New York Art Galleries Played It Too Safe in 2024 as Museums Thrived

By just about any measure, this was a tumultuous year for New York’s close-knit art scene. Beloved galleries shuttered—not just the small ones, like David Lewis, Simone Subal, and Jack Hanley, but also bigger, more blue-chip outfits, like Mitchell-Innes & Nash. Beloved New York artists died, from Frank Stella to Faith Ringgold to Lorraine O’Grady. Even one beloved museum director, MoMA’s Glenn Lowry, said he would step aside after 30 years in the role.

But even amid all this change, the scene continued on. Galleries mounted starry shows for artists on their roster, and museums staged well-attended surveys that pushed at the conventions of institutional exhibitions. There were three major New York museums missing from the conversation this year—the Frick Collection, the New Museum, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, all of them closed amid ongoing expansion efforts and all with plans to reopen in 2025.

Even without these institutions, the city’s scene remained bustling. To take stock of all the excitement, two ARTnews senior editors convened to look back on the New York art scene as it played out in 2024. Their discussion, which was fielded by a Google Doc, follows below.

Alex Greenberger: Can I admit something? Nearly all of my favorite gallery shows in New York this year were for dead artists. I’m not proud of this—it goes against my belief that galleries should generally champion the living while museums revivify the dead using the scholarly resources at hand. But what fun it was to watch galleries take part in the art-historical rewriting that has heretofore been largely confined to institutional walls. 

I was awed early on by Andrew Kreps Gallery’s Eileen Agar show, which was filled with memorable landscapes and portraits by this British Surrealist, who has yet to receive much attention in New York. That show, which opened in January, is still one of my favorites of the year. At the same time that exhibition was on view, Galerie Lelong & Co. trotted out another Argentinean-born artist who isn’t so well-known here: Sarah Grilo, whose paintings of the 1960s are filled with found text and letter-like scrawls. This was a show so good, I couldn’t believe I’d never heard of her before. 

Should I also mention Fergus McCaffrey’s Tatsuo Ikeda show, loaded as it was with mysterious paintings of creatures undergoing transformation? Should I regale you with more praise for Salon 94’s exhibition of work by Ione Saldanha, a talented Brazilian artist who starred in this year’s Venice Biennale and moved abstraction into the third dimension by painting onto sanded pieces of bamboo? Should I say a little about Garth Greenan Gallery’s superlative show of work by Fritz Scholder, a Luiseño painter who bitterly critiqued representations of Native Americans? Should I pause here to note that you can still see Hauser & Wirth’s Thornton Dial survey, one of the best shows mounted in New York this year?  

I could go on, but I won’t. You get my point: the under-recognized giants of art history reigned supreme in galleries across the city. But I also wonder if that’s entirely a good thing. It seems to me as though New York galleries retreated from our tense current moment by taking up the past, which is arguably the route of least resistance—critics are more likely to praise these shows, as I just did, than they are to pan them. All of the shows I’ve just singled out were worth mounting. They were definitely worth seeing, too. I’m just concerned about how many of them there were this year. What do you think, Max? 

Maximilíano Durón: I think you make a valid point. I agree that the Thornton Dial show is a knockout. The late artist’s close attention to materiality and the way he juxtaposes found objects is sublime. There was also a haunting beauty in the works Alexander Gray Associates showed of Hugh Steers over the summer. Titled “Conjuring Tenderness,” the exhibition presented paintings made solely in 1987, the year Steers received his HIV-positive diagnosis; he died from AIDS-related causes in 1995. There’s an intimacy that Steers captures that spoke to that moment, at the height of the AIDS crisis. His art still resonates today. 

I’d go further and say that the majority of the museum exhibitions that stand out from the past year, both in New York and elsewhere, were also dedicated to dead artists. I don’t think we can talk about New York exhibitions this year without mentioning Käthe Kollwitz at the Museum of Modern Art and Elizabeth Catlett at the Brooklyn Museum. Though they were working decades apart, both artists are revered for their radical politics. After seeing the Catlett show, however, I came to realize that both also showed a tenderness toward the relationship between mother and child, as well as the pain and grief that comes with motherhood. 

