchildren, Tanéa and Shakuru Tajiri, showed. (The market has trouble with multifarious figures; historians sometimes do, as well.) His creations included wild robots, ambitious biomorphic abstractions (some based on knots have an alluring tension), and sci-fi–inflected, machine-like figures. Charm and menace commingle. This is a thoroughly honest art: in awe of the world and human creativity, and a bit wary of them, too.

  Installation view of “Monte di Pietà: A Project by Christoph Büchel” at the Prada Foundation in Venice.

9. “Monte di Pietà: A Project by Christoph Büchel” at the Prada Foundation, Venice
When Christoph Büchel is at his best, he's peerless in the realm of mind-bending institutional critique, and when he's not, the results can be baleful. At the Prada Foundation, he was in top form, filling its palazzo with all manner of junk, obscure treasure, gambling equipment, and a lot more—a display that apparently referenced the monte di pietà (a "mount of piety," a charitable pawnshop) that operated on the site from 1834 to 1969. Furtive and powerful flows of money, energy, and history seemed to flow through the building. The operators of this multilayered capitalist fantasia were nowhere to be found, but you could sense that they were watching.

Installation view of Donna Dennis’s Deep Station (1981–85) at the Ranch in Montauk, New York.

8. “Donna Dennis: Deep Station” at the Ranch, Montauk, N.Y.

I still can't believe that Donna Dennis's Deep Station (1981–85) is real. It is a massive installation, a scaled-down subway station fashioned from wood, Masonite, paint, glass, metal, and plastic. Every few minutes, through unseen speakers, it emits the sound of a train, which never appears. It has strong connections to art history (George Tooker, Edward Hopper) and psychological states, but it is also one of those are rare artworks that seems to harbor mysteries, that slips away from pat explanations. It is, I wrote in Artnet, "a place of confinement, of refuge, and of thinking. It is in limbo." It is a crime that it has not been purchased by a leading art museum and put on permanent display.

Installation view of Thomas Hirschhorn’s Fake it, Fake it–till you Fake it (2023) at Gladstone in New York.

7. “Thomas Hirschhorn: Fake it, Fake it–till you Fake it” at Gladstone Gallery, New York
Remember when Chelsea galleries were filled with ambitious, bizarre, and discomfiting installations like this? At the time, it could be exhausting. But now I miss those days. In a year of polite, safer-than-usual shows in Chelsea, Thomas Hirschhorn brandished his trademark cardboard and duct tape to create a frankly oppressive environment that was part Apple store, part digital war zone, part social-media hellscape. Like Büchel's Venice tour de force, it was at once au courant and outmoded—an art struggling gamely to grasp the full horror of the present.

Installation view of Kara Walker’s Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine), 2024, at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

6. “Kara Walker: Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine)” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
It is a wonderful and wise thing that Kara Walker's kinetic installation Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine)... (only part of its long, evocative title) will be on view at SFMOMA into 2026: It offers a lot, and one could learn a lot from repeat visits, I suspect. Black automatons stand in a rock-filled landscape as rituals and quotidian acts transpire. A woman floats magically into the air as a kind of spiritual leader appears to guide her with his hands. A girl cradles a doll. A solitary woman emits printed fortunes from her mouth (it was not working when I was there, but it was impressive nonetheless). Plush seating around the edge of the main installation suggests a grand old museum or an opera house. Disparate worlds and histories are coming together. It's addressing America today—deep time, too.

Anh-Phuong Nguyen's SilkAirways_GirlStandee_New.png (2024) in “Means of Production” at the Sheerly Touch-Ya and Shiwansu warehouse in Queens

5. “Means of Production” at Sheerly Touch-Ya and Shiwansu, Queens

Hell yes. A collective called Lunch Hour (comprised of Lily Jue Sheng, Do Tuong Linh, and Serena Chang) brought together more than 70 artists, including Anh-Phuong Nguyen, Jacob Kassay, and Becky Kolsrud, in a sprawling warehouse in Glendale, Queens, that is home to Sheerly Touch-Ya hosiery, the art fabricators Shisanwu, and artists' studios. The works were, generally speaking, inventive, sly, smart, and sometimes mournful. It was a show about what can be accomplished together, in communion with art. In Artnet, I wrote, "As the international art market becomes ever more top-heavy, corporate, and unequal, this smart and scrappy production is registering the pervasive discontent—and modeling another approach." Here's hoping for a sequel, soon.

