The Defining Exhibitions of 2022

"Khaleej Modern: Pioneers and Collectives in the Arabian Peninsula" at the Art Gallery at NYU Abu Dhabi

The first survey of modernism in the Arabian Gulf, which includes Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, included some 60 works beginning in the 1940s. Making a story out of these works—which span painting, sculpture, and installation, as well as more idiosyncratic mediums—was no small undertaking. The curatorial team, led by Omani scholar Aisha Stoby, with assistance from Tala Nassar, went on a treasure hunt of sorts through spotty archives, private collections, and far-flung institutions while unraveling the show’s central mysteries: How do you properly tell the visual narrative of a people and place in perpetual motion? Is it really a retrospective if the epilogue of modernism in this region is still unwritten? They settled for thematic groupings that illustrated how art movements are transmitted over land and transmuted by languages, values, and landscapes. It was a terrific case for freeing modernism from the nearsighted experiences of Global North artists, and allowing a plurality of modernism defined by their contexts. The show ends in the present, suggesting that an epilogue is nowhere in sight. —Tessa Solomon

"Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces" at Museum of Modern Art, New York

Text written directly on the gallery wall midway through the MoMA exhibition “Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces” succinctly tracks the practical development of these two institutions—one dedicated to Black art and experimentation, the other started to collect and define modern art. JAM, as the left column notes, “opened in 1974 in a 724 sq ft rented space on 57^th St,” while MoMA, per the right column, “opened in 1929 in a 4600 sq ft rented space on 57^th St.” From this shared location, their paths diverge—Linda Goode Bryant accumulated debt as she prioritized the needs of artists over the demands of sales and rent, while MoMA was supported by wealthy white trustees. The chart leaves much unsaid, but the merits of the artists Bryant exhibited aren’t in question as one walks through rooms of now-iconic artworks by David Hammons, Senga Nengudi, and Lorraine O’Grady alongside understated gems by Camille Billops, Walter C. Jackson, and Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe. Archival photographs and ephemera convey the expansiveness and inventiveness of the gallery’s program. —Mira Dayal

“Denyse Thomasos: just beyond” at Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto

Denyse Thomasos, a Trinidadian-Canadian artist who died at 47 in 2012, was a surprise star of the Whitney Biennial, since she never built a huge following during her lifetime in New York, where she was based at the time of her death. Things are slightly different in Canada, where her grand abstractions have garnered new interest as under-recognized Black artists from the nation’s past have received second looks, and this year, Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario staged a full-dress Thomasos retrospective. (Curated by Renée van der Avoird, Sally Frater, and Michelle Jacques, it will also head to Remai Modern in Saskatoon.) On view are a selection of Thomasos’s expansive canvases mulling forms of confinement, histories of slavery, and diasporas. Many of the works in the exhibition had rarely been shown, and if they had, it certainly wasn’t within the context of much of her other art. Even in a time when supposedly rediscovered artists are constantly invoked to speak to the present, this Thomasos exhibition feels different—that rare and special chance to write a deserving figure into the canon. —Alex Greenberger

"When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting" at Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town, South Africa

The experiences of artists from Africa and its diaspora are at the forefront of “When We See Us,” an exhibition that brings together more than 200 artworks from the last century of Black figurative painting. Organized around six themes—the everyday, joy and revelry, repose, sensuality, spirituality, and triumph and emancipation—the show doesn’t settle for one style, instead opting for a multiplicity of practices. While the artists included span different locations and time periods, from Jacob Lawrence to Amy Sherald, the show reveals deeper links between them than one may initially imagine. “When We See Us” is one key example of progress in the ongoing effort by museums to highlight the importance and historical contributions of BIPOC artists. —Francesca Aton

“The Milk of Dreams” at Venice Biennale, Italy

Almost every Venice Biennale’s main exhibition has tended to skew toward an overrepresentation of male artists—until now. “The Milk of Dreams,” Cecilia Alemani’s boundary-pushing show for this edition, bucked that trend, with around 90 percent of the 213-person exhibition devoted to women or gender nonconforming artists. Taking its name from a piece of writing by the Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington, the show surveyed a wide array of artists who are envisioning fantastical worlds that foster a closer connection between humanity and the natural world. Queer communities thrived in these alternate universes, and decolonial protest took priority.