Back to your question, I think we’ve entered a moment where it’s easier to commend the politics of a dead artist who worked under an oppressive regime decades ago than it is to acknowledge the work of artists doing the same thing right now. This may explain the reactions to this year’s Whitney Biennial. The general consensus was that it was a quiet show—the politics weren’t in your face. What people forget is that artists often have to work this way in order to avoid censorship, imprisonment, and even death. 

I think back to the Hammer Museum’s groundbreaking 2017 exhibition “Radical Women,” which looked at the artistic production of women artists in Latin America and Latina and Chicana artists in the US. We celebrate how many of these artists slyly commented on the dictatorships they were living under. Artists here in the US are working subtly, but they aren’t treated the same way. Maybe this has to do with denial that the fascist takeover that Democrats constantly mentioned in the run-up to the US presidential election is, in fact, already here. Artists have always been especially attuned to the shifting of the winds, and I think this edition of the Biennial only offered further proof of that.

AG: That’s true, and I think this Whitney Biennial brought to the fore that debate about what art counts as being safe—which was the same thing discussed around the 2019 edition. Was P. Staff’s installation Afferent Nerves (2023) safe? It certainly didn’t appear radical. Mostly, it just looked like some netting hanging above a highly abstracted picture printed onto a wall. But the wall text revealed the netting was electrified, and close looking reveals that the picture is a photograph of Staff themselves. 

I think Afferent Nerves refers to the fragility of certain people’s bodies, with the netting acting as a nice analog for one’s nervous system. Staff is alluding to the sense of endangerment faced by trans people like themselves without representing it. I like this piece a lot—it stands nicely for what the Biennial was all about. I’m not surprised other critics don’t agree, but I am surprised by the unwillingness to engage with the work. In a Spike essay denouncing “risk management and self-care in contemporary art,” Travis Diehl tried to knock Staff down a peg by noting that no one was tall enough to truly be electrified by the net, which Diehl said was made of plastic, anyway, therefore rendering it “inert.” I mean, come on. Does an artwork have to kill you in order to be considered unsafe?

MD: Critical thinking certainly has been lost in certain circles over the past few years. Not to harp too much on the past, but it’s comical, given how critics eviscerated the 1993 Whitney Biennial for being too much about politics, specifically of the so-called “multiculti” variety. Now, 31 years later, the pendulum has shifted back the other way, where artists are pilloried for making work that doesn’t broadcast their identities loud enough. 

In this biennial, there were other works in the same vein as Staff’s installation that seemed on the verge of collapse, with the potential to injure. Charisse Pearlina Weston’s monumental sheet of smoked glass bisected one of the Whitney’s galleries, intentionally corralling the movements of visitors. If not for eagle-eyed museum guards, you might get close enough to bop your head on it. Suzanne Jackson’s paintings made of built-up acrylic and gel defy gravity in sumptuous ways; that they hung by only the thinnest of wire strings from the ceiling added to their fragility. And, of course, there’s Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio’s sculpture of modified amber, which did in fact collapse during the run of the show. (No one appears to have been harmed in the process.) The Aparicio work displays a kind of material risk I haven’t seen in a really long time. An earlier amber work by him that appeared at the Hammer bulged and swelled, but it did not fully fall apart like this one. I’m glad artists are still open to experimentation in this way.

AG: I can think of just one notable New York show this year that outright represented the violence it referenced: Arthur Jafa’s Gladstone Gallery exhibition. That show featured his new film *****, for which he appropriated the climactic shootout of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) and re-edited it such that all of Travis Bickle’s victims were Black. Looped many times over, with slight alterations each time, Jafa’s remade version of Scorsese’s ending was oppressive—I forced myself to sit through all 73 minutes of Jafa’s film, but several people told me they could barely stomach watching even just 5 minutes of it.

“My Travis Bickle is Dylann Roof,” Jafa has said, underscoring the sense that ***** is really just an imagined parallel for real-world anti-Black violence. But did we really need to see all that simulated carnage to know as much? Who was this work really for?

I find it fascinating that another provocateur, Kara Walker, moved her art in a less shocking direction this year. Having made her name on art that graphically represents the sexual assault and physical denigration of enslavement, Walker is now showing at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. new collages in which layered female bodies formed from cut paper disappear into one another. The violence is here made metaphorical, the erasure of Black women invoked through the outlines of missing faces and hands. This isn’t my favorite series by Walker—I find it a little too delicate, especially for an artist so unafraid to be messy in the past—but I think it’s telling about which way the wind is blowing here in New York.

