The Defining Artworks of 2020

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (Fortune Cookie Corner) (1990)

In 2020, few artworks hit the wrong note quite like the recreation of the late Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s 1990 artwork “Untitled” (Fortune Cookie Corner). For the “live exhibition” this past summer, Andrea Rosen Gallery and David Zwirner invited 1,000 art professionals to create the piece—a pile of the cookies—and display it on their social media channels. The exhibition was called a “response to the moment” by the two galleries. It was anything but. Instead, a loose interpretation of the artist’s intentions turned it from an exercise in sharing and community building to a tacky hashtag, seemingly aimed at producing little more than FOMO. —Joshua Smith

[Why the Gonzalez-Torres work was one of the year’s biggest flops.]

Sam Lavigne and Tega Brain, Get Well Soon (2020)

Get Well Soon is a plain-looking artwork composed of text drawn from 200,000 comments on GoFundMe campaigns and little more. (The digital work can be perused in its entirely here.) The comments range from commonplace sentiments (“Keeping you & the family in prayers”) to oddly specific tributes (“She has a drive, determination, and commitment to put herself out there in order to bring to light the challenges amputees face and experience everyday”). And the mix of messages bears out complex associations that Sam Lavigne and Tega Brain have said allude to the brokenness of a health-care system that in better shape would preclude the existence of such fundraising initiatives and the emotions that accompany them. In a year when millions struggled to make ends meet while facing medical emergencies of all kinds, Get Well Soon hit home. —Alex Greenberger

Jacob Lawrence, There are combustibles in every State, which a spark might set fire to. —Washington, 26 December 1786 (1956)

During the last days of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition of Jacob Lawrence’s 1954–56 painting series “Struggle: From the History of the American People” this fall, a remarkable rediscovery took place in New York. A panel that had long been missing from the group of works was found in an apartment on the city’s Upper West Side. One of 30 panels from a series devoted to under-studied aspects of U.S. history, the work, titled There are combustibles in every State, which a spark might set fire to. —Washington, 26 December 1786, depicts Shays’ Rebllion, in which Massachusetts farmers clashed with soldiers. The holders of the painting had purchased it from a charity auction in 1960, the last year it was publicly exhibited. Upon its recovery, the work was incorporated into the exhibition at the Met and will figure in presentations of the series at institutions in Birmingham, Washington, D.C., and Seattle over the course of the next year. (The exhibition was organized by the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, and ran there from January to August.) As historians, critics, and curators pull little-known artists and artworks from the depths of art history, the rediscovery of Lawrence was proof that some masterpieces have been right in front of us all along. —Claire Selvin

Lorraine O'Grady, Art Is. . . (Man with a Camera) (1983/2009)

In the hours following its triumph over Donald Trump in the Presidential election last month, the Biden-Harris campaign team released a video thanking voters and calling for unity in the days ahead. The video features shots of Americans from different backgrounds posing behind empty picture frames—a direct reference to one of the most seminal pieces in performance art history, Lorraine O’Grady’s 1983 performance Art Is… In the first iteration of the piece, participants carried empty gold picture frames during New York’s annual African American Day Parade, periodically leaping from the float to invite the community to cast themselves as framed artworks. In a statement posted to Instagram, O’Grady said she’d given the campaign her blessing in advance, writing, “I gave to them and they gave to me.” —Tessa Solomon

David Hockney, Do remember they can't cancel the spring (2020)

Last April, with the coronavirus having shut down multiple cities around the world, we all needed a little cheering up. The 82-year-old artist David Hockney came to the rescue with a new series of iPad paintings and drawings of flowers in Normandy, where he was quarantining. One of them, an image of daffodils, bore the title Do remember they can’t cancel the spring. “The virus is going mad,” Hockney told the BBC at the time, “and many people said my drawings were a great respite from what was going on.” —Sarah Douglas

Orian Barki and Meriem Bennani, 2 Lizards (2020)

While many of us were busy binge-watching Tiger King on Netflix during the start of lockdown in the spring, Orian Barki and Meriem Bennani were producing essential viewing of a different sort. 2 Lizards, a series of videos released on IGTV, was in a way about quarantine itself, with a pair of animated reptiles navigating a strange new world and confronting bizarre fears associated with it. All of the humans have been replaced by CGI animals—even Dr. Fauci, who appears briefly as a bespectacled snake on a faux BBC News broadcast watched anxiously by the lizards. Other points of specificity abound: Zoom birthdays, at-home haircuts, calls for a rent strike, eerily vacant city centers. And the series’ anything-goes sensibility foregrounds a kind of anxiety shot through with hope. At times, Barki and Bennani even offer up moments of genuine beauty. In the first episode, the two lizards find themselves atop a roof as various animals around them start playing instruments, creating a city symphony of the most unexpected kind. —Alex Greenberger

Deana Lawson, Axis (2018)