This was a show that seemed to offer a pleasant surprise at every turn: a labyrinthine installation of aromatic soil, courtesy of Delcy Morelos; Mire Lee’s slopping and squishing sculptures dripping with liquid silicone; Zheng Bo’s film of people fornicating with trees; a set of paintings of people sprouting flowy vinery by Felipe Baeza; and a whole lot more. Alemani augmented these contemporary presentations with several mini-shows featuring a wealth of female Surrealists in need of much greater attention, suggesting that we cannot imagine the future without considering how artists of the past envisioned the years to come. In a sea of similar-feeling biennials, this Venice Biennale stood out. Plus, it was kinky, funny, and genuinely weird, and you can’t say that for many other shows being staged anywhere these days. —Alex Greenberger

Documenta 15, Kassel, Germany

Ruangrupa’s edition of Documenta was riddled with controversy that still threatens to overshadow the show’s important interventions. Chiefly, Documenta 15 exposed (rather than resolved) the frictions inherent in trying to frame cultural production from the global South in the Western frameworks of “fine art” and “the museum.” Mere “inclusion” is no solution to Eurocentrism; we need transformation. The questions posed by this show are sure to resonate for years to come. —Emily Watlington

“no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria” at Whitney Museum, New York

Taking its title from a line in Raquel Salas Rivera’s poetry collection while they sleep (under the bed is another country), this groundbreaking exhibition looks at the artistic production by Puerto Rican artists, both those living on the Island and its diaspora, in the five years since Hurricane Maria battered Puerto Rico. But Hurricane Maria is simply an inflection point, one that is further amplified other intersecting issues, from government corruption and failing infrastructure to foreign investment and the tourism industry, that have long affected the world’s oldest colony. The exhibition is a moving and powerful statement about how Puerto Rican artists have survived and resisted, in the process creating new forms of community, protest, and art. —Maximilíano Durón

“Black Melancholia” at CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York

A truly resonant group show is a rare thing in institutions, and so it is all the more pleasant when you come along one as idiosyncratic and perceptive as art historian Nana Adusei-Poku’s “Black Melancholia,” a survey of how sadness has been felt by members of the Black community over the past two centuries. To ponder such an epic topic, Adusei-Poku enlisted just 38 works, almost none of which are famous ones. The offerings spanned an 1885 painting of a moonlit ocean by Edward Mitchell Bannister to new glass works incorporating photographs by the promising young sculptor Charisse Pearlina Weston. No one aesthetic mandate prevailed here, and this was very much the point. After all, trauma does not express itself in just one form. —Alex Greenberger

"This Must Be the Place: Latin American Artists in New York, 1965–1975" at Americas Society, New York

Over a pair of group exhibitions spread over six months, this two-part show, which kicked off in 2021, explored and put into dialogue work from 40 experimental Latin American artists and collectives who called New York City home during the 1960s and 1970s. By engaging with of concepts of community and identity through experimental practices, including Minimalism, performance art, and Conceptualism, these artists were able to assert themselves against the pervasive stereotypes that are so common in American culture. Curated by Aimé Iglesias Lukin, it included figures such as Anna Maria Maiolino, Carlos Irizarry, Sylvia Palacios Whitman, and many more. —Daniel Cassady

Carnegie International, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

It’s a bummer that the Carnegie International opened relatively late in the year—controversies had already raged at a series of recurring art shows around the world, and biennial fatigue had set in. And it’s especially a bummer because this was the best one of those shows. Centered on surprising histories of political abstraction and featuring countless little-known artists, the show managed what most this year could not: it showed work that spoke smartly on the pressing issues of our time that, yet was also thoughtful about art’s purpose, limits, offerings, forms, and histories, as I wrote in my Art in America review. The show’s ethos is captured in Felix Gonzalez-Torres 1988 Forbidden Colors—four monochrome canvases in red, green, black, and white that evoke but do not illustrate the Palestinian flag. The work is from a time when Israeli occupation made it illegal to display the flag in the territory. It speaks to the strategic power of flying under the radar, and to illegibility as a strategy. ­—Emily Watlington

“Moon Shin: Towards the Universe” at National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, Deoksugung branch