MD: New York’s gallery shows this year were incredibly safe, that’s for sure. A lot of ink has been spilled—including in these pages—about the uncertainty of the market and the world more generally, and that may be the reason for this turn. A perfect example here is Jadé Fadojutimi’s recent exhibition at Gagosian. I know I’ll get crucified for saying this, but talk about colorful paintings made to hang over a rich person’s off-white couch! I’ve been following this London-based artist from a distance for several years now, and I’ve been intrigued by her approach to abstraction. I was sorry to see that these paintings just didn’t hold up to my expectations. 

I found her comment to the New Yorker about her move to Gagosian from London’s Pippy Houldsworth Gallery to be rather unfortunate. “I outgrew Pippy,” she said, adding, “It was too personal. I didn’t want a mum anymore.” It’s one thing to outgrow your current gallery because the demand for your work is so high, which is definitely the case with Fadojutimi, but there’s no need to throw that kind of shade. Midsize dealerships like Houldsworth have it hard enough. On that front, it’s worth noting that the mega-galleries have for a while now been poaching artists from their smaller counterparts; we’re told it’s something worth celebrating, the logical step forward for a burgeoning career. We’ve covered 18 artist representation deals by the four megas this year alone. Even if that may be slightly down from years past, the megas are still gobbling everything up. 

Let’s face it, we’ve gotten to the point where a handful of galleries have gotten too big to fail. Even if the softening of the market we’ve witnessed for nearly two years swings back the other way, I’m still skeptical that we’re on the right track. The New York art world isn’t as weird as it used to be. The art ecosystem here isn’t broken per se, but it’s in desperate need of some medical attention. I beg the powers that be to take more risks. No one will remember you if all you do is sell middling paintings, abstract or figurative. 

AG: Only a few galleries did take risks. Thomas Hirschhorn’s Gladstone show in January stands out to me as one of the crazier things I’ve seen recently. It was predominantly composed of an installation resembling a trashed office in which much of the equipment, including the computers, was made of cardboard. On the screens were prints of screenshots of first-person shooter video games. The show felt joyously anarchic and kind of evil at the same time.

I can think of some of other oddities from this year: Nikita Gale’s vertigo-inducing Petzel show; Pat Oleszko’s David Peter Francis exhibition, featuring a gigantic blow-up nude woman spreading her legs; Catalina Ouyang’s bracing Lyles & King outing, packed with bondage-adjacent sculptures; Amanda Ba’s recent Jeffrey Deitch Gallery stunner, with its giant paintings of Asian women towering over cities; “The Bitch,” at O’Flaherty’s, a truly bizarre two-person show that featured paintings by Alex Katz and a Matthew Barney film of that artist producing them. But these are exceptions to a pretty staid playing field, and even extremely creative artists I really admire put on some pretty boring shows this year.

I’m on the record as being a Josh Kline mega-fan, but even I couldn’t get behind his recent Lisson Gallery, which revisited past bodies of work by himself as a commentary on his having officially reached mid-career-artist status following a Whitney survey. In place of the workers whose bodies formed the basis of his 3D-printed sculptures, Kline now represents his own arms as detached parts, as if to suggest he were also drawn and quartered by the same exploitative system. I’d go so far as to say the earlier 3D-printed sculptures defined an entire era, but this Lisson show didn’t seem to define anything at all other than a certain post-pandemic ennui taking hold right now.

MD: Funnily enough, one of the few gallery shows that stands out in my mind from this year was also at Lisson. That was the solo show for Hugh Hayden, which I had also seen at the gallery’s LA outpost. I preferred the LA iteration solely because I think the installation was correctly scaled to that space. But I do think it takes guts to mount a massive set of bathroom stalls in a commercial gallery. Each stall featured a different artwork, ranging from humorous to poignant. Taken as a whole, the show provided a commentary on navigating life as a queer Black man in the US today. But what I particularly liked about the show was that one stall was closed off, inaccessible to all. All you could do was take a peek at its contents by crouching down and peering through a glory hole. 