Matthew Barney’s video Drawing Restraint 28 (2024) in “The Bitch” at O’Flaherty’s in New York

4. “The Bitch: Matthew Barney and Alex Katz” at O’Flaherty’s, New York
Two grandmasters united at the most consistent, unpredictable gallery in town. The result? Unlike anything I have ever quite seen before, at once ironic, comic, and utterly sincere—a show about a show about a show. "The Bitch." In recent paintings, just orange and white, Alex Katz hikes into some thrillingly uncharted terrain (late de Kooning comes to mind, vaguely). He's onto something new as he edges closer to 100. Matthew Barney's video of Katz at work renders the process of painting as miraculous, fearsome, and quotidian labor. I'm stacking up questionable oxymorons here, but that's only because this show was so good, so bewitching, and so true to life.

Installation view of Pacita Abad at MoMA PS1 in Queens.

3. Pacita Abad at MoMA PS1, Queens
Pacita Abad's death in 2004, at the age of 58, of lung cancer, cut short the career of one of our era's signal artists. (She'd be turning 80 next year.) Abad still managed to build an astonishingly incisive, multifarious, and most of all, joyous body of work, as this concise traveling retrospective showed. (Its MoMA PS1 outing was organized by Ruba Katrib, the museum's director of curatorial affairs.) I wrote in the New York Times: "Abad’s art evinces a deep reverence, a love, for the world—and for people, for what they make with their hands and for what they treasure."

Simone Martini’s ca. 1340 Christ on the Cross in “Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300–1350” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York

2. “Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300–1350” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Masterpieces marshaled from august museums and assembled in high style: This is why you live in New York. 

Heecheon Kim’s video Studies (2024) on view at the Atelier Hermès in Seoul

1. “Heecheon Kim: Studies” at the Atelier Hermès, Seoul

Kim Heecheon's two-channel video, which was the lone work in his show at the Atelier Hèrmes in Seoul felt new, rich and strange. Masterful. Here's what I wrote for Artnet in December: 

Student wrestlers have gone missing, and an investigation is underway, as rumors fill the air. That’s the basic plot of Studies (2024), an enigmatic, genuinely frightening two-channel short film by Heecheon Kim, who is one of South Korea’s best video artists, 35 this year. In the past, Kim has drawn on video games and face-altering apps to produce gimlet-eyed, bracingly contemporary work. In Studies, he toys with the conventions of a far older cultural form, the horror movie, mulling how to shoot a convincing one in an era of ultra-high-res cameras and omnipresent technology. Discussing his approach here would spoil it, but let’s just say this: You watch awful things unfold, even as you can’t quite understand them, and the dread just keeps building. 

What a piece to screen in the basement of a luxury emporium!

A Map of South Korean Art Museums, Galleries, Sculpture Parks, Project Spaces, and More

 

Want to see art in art-rich South Korea? Read on. A brutal reality for the art tourist—for any tourist—is that Google Maps does not work very well here. It offers neither driving nor walking directions, and for public transport, it will present only limited options. What is the non-Korean speaker to do? Kakao Maps and Naver Maps are the local, robust alternatives, but they take a little practice and have some quirks. That is true of Naver, especially, for which some rudimentary knowledge of Hangul, the Korean alphabet, is useful. (Type "leeum" in English into it, and you may get directed to a wedding planner, a textile seller, or another business somewhere in Seoul, rather than the august museum started by the Samsung family in the Hannam neighborhood.)

I recommend Kakao for a first-time visitor, but Google Maps is still helpful for getting one's bearings, and its listings have improved in recent years. Above is a map aimed at helping to smooth the process of locating art venues and perhaps planning itineraries in the country. (Just do not try to use it to get directions.) It is far from complete, especially beyond Seoul, but it aims to be a solid primer to key outfits—big and small, mainstream and off the wall, proudly blue chip and pugnaciously nonprofit. Only places that I have visited are listed, and I strive to keep locations up to date, but please consult officials websites to make certain that you do not show up at an empty storefront. (If that happens, there will invariably be a good restaurant nearby, at least.)