Taking over the entire Deoksugung branch of Seoul’s MMCA this fall was an exceptional retrospective for the woefully underknown artist Moon Shin. The exhibition, timed to the centennial of Moon’s birth, was a knockout, highlighting just what a tour-de-force Moon was, charting his beginning in painting to his shift to sculpture and later monumental installations and architecture. Moon’s sculptures are the true stunners here—sensuous, undulating blobs that resemble organs and at times border on something almost alien. He executed them in a variety of mediums from bronze and stainless steel to polished woods and variously colored stones. One of Moon’s best-known works is the monumental commission he made for 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul, in which a pair of towers made of twisting half circles soar to the sky. That eventually led him to think about creating massive public art sculptures so that his art could be more accessible. Many of those were never realized, but an AR device at the museum let you explore them. It just makes you yearn for a Moon-designed park to be realized sometime soon. —Maximilíano Durón

Aref El-Rayess at Sharjah Art Museum

There’s nothing quite like seeing a comprehensive retrospective of an underappreciated painter—getting to enter the world they constructed, and seeing the arc of their work. The Sharjah Art Foundation has consistently organized excellent shows in that vein. The most recent of them was the memorable Aref El Rayess (1928–2005) survey, mounted at the Sharjah Art Museum. An important figure of Arab Modernism, the Lebanese artist dabbled in figuration, abstraction, and landscapes, but his best works manage to combine all three. In several striking hazy desert scenes from the 1980s, horizon lines fade away as colors and shapes emerge, and at times, these shapes appear to form body parts, creating enchanting scenes. —Emily Watlington

Rosa Bonheur at Musée des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux, and Musée d'Orsay, Paris

One of the things that got me through the most depressing stages of lockdown was knowing that, if we did wind up making it through, there would be a Rosa Bonheur retrospective to look forward to on the other side. My expectations were clearly high, and the show did not disappoint. Bonheur is best known for her eccentric personality: the 19th-century French animalier was a trailblazer for women in the arts, lived in a menagerie replete with lions and gazelles, and is a queer icon to boot. This rare chance to see nearly 200 of her works made her talent and skill unmistakable, but also added nuance to attempts to frame her as a proto ecofeminist icon, which I discussed in my review for Art in America. —Emily Watlington

Cezanne at Art Institute of Chicago and Tate Modern, London

It’s hard to overstate the influence Paul Cezanne—whose name was styled by the curators of this show without an accent—had on the painters that followed him, and so it’s no surprise there have been many, many big exhibitions about his work. But this extravagant retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago offered an introspective view of the master’s work that is rare. There were well-known canvases, but there were also less often seen objects, like his sketchbooks, which revealed his process of reimagining the world in two dimensions. Produced in collaboration with Tate Modern, where the show is now on view, the exhibition also included 40 watercolors and drawings. —Daniel Cassady

“Fictions of Emancipation: Carpeaux Recast” at Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

The Met billed this exhibition, focused around a single Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux sculpture, as the first in its history ever to take up the transatlantic slave trade. That alone would make it worth noting, but the show was more than a milestone—it also offered an example of how museums could properly mine problematic works in their holdings for all that they’re worth. The central Carpeaux sculpture, a bust of a chained-up, partially nude Black woman titled Why Born Enslaved! (1868), has for more than a century been celebrated as an icon of the abolitionist movement, but this show’s curators—Elyse Nelson and Wendy S. Walters—suggested that it may contain more insidious resonances. They explored the ways that the identities of Black sitters were collapsed by white artists in France to form racist allegories for white audiences, and they considered how images of enslaved people circulated, showing how Carpeaux could monetize images like this one. Exhibitions like this one unfix art history in intriguing, vital ways, and it’s likely that we’ll see many more shows in this vein in the years to come. —Alex Greenberger

"Monet - Mitchell" at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris

Despite becoming successful and receiving acclaim during her lifetime, Joan Mitchell still does not have the same status as her male Abstract Expressionist colleagues, like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. This may soon change, however, thanks to several shows of her work staged this year. Her retrospective, which first opened in 2021 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, traveled in the spring to the Baltimore Museum of Art. Then, in the fall, some of the works in it traveled across the Atlantic to go on view at the Louis Vuitton Foundation, whose Mitchell show came with a twist. Curated by Suzanne Pagé, this show, titled “Monet – Mitchell,” paired Mitchell’s works with paintings by the famed French Impressionist, whse studio in France, where she created most of her works, was a stone’s throw from Monet’s famed studio in Giverny. Crowds came in droves to see the show, which displayed how both artists approached landscapes and the natural world in unusual ways. Meanwhile, David Zwirner gallery mounted a show of Mitchell’s lesser-known late works in New York that also received acclaim. —Shanti Escalante-De Mattei