Deana Lawson made history this year by becoming the first-ever photographer awarded the Guggenheim’s biennial Hugo Boss Prize, which is among the most prestigious art awards in the world. But before that win was announced, she had already delivered yet another key series, made as part of the forthcoming Bienal de São Paulo. Its focus, loosely, was the concept of what Lawson termed “centropy,” which she said involves a turn toward order and renewal. When that new work went on view at the Kunsthalle Basel in Switzerland, her show opened against the backdrop of the coronavirus pandemic, which has claimed a disproportionate number of Black and Brown Americans, and the Black Lives Matter movement. In that context, Lawson’s semi-staged photographs, videos, and films imagined a powerful view of Black life that stood in opposition to the chaos of the current moment. —Tessa Solomon

Patrisse Cullors, Malcolm Revisited (2020)

For a new work commissioned by L.A.’s REDCAT gallery, Patrisse Cullors created a short performance that was first streamed in October. The piece revisits the words of the assassinated civil rights activist Malcom X, including two of his most famous speeches from the 1960s, “Who Taught You to Hate?” and “The Ballot or the Bullet,” and was part of the artist’s efforts to get out the vote. In the video, we see Cullors behind a pulpit—as well as collaborators Aaryn Lang and Brayan Gonzalez—delivering excerpts from Malcolm X’s speeches. Today, those words ring just as true as they did when they were first delivered more than 50 years ago. —Maximilíano Durón

[Patrisse Cullors is working to create a new world with her art.]

Patty Chang, Milk Debt (2020)

For a year that has proven to be consequential on many fronts, fear was on everyone’s mind. Not surprisingly, fright is what animates one of this year’s most poignant works. For the latest iteration of Milk Debt, L.A.-based artist Patty Chang asked her fellow Angelenos about what they fear most, back in mid-March, just as lockdown was beginning for many in the U.S. Chang adapted that work, which was originally to open as part of a solo show at the 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica, to stream as a Zoom performance in which an unidentified female performer pumps breast milk—a process which produces oxytocin, a kind of anti-fear chemical—as she reads out a list of fears. Some of what made the cut was banal—volcanoes, Bloody Mary, cat scratches, and more caused concern for Chang’s respondents—but occasionally, the list included more philosophical meditations. One submission sticks out: “There is no end in sight.” —Maximilíano Durón

[Read an interview with Patty Chang about Milk Debt.]

Steve McQueen, Small Axe (2020)

Steve McQueen is a rare filmmaker whose work seems equally at home on the silver screen and the walls of white cubes, and he found a new format to make his own with the anthology Small Axe. Each episode (or standalone work, as it were) is very different, but together they tell a mosaic of stories about the British West Indian experience as lived by McQueen and a cast of characters he clearly reveres. There’s enough life and spirit in any given minute of it to make the act of sitting and watching in a couch-bound state feel like an act of engaging with a world still out there spinning on its axis. —Andy Battaglia

Carl Craig, Party/after-party (2020)

Carl Craig’s haunting and powerful installation Party/after-party proved more prescient than anyone could have wanted it to be. When it was conceived for the spacious post-industrial basement of Dia:Beacon in upstate New York, the work—a mix of disembodied electronic music and spare visual elements that conjure the feeling of a dance club after a long night has wound down—evoked notions of spent energy and socio-cultural malaise. But when it opened in March, it turned into a sort of requiem not just for specific strains of musical culture (Craig is a storied DJ/producer in the legacy of techno from Detroit) but for mass-gatherings of all kinds. Its connotation changed in what felt like an instant—and it stands to change even more as it remains in place to be experienced into summer of next year. —Andy Battaglia

Ai Weiwei, Coronation (2020)

Ai Weiwei is known for his politically minded interventions, and in August, he surprise-released a documentary that was every bit as radical as his other works. The film, titled Coronation, focused on the first known outbreak of the coronavirus in Wuhan, China, and was shot between January and April 2020, making it one of the first films of its kind. Ai and his co-directors underscored the ways in which the pandemic has altered day-to-day life in the city, from mail delivery to medical care. Much of the film focuses on the many ways the world was turned upside down by an invisible virus, resulting in the deaths of more than 1.5 million worldwide. —Claire Selvin

[Read a review of Ai Weiwei’s Coronation.]

Ja'Tovia Gary, The Giverny Suite (2020)

Ja’Tovia Gary’s swift rise as one of the most exciting young experimental filmmakers owes in part to The Giverny Suite, a three-channel installation focused on addressing safety for Black women and subverting racist conventions inherent in cinema vérité. The weighty material is imparted through an appropriately rigorous visual language, with a dense montage of appropriated images—their subject matter spanning performances by Josephine Baker and Nina Simone and footage of Philando Castile’s death—and images of Gary’s own making. Showings of The Giverny Suite at Los Angeles’s Hammer Museum and New York’s Paula Cooper Gallery were shuttered not too long after they opened, but a version of the film was broadcasted digitally, broadening the growing fan club for Gary’s art. —Alex Greenberger

[Read an interview with Ja’Tovia Gary.]