If I can assist with anything, please drop me a line.

Top 10 of 2021 in South Korea

Sangdon Kim's "Monkey Forest," presented at 2021 Gwangju Biennale, on view in a Saga–organized show in December at Log in Seoul, where the coffee is served by a skilled robot.

This is a year-end post about where I spent almost the entire year—South Korea—but I just got back from the United States, and I have to say that there were an astonishing number of great exhibitions on view in every city I visited, from the Joan Mitchell blowout at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to the Barbara Kruger takeover of the Art Institute of Chicago to Wolfgang Tillmans’s characteristically pitch-perfect exhibition at Regan Projects in Los Angeles. New York was looking particularly strong (perhaps the result of artists finally bringing out their big guns now that the pandemic seemed to be subsiding). The highest highs there included Arthur Jafa’s AGHDRA tour de force, Nolan Simon at 47 Canal (he keeps getting better, and weirder), Jennifer Packer at the Whitney Museum, Robert Gober at Matthew Marks, Wade Guyton at Reena Spaulings, and the O'Flaherty’s enterprise.

In Korea, galleries and museums have largely remained open throughout the pandemic—a blessing for gallery goers—and 2021 saw huge developments on the ground, like the donation of much of Samsung chief Lee Kun-Hee’s collection to the nation, the return of the fabled, treasure-filled Leeum museum after being closed during the pandemic, and the christening of the new Herzog & de Meuron–designed SongEun Art Space. Before my top 10 of 2021, a few additional favorites: Junghae Park’s slippery, ultra-alluring paintings at Whistle, Jinu Nam’s squid fantasia at Outsight, Hernan Bas at Space K, Robert Barry at Gallery Shilla’s Seoul branch and KIAF booth (which he closed), Michael Dean at Barakat, Hyungkoo Lee at P21, Minjung Kim at Gallery Hyundai, Lee Keun-bae’s inkstone collection at the Gana Art Center, "Planitia" at L.A.D., Chang Ucchin also at Hyundai, and “Transposition” at Art Sonje Center.

And now, the top 10—and then 2022.

   
A hanging fabric work by Rondi Park.

10. “Rondi Park: And I Need You More Than I Want You” at White Noise, Seoul
In her thrilling solo effort, Rondi Park managed the rare feat of conjuring a cohesive, satisfying aesthetic world—scrappy, inventive, and joyous—across a wide variety of materials. A fiendish demon-like creature, fashioned from fabric, hung from the ceiling, and tiny constructions, showing people, stars, and a dragonfly, dotted the space. The offhand wit of Ree Morton, and the radiant fabric constructions of Tina Girouard came to mind. The showstopper was a long, energetically colored painting of a fast-galloping horse being guided by a lone rider—Park, perhaps?
   
Haneyl Choi, The Sculptor, 2021.

9. “The Middle Land: When Time Unfolds into Land” at the ARKO Art Center, Seoul
It can be a pleasure to watch a curator pursue a bizarre curatorial idea—when they execute it well. One example: this unusual smorgasbord of a group show, which its organizer, Zoe Chun, described as a “cross-genre play consisting of five acts,” inspired by, of all things, the work of the legendary fantasy novelist J.R.R. Tolkien. Along narrow corridors, on staircases, and in dimly lit galleries, she positioned irreverent sculptures by Haneyl Choi, a deep-cut Kara Walker film, a transfixing Paul Chan balloon, and more. It was all high drama and mystery—shadowy, in a word—as bewildering as it was satisfying.


Installation view of "Haegue Yang: Mesmerizing Mesh" at Kukje.

8. “Haegue Yang: Mesmerizing Mesh” at Kukje Gallery, Seoul
Following a barnburner of a survey at the nearby Seoul branch of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art that closed in February, Haegue Yang staged this intimate display of new paper works, which are informed by Korean shamanistic rituals incorporating that material. It was billed as something less than a full show—just a presentation in one room for a few weeks—but no matter: these intricate works stun, tenderly. Composed of precisely sliced pieces of paper in a limited number of shades, each seems to present a topsy-turvy world populated by ever-evolving abstracted figures.
    