And I’ll add one more show dedicated to five living artists: “Five Women Artists in 1970s Los Angeles” at Ortuzar Projects. Even if the show focused on historical pieces from the ’70s, they seemed as fresh as ever. What’s more fun than being able to flip through a large-scale binder of nude black-and-white photos (courtesy Susan Singer)? Hopefully New York galleries will take notice and give these artists there own solo shows in 2025.

Anyway, should we move onto something a bit more positive? Tell me about an observation you’ve made to me repeatedly this year: that 2024 marked the return of the “nerdy blockbuster” in New York.

AG:  Even 20 years ago, it was not unusual to see big, flashy blockbusters in New York for artists and styles known mainly to art historians. These days, it is hard, for example, to fathom the Metropolitan Museum of Art ever doing another gigantic Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson retrospective, as it did so beautifully in 2006. That changed significantly in the past decade, and specifically during the pandemic, when New York museums put on crowd-pleasers in an attempt to quickly get their dwindling attendance numbers back to pre-pandemic levels. 

But this year, the nerdy blockbuster came back, and thank goodness it did. During the fall alone, there was a once-in-a-lifetime show of quattrocento Sienese art at the Met and a rotunda-filling survey at the Guggenheim Museum of Orphism, one of the lesser-known modernist art movements. Neither of those subjects are the stuff of everyday conversation; both looked better than ever at their respective institutions. The Siena show, for its part, is my absolute favorite exhibition of the year—I’ve seen it twice now, and I plan to go once more before it ends. 

Maybe I’m wrong, but I think these shows may just herald a broader turn toward geeky art-historical subject matter at Met-sized museums. Influencers who are invited to museum previews with the hope of gaining social media traction might not find much to love here, but I sure did.

MD: I’m not going to lie, when you first mentioned this idea of the nerdy blockbuster, I rolled my eyes. But the more I think about it, the more I realize this is a keen observation, especially after seeing both exhibitions back to back. I think we need more nerdy blockbusters. Both exhibitions were relatively well-attended on a frigid Friday this December. They may not be up to the level of, say, the Matisse “Cut-Outs” show at MoMA a few years back, but how enjoyable is it really to see a show where it’s so packed you can’t actually see anything? And really, who needs another show dedicated to Warhol, Monet, or van Gogh? Is there really anything else left to say? 

The Siena show was a knockout. First, it’s impressive that the Met was able to secure all those loans, including the entire extant predella of Duccio’s Maestà (plus a couple other of its panels) and Pietro Lorenzetti’s Tarlati Altarpiece. As a lapsed Catholic, I was awed by the brilliance of this altarpiece. Cast in dim lighting and installed so it towered over the viewers, as it would have been back in the day, I felt myself coming closer to God. I can’t even imagine what it would have been like seeing this gold-leafed altarpiece in a church from high above, lit only by candlelight—and with my astigmatism, it would have truly been something! 

The Met has been on a roll recently with more art-historically driven shows (as opposed to contemporary ones). Another blockbuster at the Met this year was “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism.” It was a dense show that explored the movement’s most well-known artists as well as ones under-recognized until now. A gallery dedicated to Aaron Douglas and the woefully under-known portraits of Laura Wheeler Waring still stand out in my mind, as did a double self-portrait, a way to translate W.E.B. DuBois’s theory of “double consciousness” visually, by Samuel Joseph Brown, Jr. 

My only gripe was that the Met show failed to fully acknowledge its own history with the Harlem Renaissance. Of course, the Met didn’t embrace these artists in the 1920s, but it failed again in 1969 with the exhibition “Harlem on My Mind,” which famously included no art by artists of the Harlem Renaissance, minus the photographs of Harlem by the likes of James Van Der Zee. That show approached Harlem from a more cultural anthropological lens, and so it was widely protested by Black artists who formed the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition in response. This largely wasn’t mentioned in the wall text for the 2024 Harlem show, and it is mentioned only once in the exhibition catalog. Frankly, I don’t think that’s enough, even if the Met did publish an essay about this on its site. If the Met wants to mount such a corrective show it needs to contend with its own historical legacy when it comes to the Harlem Renaissance. Failing to do so only does us all a disservice.