"Walter De Maria: Boxes for Meaningless Work" at Menil Collection, Houston

The first-ever U.S museum retrospective survey devoted a giant of Minimalism, this showcase begins with works that derive from Walter De Maria’s early exploration of “meaningless work,” or art that serves no function. These were precursors to the drawings, photographs, and Land artworks that De Maria would go on to produce, all of which are surveyed here. The Arch (1964), one of the works included in this show, comprises a group of wood columns aligned in procession that draw connections to the body, while a reconstruction of Ocean Bed (1969) makes a mattress available to audience members as a resting place to listen to audio recordings of the sea. They’re all a part of an oeuvre that one of the exhibition’s curator’s, Brad Epley, has described as emblematic of De Maria’s “deceptive simplicity.” —Angelica Villa

"A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration" at Mississippi Museum of Art and Baltimore Museum of Art

This show, jointly organized by the Mississippi Museum of Art and the Baltimore Museum of Art (and headed next year to New York’s Brooklyn Museum), features 12 Black artists draw on connections to the Great Migration, through which Black residents in the South ventured across the country. The artists here process the shift by a variety of means. Mark Bradford’s 500 (2022), one of the works commissioned for the show, features 60 abstract paintings, while Robert Pruitt’s A Song for Travelers (2022) pays homage to the Third and Fourth Wards of Houston, the artist’s native city, by way of portraits depicting people in garb from various eras. Meanwhile, Carrie Mae Weems charted her grandfather’s path as a tenant farmer and union organizer in Arkansas, Allison Janae Hamilton considered the connections Black Southerners hold to the places they inhabit, and Jamea Richmond-Edwards and Torkwase Dyson relied on mixed media and sculptural pieces to ponder the relationship between one’s community and the surrounding environment. —Angelica Vila

“Faith Ringgold: American People” at New Museum, New York

Faith Ringgold’s influence is so vast that it would have been easy to forget she had never had a retrospective in New York, the city she has long called home. And so it felt truly remarkable to stand within the New Museum this past winter and see five decades’ worth of art-making that vividly speaks to the experiences of Black women, the pervasiveness of racist violence, and the value of direct action. Well-known works by Ringgold—like a vast painting depicting the carnage resulting from a clash between Black and white people, which had been prominently featured at MoMA recently—were on view in this show, curated by Massimiliano Gioni and Gary Carrion-Murayari, with Madeline Weisburg. What stood out, however, were the less often seen parts of Ringgold’s oeuvre, like her “Slave Rape” series of the ’70s, in which she offers provocative images of Black women who resist any attempts to be ground down by those who seek to exploit them. —Alex Greenberger

"Luiz Zerbini: The Same Story Is Never the Same" at Museu de Arte de São Paulo

The Museu de Arte de São Paulo’s “Histórias” series, devoted to reconfiguring under-studied aspects of art history, this year focused on Brazil, It asked an intriguing question: how could one of Brazil’s premier institutions best represent the country’s story and talent? Luiz Zerbini’s solo show at MASP, “The Story Is Never the Same,” was one answer. The paintings on view in it imagined different moments in Brazilian history that were undocumented, or have only been told from the perspective of the powerful. Zerbini illuminated how Brazil’s great abundance of resources has continuously attracted tragic violence in works such as Massacre de Haximu (2020), which depicts the killing of Haximu people by illegal gold miners, or Paisagem inútil (Useless Landscape), 2020, which lovingly renders the plants that slaves were made to care for, as their ghosts hover in the background. The paintings were mounted on pillars, so that audiences could see the backs of the works, where Zerbini displayed source materials and studies for his pieces. Also on view were his prints and strange sculptures, both made using bits of flora he had gathered from the edges of his property, giving audiences the sense that they are embedded in a frothy, jungle landscape. The exhibition served as a memorial to all the beauty Zerbini treasures and the horrible fate that often befalls it. —Shanti Escalante-De Mattei

"Igshaan Adams: Desire Lines" at Art Institute of Chicago, New York

The bonds between the individual and the community, and between the self and the soul, were exposed to breathtaking effect in “Desire Lines,” the mid-career survey of South African artist Isghaan Adams. Where some artists are inspired by their community, Adams inspired his community to realize his art: 20 majestic, intricate tapestries and textile installations were woven with objects drawn from his native Cape Town—shells, rope, wire, glass, and beads—with the help of his friends and family. Thick weavings of metal, rope, and tassel dripped from the ceiling and diverging paths of glass, gold, and wood offered visitors several ways forward through the exhibition. Like the well-worn ribbon of earth referenced by the show’s title, we unconsciously form our life’s route searching for a shortcut to its rewards. But it’s only by slowing down and looking around, Adams says, that we can sustain our selfhood to the end. —Tessa Solomon