Installation view of "MMCA Hyundai Motor Series 2021: Moon Kyungwon and Jeon Joonho – News from Nowhere, Freedom Village" at the MMCA, Seoul.
   

7. “Moon Kyungwon and Jeon Joonho: News From Nowhere, Freedom Village” at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), Seoul

Moon Kyungwon and Jeon Joonho conceived this multifarious project before the pandemic, but it nevertheless feels like a key work for grappling with the present era. A quietly sumptuous two-channel video follows two people living in isolation—one in futuristic, hermetically sealed environs, the other in a remote landscape. (Let's not give too much away.) Joined by doctored photos of the DMZ and an expansive painting of a dense forest, the show (running into February) is a master class in using deep research to tell a captivating story about important, universal things like communication, borders, and survival.

Hyungwoo Lee, Untitled: Borderless, 2021, at UniMARU.

6. DMZ Art & Peace Platform at UniMARU, Paju, and Other Venues
Beyond a military checkpoint near the Demilitarized Zone, the architect Hyunjun Mihn has transformed a disused building into an airy, light-filled exhibition space, UniMARU, which art historian Yeon Shim Chung inaugurated for part of her nuanced group show about propaganda, transit, surveillance, and the DMZ itself. Jae-Eun Choi showed ceramics with the names of endangering plants that grow in the area, and a winsome 2001 Nam June Paik sculpture consisted of an elephant attached to a cart piled with televisions and phonographs, apparently ready to embark on a long journey that fences, guard towers, and weapons forestall, for now.

 

5. The 13th Gwangju Biennale
It is painful to think about how few people got to see this year’s many-layered Gwangju Biennale, “Minds Rising Spirits Tuning,” which was long-delayed and then opened when South Korea had a 14-day travel quarantine (now 10). Organized by Defne Ayas and Natasha Ginwala, it intertwined alternative histories and modes of political resistance, via remarkable contributions from Cecilia Vicuña, Sylbee Kim, Sangdon Kim, Korakrit Arunanondchai, Vaginal Davis, and more. A big-hearted, ambitious show that was also graceful, it delivered diverse visions of life, death, resurrection, and love. (Here’s the New York Times story I wrote about the show.)
   
Partial view of Seulgi Lee’s Slow Water, 2021, at Incheon Art Platform.

4. “Seulgi Lee: Slow Water” at Incheon Art Platform
I will admit that I almost never revisit shows, even when I love them (there are places to be), but I road the subway from Seoul to Incheon three times to see Seulgi Lee’s exhibition because the more I read about it and thought about it, the more intriguing it became. Using ultra-minimal means—a huge circle of traditional lattice suspended from the ceiling, textiles printed with grids, a brief song—Lee conjured a time-bending vision of the surrounding city, of its history and its people. It was bewitching. (A review I wrote of it is in the January 2022 issue of Artforum.)


Sung Chankyung, One Lonely Pine Branch, 1980, at the Um Museum.

3. Sung Chankyung at Um Museum, Hwaseong
A renowned poet, Sung Chankyung (1930–2013) also made wry, humble sculptures from castoff, recycled materials, as this concise overview demonstrated. In Sung’s remarkable hands, a nut and bolt could become a tree, part of a sewing machine a bust, and a few pipe pieces an uproarious cartoon head with its tongue blasting out. An exhibition of Sung’s work is on deck at one of the Seoul Museum of Art’s locations in 2022, which will provide another welcome opportunity to delight in his charming work. (Here’s a review I wrote for Artforum about the show.)
  
Choi Wookkyung, Beginning Is Concluding, 1968, at the MMCA in Gwacheon.