AG: Thinking back on the Harlem show and the Catlett retrospective, it occurs to me that New York’s museums, as they stood in 2024, were in a totally different place than they were even two years ago. We tend to think about museum blockbusters as being devoted to the great white males of art history, but my sense is that that’s finally begun to shift. Consider how big the Harlem and Catlett shows are, and consider, too, the size of the Whitney’s Alvin Ailey show, which may just be the year’s most experimental offering.

Admittedly, I have mixed feelings about the Ailey exhibition. This is a sprawling show that doesn’t really act as a survey of its subject, a Black choreographer who changed dance forever. Instead, the bulk of it is devoted to modern and contemporary artworks that share something in common with Ailey’s choreographies, from a Jean-Michel Basquiat painting to a Karon Davis sculpture of a ballerina. Footage of performances by the Alvin Ailey Dance Company is projected high above the show, but the focus, mainly, is art that doesn’t bear an explicit tie to Ailey himself.

This approach does succeed sometimes, especially in the sections devoted to modernism. It doesn’t matter whether Ailey actually looked at paintings by Rubem Valentim, a self-taught Brazilian painter of the mid-20th century who sometimes alluded to motifs seen in African art. The show suggests that Ailey worked in ways similar to Valentim—both were reaching back in time, retrieving elements of Africa’s past via abstraction. On the one hand, in these moments, the show works well as a map of Ailey’s rich mind. On the other hand, the exhibition makes the contemporary art on view, great as it may be, feel like an afterthought.

Sometimes, a retrospective doesn’t need to be more than that, and I wished for something more conventional. But still, what a beautifully installed show! And what a joy to see it alongside MoMA PS1’s Ralph Lemon survey, which is likewise centered around dance—not something you see often in big shows like these two. It seems that museums really are taking risks now. Do you think that will continue in 2025, Max?

MD: I could definitely see this kind of risk-taking continuing, but I don’t think the Ailey show is perhaps the best template to follow for it. The day I visited, I happened to get there just in time for one of the accompanying dance performances, by Ailey II. I left the performance thinking I’d learn more about how Ailey transformed modern dance, but I didn’t find that in the galleries. I found the art on view to be tangentially related to Ailey. The bulk of the exhibition focuses on Black diasporic artists who have represented dance in one way or another, with some archival documents from throughout Ailey’s career. I know the show’s title, “Edges of Ailey,” hints at this, but if you’re going to say you’re mounting the first museum exhibition about Alvin Ailey, you have to actually examine the work of Alvin Ailey. 

I’ve noticed this happening a lot lately: museums are mounting exhibitions that are said to be surveys or retrospectives of artists, and then end up being more like group exhibitions that use these artists as a jumping-off point, perhaps because there’s just not enough material to actually fill the galleries. I’ve seen it work before, but in those instances it’s clear to provide a wider context for the artist than can be had by a traditional survey. I think that’s not what the Whitney promised when it announced the exhibition, so I didn’t find it all that successful.

But there is value in thinking expansively, and it’s something I want to see more often, just in different ways. One example was El Museo del Barrio’s La Trienal. In titling the exhibition “Flow States,” the curators wanted to examine both the creative flow of the artistic process and the ways artistic networks expand throughout the Latinx and Caribbean diaspora. El Museo has historically given much of the Caribbean, and especially the non-Spanish speaking countries, the short-end of the stick. That meant that this iteration of its recurring triennial is significant. 

It also looked to the Philippines, thinking through the historical connections between that former Spanish colony and the former Spanish colonies in North America. I love the work of the one Filipino artist they included, Norberto Roldan, even if his work a bit out of place here. I would have been more interested in seeing the work of Filipino American artists from the San Gabriel Valley or the Bay Area, to learn how their work is in dialogue with that of Latinx artists working in those same regions, since these two communities have a shared cultural and visual language shaped in part by colonialism. That being said, I applaud the curators for trying that approach. Not everyone would think about a triennial focused on contemporary Latinx art so expansively. 

I hope there is more risk-taking in the art world in that vein in 2025. Museums, galleries, collectors, and most of all artists must not fear trying something new—even if it doesn’t totally work in the end. That experimental energy might just pay off, but you’ll never know unless you try it out.