The Top Ten Shows in the US of 2020

Like many of us, I’d prefer to forget 2020. It’s been an extremely difficult year, to say the least. Yet, folks persevered, and things got done. Despite the COVID-19 health crisis, Black Lives Matter protests ensued globally, monuments fell and the art world was forced to reckon with the systemic racism that permeates its culture. While all this was happening – with the occasional pivot – galleries and museums continued with their programming as best they could, managing to produce a remarkable roster of exhibitions. Here are just a few of this year’s highlights.

Zarina

Pulitzer Arts Foundation

St. Louis, USA

‘Zarina: Atlas of Her World’ was a brilliant and long-overdue survey of the printmaker’s five-decade career that further explored her fascinations with architecture and mathematics. ‘The serene, meditative volumes of Tadao Ando’s Pulitzer Arts Foundation’, wrote Murtaza Vali, ‘are the ideal setting for this retrospective, which explores Zarina’s refined and restrained experiments with paper and printmaking, and her meditations on the comforts and vicissitudes of home.’

Noah Davis 

David Zwirner

New York, USA

Expertly curated by Helen Molesworth, ‘Noah Davis’ at David Zwirner was one of the most celebrated shows of this year. ‘This luminous exhibition’, wrote Erica N. Cardwell, ‘the largest ever presentation of work by [Davis], makes me wish I could have spent time with the artist’s brilliant mind. Absent of that possibility, the 20 paintings on display here demonstrate not only Davis’s technical skill but his lifelong dedication to Black art and artists.’

Edgar Heap of Birds

Fort Gansevoort 

New York, USA

‘Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds works simultaneously in place and on the move,’ wrote Lou Cornum of the Oklahoma-based artist, who has shown internationally for decades. His survey exhibition at Fort Gansevoort displayed some of his most iconic works, including his pastel text drawings and mock street signs, that investigate issues around place and indigeneity. ‘Through powerful verbal juxtapositions, Heap of Birds articulates a political position in support of land-defenders and against militarism and corporate development as well as an ethical position, accountable to the land and the people who live off it.’

Nicole Eisenman 

The Contemporary Austin

Austin, USA

Curated by Heather Pesanti, ‘Sturm und Drang’ presented a slew of Eisenman’s paintings and sculptures that question grand historical narratives. ‘For Eisenman’, wrote Shiv Kotecha, ‘historical memory sometimes works like a blunt instrument. Against the many crises her painting and sculpture insistently refer to – climate collapse, the imbroglio of electoral politics, the dilapidated conditions of migrancy – we receive, unequivocally and without restraint, the gamut of the artist’s own experience saturated with the calamity of our collective present.’

Autumn Knight 

The Kitchen

New York, NY (Online)

In light of COVID-19 restrictions, Autumn Knight decided to live-stream three new performances on Twitch in lieu of her more interactive work. In her review of the show, Madeleine Seidel wrote: ‘This live feed is interspersed with security footage of The Kitchen’s bathroom and animations of hand gestures by the artist Adebukola Bodunrin. Knight’s actions frame The Kitchen as a complex setting: the institutional space is simultaneously described as a ‘cage’ in which racial, gendered and classist power mechanisms are at play, yet it also provides a blank slate for her artistic exploration of these societal ills.’

‘Uncanny Valley’

De Young

San Francisco, USA

With works by Ian Cheng, Simon Denny, Agnieszka Kurant and others, ‘Uncanny Valley’ deftly examined the dangers of AI technology. ‘The show’s title’, wrote Fanny Singer, ‘is a nod, of course, to nearby Silicon Valley – of which San Francisco has increasingly become an annex – but also reflects the show’s intent: to look not broadly at how technology has seeped into art, but at how the definition of what constitutes “humanness” has been blurred by advancements in artificial intelligence and how artists are metabolizing these developments.’

‘FIVE’

We Buy Gold

New York, USA (Online)

This online exhibition, curated by artist Nina Chanel Abney, featured works by Nick Cave, Azikiwe Mohamed and Sondra Perry, among others. ‘It brings together more than a dozen moving-image works’, wrote Anthony Hawley, ‘centred around a quintet of pressing sentiments for this moment: anxiety, stillness, isolation, escapism and fear. The works in this exhibition explore these emotional states in complex and shifting configurations. In the best possible sense, nothing ever fully settles in ‘FIVE’, and the result is a curated online project as elusive as the gallery itself.’

Ficre Ghebreyesus

Galerie Lelong & Co.

New York, USA

The late artist’s first solo show in New York presented 21 lush paintings that retraced the histories of his life in his home country of Eritrea. Rebecca Rose Cuomo wrote in her review: ‘Ficre Ghebreyesus’s art conjures liminal spaces where water and earth, beginning and end, reality and fiction converge […] The shallow pictorial space coupled with the loose, ethereal rendering of the scene complements Ghebreyesus’s own process of fusing real and imagined elements of his past: a synthesis of fact and fiction.’

Timur Si-Qin

von ammon co.

Washington, D.C., USA

As part of his ongoing ‘New Peace’ project, the artist presented a suite of new works that speak to the West’s exploitation of the natural world. ‘Si-Qin’s solo show’, wrote Ian Bourland, ‘continues a run at the [von ammon co.] of new-media work that would feel bleeding edge even in Berlin, where the artist is based […] Si-Qin’s tech-mediated oeuvre, high gloss aside, confronts us head on with the sublime terror of collapsing ecological and social systems and the non-European forms of knowledge that may restore them. Don’t turn away.’

Sanford Biggers

Marianne Boesky & The Bronx Museum

New York, NY

With two concurrent shows up in New York – ‘Codeswitch’ and ‘Soft Truths’ – the artist celebrated an institutional survey of his quilt-based works and a gallery exhibition showcasing his most recent sculptures in marble. ‘Especially stunning’, wrote Rahel Aima, ‘are the four works from Biggers’s latest series, ‘Chimeras’ (2020–ongoing). Made from cool Italian and Portuguese marble, these figurative sculptures synthesize African and European forms and suggest an inversion of Frantz Fanon’s Back Skin, White Masks (1952) […] Biggers’s chopped-and-screwed process makes time and history feel elastic and multidirectional, even as it adds a new verse to a very old song.’

_{Main Image: ‘Noah Davis’, 2020, exhibition view, David Zwirner, New York. Courtesy: the artist, The Estate of Noah Davis and David Zwirner, Paris /New York/ London/ Hong Kong}