2. “Choi Wookkyung: Alice's Cat” at MMCA, Gwacheon
Once described, quite condescendingly, as “a young lady of small stature who produces the largest paintings in Korea,” Choi Wookkyung (1940–85) made painted blazing abstractions that are variously sharp and geometric, frenetic and expressionistic, and otherworldly and lyrical. (Sometimes she snuck in text, too: “CARELESS BITCH” in one memorable work on paper.) This judiciously curated retrospective was a superb guide to her freewheeling, and too-short, career. A surprise came at the end, with a room of enigmatic, outrageous, and charismatic self-portraits that Choi made but did not intend to exhibit. They depict an artist with boatloads of energy and talent to burn.
   
Lee Bul, Hydra (Monument), 1996/2021, at the Seoul Museum of Art's main branch.

1. “Lee Bul: Beginning” at the Seoul Museum of Art
In an ideal world, a building would be found to permanently display documentation of Lee Bul’s searing performances from the late 1980s and early ‘90s, where it could serve as a kind of gold standard against which to measure all other live artworks. Lee was utterly fearless in these years, walking city streets in a grotesque costume and suspending herself naked while discussing her abortion, to name just two of her actions. Through huge video projections and a mountain of photographs, this survey of the period managed to transmit the fleeting but vital activities of an unstoppable artist. (Here’s my Artforum review of the show.)

See you next year.

The Year in, and Beyond, the Galleries: A 2020 Top 10

The most butter I have ever seen adorning a baked good—at Layered in Seoul.

No writing activity gives me greater pleasure each year than assembling a top-10 list of art shows as the holidays approach. Combing through notes and cell-phone photos, I’m always bowled over by how much astonishing work is being made—and shown—every single day. However, assembling the list for 2020 has elicited more complicated feelings. Seeing art in person carries a special poignancy now, and organizing exhibitions is a precarious task. This has been a year of incredible loss.

Art looks very different in this atmosphere—when we can see it. “Inaccessible, the works conjure in the imagination a significance that we have taken for granted,” critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote in April. On the July day that the last coronavirus patient was discharged from a hospital in Rivoli, Italy, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, the director of the Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, tweeted, “After a ferocious time, there was a cool breeze and the artworks hung proudly in the museum.”

On March 12, when the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced it would close in the face of rising virus cases, I was sitting a coffee shop in Brooklyn and mulled grabbing a car to catch the just-opened Gerhard Richter survey at the Breuer. No point, I figured. It would be back in a couple weeks. I was very wrong. It never returned, and the Met welcomed back visitors only in late August. That was a glorious day.

Despite the long lockdowns, with museums and galleries prudently going dark, there were still enough exhilarating shows to make assembling a top-10 as difficult as ever. My list comes from trips to Los Angeles and Philadelphia before the world changed, gallery strolls in New York when those were possible, and a few trips around South Korea, to which my wife and I moved in October.

 

The head of a roasted pig at La Kaje in Brooklyn on Leap Day, as part of G. William Webb's "Leaping" event.

I saw no real, in-person exhibitions between March 6 and July 8, but I did make it to the refurbished LaGuardia Airport in Queens to see Laura Owens’s majestic love letter of a mosaic to New York City. Even if you are not flying anywhere anytime soon, walk over and have a look.

Here is a too-brief string of other great shows not on the top-10: Paul McMahon at 321 Gallery, Jana Euler at Artists Space, Ja'Tovia Gary at Paula Cooper, Michael Buthe at Alexander and Bonin, Jasper Marsalis at Kristina Kite Gallery, Thomas Kovachevich at Callicoon, Abigail DeVille in Madison Square Park, Christopher Wilmarth at Craig F. Starr, Parker Ito at Château Shatto, “New Images of Man” (curated by Alison M. Gingeras) at Blum & Poe, Michael Krebber at Gaga & Reena Spaulings, Jacob Fabricius’s Busan Biennial, Sofu Teshigahara at Nonaka-Hill, Kathe Burkhart at Fredericks & Freiser. Before the pandemic set in, on Leap Day, one particularly memorable evening was a bacchanal/one-night art festival at La Kaje in Brooklyn, organized by G. William Webb, with performances by Miles Huston, Guy Henry, and more and more. The centerpiece was a roasted pig. It feels like a very long time ago. 

And now, a list.

Félix Vallotton, Felix Fénéon at La Revue blanche, 1896, at the Museum of Modern Art.