“Traitor, Survivor, Icon: The Legacy of La Malinche” at Denver Art Museum

To call someone a “malinche” in Mexican culture is a misogynistic insult that signifies someone, often a woman, being a traitor to their kind. This word traces its history back to an Indigenous young girl who is known as La Malinche. She served as a translator for the conquistador Hernán Cortés, who referred to her only as “mi lengua” (my tongue). She has long been blamed for the downfall of the Aztec Empire. But how true is this history? It’s complicated. La Malinche was likely enslaved by Cortés; she had no choice in the matter. Not much else is known about her. This exhibition, curated by Victoria I. Lyall, Terezita Romo, and Matthew H. Robb, looked to reconsider La Malinche’s history and how the mythology around her story has been reimagined and reworked over the centuries by numerous artists, from contemporary colonial illustrations to Chicana artists who have reclaimed her over the past several decades, including Delilah Montoya, Judithe Hernández, and Sandy Rodriguez. —Maximilíano Durón 

"Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure"

This year saw the opening of not one but two major exhibitions on Jean-Michel Basquiat. Though Basquiat’s star burned brightly in the ’80s before he died of a heroin overdose at 27 in 1988, he has become one of the few contemporary artists known in the wider public, no doubt due to his association with (and adoption by) popular culture, most notably hip-hop. Though Basquiat has been feted by the art world for decades, “Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure” offered something truly new: 200 rare paintings, drawings, and artifacts by the artist, curated by his sisters, in a series of spaces designed by starchitect David Adjaye that recreate locations in Basquiat’s life. In doing so, sisters Lisane Basquiat, Jeanine Heriveaux, and Adjaye wrest Basquiat’s work from the white walls of the gallery or museum to place them in a more familiar context. As Basquiat and Heriveaux told ARTnews, “King Pleasure” is a “personal account” and an immersive “experience,” not a “scholarly show.” It was all the more powerful for it. —Harrison Jacobs

“Virgil Abloh: Figures of Speech” at Brooklyn Museum, New York

Opening just seven months after Virgil Abloh died to the surprise of pretty much everyone (including many who knew him well—after a cancer diagnosis that he kept intensely private), “Figures of Speech” at the Brooklyn Museum served as a sort of tribute to a fashion designer and street-style aesthete who went out at the top of his game. The exhibition was expanded beyond earlier iterations in Chicago, Atlanta, and Boston, with curatorial embellishments courtesy of Abloh’s friend and peer Antwaun Sargent. And for all the questions it left unanswered as a museum exhibition (for a subject so steeped in music, why was the show so quiet? And for that matter, why were so many of the clothes displayed sideways on hangers, as if stowed away in a closet?), it occasioned a miracle of social assembly. Seeing dads and their kids in matching sneakers and T-shirts, not to mention groups of style-aspiring teenagers out on their own, left a lasting impression to be sure. —Andy Battaglia

"Chroma: Ancient Sculpture in Color" at Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

In July, visitors to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Greek and ancient galleries were met with a shock of color and motion. Vibrantly painted and richly adorned replicas of ancient sculptures stood beside the originals which, visitors learned, had been stripped of their paint by time and human design. “Chroma: Ancient Sculpture in Color” revealed the history of polychromy—meaning “many colors” in Greek—in antiquity, proving that the popular imagination of ancient Greece and Rome as paradigms of whiteness was deeply flawed. The recreations were the result of technological breakthroughs by Vinzenz Brinkmann and Ulrike Koch-Brinkmann that resurrected ancient pigments. The most shocking revelation of the show, however, was that this isn’t news—significant evidence of ancient polychromy has been recorded over nearly two millennia. Exposure to the elements had simply deteriorated the colors’ boldness, and museum curators and art restorers had removed lingering traces of paint out of deference for pure form. The show had two intentions: to explore the cutting-edge technologies that are rewriting art history and to unpack how Western artists and scholars have propagated a hierarchy of beauty at the expense of the truth. —Tessa Solomon