For Freedoms, "2020 Awakening" (2020)

Many artists created projects aimed to get out the vote for Presidential and local elections this year, but none was as visible a billboard project by the artist-run collective For Freedoms called “2020 Awakening,” which took place in numerous locations in all 50 states, Washington D.C., Puerto Rico, Guam, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Drawing inspiration from the Wide Awakes movement, which helped elect Abraham Lincoln as President 160 years ago, the project brought together 85 artists, including Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds, Alexandra Bell, Amelia Winger-Bearskin, John Edmonds, Christine Sun Kim, Claudia Peña, Miguel Luciano, and Kameelah Janan Rasheed, to create 100 billboards that addressed voters directly with images accompanied by short powerful phrases. Among the most powerful was Muna Malik’s, which showed a Black person’s raised fist, along with the words “HOW MANY MORE PROTESTS DO WE NEED?” —Maximilíano Durón

Nicholas Galanin, Shadow on the Land, an excavation and bush burial (2020)

Nicholas Galanin has held up and stared down issues related to Indigenous culture from his home base in Alaska, and he made a monumental move across the globe with a sculpture (or whatever might be the opposite of sculpture) at the Biennale of Sydney in Australia. Shadow on the Land, an excavation and bush burial suggests a kind of crime scene, with a fenced-off area of grass dug up in the shape of a grave lying in wait for a statue of 18th-century British Royal Navy captain James Cook, who has long been a national symbol for Australia. Violence visited upon Galanin’s Tlingit and Unangax̂ heritage resonated with similar histories within Australia’s Aboriginal culture, and there was no mistaking the sort of pent-up roar in a powerfully disquieting gesture. —Andy Battaglia

Edward Hopper, Nighthawks (1942)

In the spring, when the pandemic caused lockdowns around the world, Edward Hopper’s disquieting, melancholy paintings of lonesome figures in empty rooms and on empty city streets took on a new resonance. One viral tweet proclaimed, “We are all edward hopper paintings now,” and suddenly, paintings from more 80 years ago were given renewed relevance. Not everyone agreed on the degree to which Hopper’s solitary figures are relatable in the current moment, but there’s no doubt that the foreboding atmosphere of his art feels suddenly familiar. Hopper’s most famous work, Nighthawks (1942), for example, took on another valence this year. The work, which shows one man alienated from a small grouping of people to his right, portrays what you could say is a form of social distancing. —Claire Selvin

"In Plain Sight" (2020)

Conceived by artists rafa esparza and Cassils, “In Plain Sight” brought together 80 artists (including Dread Scott, Carolina Caycedo, Beatriz Cortez, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Gala Porras Kim, and Raven Chacon), along with activists Bamby Salcedo and Chase Strangio and writer Raquel Gutiérrez, to create sky-typed messages on July 4. Their phrases appeared in politically fraught locations: they were broadcast over 80 ICE detention centers, immigration court houses, processing centers, and former internment camps across the country. The texts powerfully drew attention to the ways in which incarceration in all its forms happens everywhere, across the country, in every state, and impacts the lives of real people who are often the most marginalized and least seen. The words borne out in these phrases may have faded away not long after they appeared, but their messages lingered on for anyone who saw them. —Maximilíano Durón

Garrett Bradley, Time (2020)

The images that linger from Garrett Bradley’s Time, a knockout documentary focused on the impact of mass incarceration on a family in Louisiana, tend toward long takes of the film’s protagonist, Fox Rich, awaiting word on whether her partner will be released, or home movies shot on degraded video showing her kids at play. Time is without a question an abolitionist work—and well-suited to a year when the general public focused its attention on the structural racism that is endemic to the U.S. prison system. But it is also a tender study that focuses on the real-world consequences of prejudice, which are not often glimpsed with such an intimate, eye as Bradley’s. Her sleek and haunting black-and-white cinematography is top-notch, and her vision overall helped her win 2020’s Sundance Film Festival documentary award. The film’s soaring climax, with Rich finally having some unexpected success in her quest, also offers a kind of catharsis that only the best art can. —Alex Greenberger

Artist-Designed Magazine Covers

The September issue of fashion magazines is typically the most momentous of any year, and two in 2020 turned their sights not to models wearing luxe clothes but instead to poignant paintings by Black artists. Vanity Fair featured a painting of Breonna Taylor by Amy Sherald on its cover, while Vogue spotlighted new works by Kerry James Marshall and Jordan Casteel. As Kyle Chayka noted in an ARTnews essay earlier this year, these images turned the “magazine into a collectible art object.” Not everyone was pleased—some claimed that the Sherald cover risked turning Taylor into a meme—but the paintings featured have been regarded as emblematic of a larger recognition that the Black Lives Matter protests touched every aspect of life. —Alex Greenberger

Xena Goldman, Cadex Herrera, Greta McLain, and Collaborators, George Floyd mural (2020)