10. “Félix Fénéon: The Anarchist and the Avant-Garde—From Signac to Matisse and Beyond” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York 

There should be more exhibitions about art critics, says I. Of course, Félix Fénéon (1861–1944) was no ordinary art critic. He was a force of nature. His unsigned “Nouvelles en trois lignes” alone secure his place in history. Most are mordant, and some are dad jokes (charming in their own way). As this treasure-filled show by Starr Figura, Isabelle Cahn, and Philippe Peltier made abundantly clear, he also had a gimlet eye for talent, boosting key figures like Seurat and Signac. It had me reading every wall label, to learn the owner of certain works and plot how to see them again. Félix Vallotton’s portrait of a studious Fénéon bent over his desk is, regrettably, in a private collection.

Park Rehyun, Glory, 1966–67, at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul.

9. “Park Rehyun: Triple Interpreter” at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul 

A mind-blowing exhibition. Park began her career making elegant ink-wash paintings of people and street scenes. She ended it making some of the 20th century’s most beguiling abstractions—networks of colors that suggest polychromed spider webs or luminous tapestries. She died in 1976, only 56 years old, of cancer. Curator Park Kim Ye-jin’s show was not only a fireworks-filled retrospective but also a moving portrait of an artist finding her way while being overshadowed by her artist-husband, Kim Kichang. Park’s in the canon now, but her art still needs to reach a far wider audience.

Works by Faith Ringgold in "With Pleasure" at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

8. “With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

Yes! This is what it (art history, curatorial work, the museum) is all about: taking a too-little-seen art moment and diving in deep. Anna Katz marshaled work by Joyce Kozloff, Faith Ringgold, Robert Kushner, Emma Amos, Billy Al Bengston, Sylvia Sleigh, and a boatload more, making the case that Pattern & Decoration has been wrongly sidelined in many narratives of the 1970s. This is art born of—and imbued with—cosmopolitanism and feminism and activism. It’s perfect for right now. It’s been perfect for a long time. Some very good news: the show lands at the Hessel Museum of Art in upstate New York next year.

Suzanne Jackson, Light, light into being (2019) at Ortuzar Projects.

7. “Suzanne Jackson: News!” at Ortuzar Projects, New York

Ortuzar has been delivering one revelation after another for a couple years snow, and Suzanne Jackson’s solo outing was my favorite of its 2020 offerings. (Admittedly, it opened in 2019, but please let me count it.) Now in her mid-70s, Jackson showed astonishing wall works made with layered acrylic and harboring nets, seeds, and other disparate materials. They are utterly original paintings and also living things, full of stories, joys, and mysteries. 

Trevor Shimizu, Garden, 2019, at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia.

6. “Trevor Shimizu: Performance Artist” at Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia

Even at Trevor Shimizu’s most slapdash moments with his paintbrush, his pictures never feel desolate or unfinished. He aims to please, and he succeeds. ICA Philadelphia’s survey, curated by Alex Klein, was a taut primer for Shimizu’s curveball-filled career, from video to canvas, while his latest outing at 47 Canal suggested an intriguing new chapter as a maker of masterful Impressionist scenes. I would bet good money that they would look pretty fresh next to a Mitchell or a Monet. Here’s hoping.

Donald Judd, Untitled, 1964, at the Museum of Modern Art. (Collection Stephen Flavin.)

5. “Judd” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York

I’d happily sign on to view a Donald Judd retrospective that is two or ten times larger, but through ruthless editing that one imagines the artist would have begrudgingly respected, Ann Temkin assembled a razor-sharp portrait of his practice that ranks as one of the great MoMA shows of the past 20 years. In an era when Minimalism goes down smooth, it channels the radical tone of Judd’s art: its expansive range, strange visual pleasure, and perverse meticulousness. The icing on the Judd cake was Gagosian’s staging of an untitled 80-foot-long wonder from 1980.

Installation view of "Souls Grown Diaspora" at Apexart with work by Otis Houston Jr and text by Wesley Willis.

4. “Souls Grown Diaspora” at Apexart, New York

The curator and dealer Sam Gordon assembled this showcase of 10 key contemporary African-American artist who ought to be more widely known: Alvin Baltrop, Raynes Birkbeck, Stephanie Crawford, Curtis Cuffie, Otis Houston Jr., Dapper Bruce Lafitte, Reverend Joyce McDonald, Sara Penn, Frederick Weston (RIP), and Wesley Willis. Each was a kind of rich introductory survey. Now it is time for other institutions to stage complete shows. In the meantime, go see Houston’s inimitable work along Manhattan’s FDR Drive.

Diane Simpson, Constructed Painting #1 (1977) at Wesleyan's Zilkha Gallery.

3. “Diane Simpson: Cardboard-Plus, 1977–1980” at Wesleyan University’s Zilkha Gallery, Middletown, Connecticut

In the 1970s, the magnificent Chicago sculptor Diane Simpson composed abstract sculptures out of slices of cardboard that are held together by wooden dowels and sometimes ornamented with tender dashes of crayon or pencil. They nod to architectural and fashion forms while eluding any straightforward reading, and they looked wonderfully at home inside this jewel of a building by Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates, in a show organized by Benjamin Chaffee. The only heartbreaker: it did not travel. It should, minting new fans and teaching artists how humble materials can be wielded with great ingenuity.

Inside Haegue Yang's Silo of Silence – Clicked Core (2017) the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul.

2. “Haegue Yang―O₂ & H₂O” at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul

An absolute barnburner of an exhibition, “O₂ & H₂O” shows Haegue Yang at her most inventive. She has turned Venetian blinds into enchanting installations and adorned abstract sculpture on wheels with bells: portable, sui generis instruments. Yang envisions a modernism gone electric, flying deep into hyperspace and yet still attuned to the rituals and politics of the world. Is it clear I’m at a loss for words? She is firing on all cylinders.

Alex Da Corte's Chicken (2020) at the University of the Arts, Philadelphia, Gershman Hall, March 5.

1. “Invisible City: Philadelphia and the Vernacular Avant-garde” and Alex Da Corte’s Chicken at the University of the Arts, Philadelphia

The last museum show I saw before the shutdown was a great one: “Invisible City,” a multi-venue feast organized by Sid Sachs that dove deep into Philadelphia’s rich postwar art scene. The highlight, in a show full of them: Alex Da Corte’s reimagining, on March 5, of a storied Allan Kaprow performance, Chicken, in the same auditorium that hosted it in 1962. Da Corte presided in Kaprow attire—burly beard, brown vest—as he orchestrated delirious, mischievous mayhem. (Here's a report of the action.) There were no live chickens this time, but the artist's band of gifted collaborators threw eggs, launched confetti, and conjured one incredible sight after another in a dreamy (sometimes slightly frightening) narrative. It was utterly impossible to summarize. It was also utterly unforgettable. A few days later, the country shut down.

Alice Neel's Hot-Fudge Sauce

Alice Neel's hot-fudge sauce ornamenting vanilla ice cream.

Get ready for a world of pleasure. Alice Neel’s hot-fudge sauce is rich, boozy, and deeply satisfying. Its secret ingredient: a solid splash of rum, which joins together with chocolate, butter, sugar, and corn syrup. The recipe comes from The Museum of Modern Art Artists' Cookbook, which was published in 1977. (The full directions are in this PDF for a catalogue I made a few years ago for a project at Interstate Projects in Brooklyn.)

While warm, the sauce brings a refreshing zest to vanilla ice cream, but it’s when it’s gotten cold, having sat in the fridge overnight, that it gets really great, taking on a luxurious, almost chewy texture that is reminiscent of soft toffee or thick caramel. I found myself eating spoonfuls of it by itself. Atop ice cream in that form, it’s pure heaven—and it looks beautiful, too, like strange black snow adorning a mountain peak. I regret never taking a photograph of that pairing: it was too delicious to stop and think, apparently.

Preparing the hot-fudge sauce.

In the cookbook, Neel says, “I never learned to make cakes and pies because after all I’m an artist and couldn’t concentrate on that,” and she adds, “I have privileges, you see, that only men had in the past." It’s impossible not to admire that sentiment. But thank goodness she was willing to grace us with this confection.