The best place to begin is with Amalia Mesa-Bains, who gave a presentation at that 2016 Ford Foundation gathering about her nearly five decades’ worth of advocating for Latinx and Chicanx art. Mesa-Bains, best known for her altar installations, is a towering figure within the Chicanx and Latinx art communities. Her art, activism, and scholarship spoke to our lived experiences when mainstream institutions ignored them. Finally, this year she got a retrospective to honor her indefatigable achievements.

When I profiled Mesa-Bains for ARTnews in 2018, she joked about how she could never “have a retrospective because I would have to replicate [some] 50 objects seven times” in order to recreate some her most significant installations, as certain objects have traveled between them. Thankfully, that did not deter curators María Esther Fernández and Laura E. Pérez, who mounted her career-spanning show at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archives.

I was most struck by one of the artist’s lesser-known works, Circle of Ancestors (1995), in which seven chairs face each other. Each is dedicated to a different woman, including the Aztec goddess Coyolaxauhiqui, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Mesa-Bains’s grandmothers and mother, artist Judith F. Baca, and Mesa-Bains herself at the age of her First Holy Communion. The work imagines the conversations and chisme that would transpire if these seven women gathered. I recalled the work at the show’s opening, where Mesa-Bains was surrounded by artists and curators. In the presence of multiple generations, she said that an exhibition like this could only have come about because a young generation had continued the fight that artists like Baca and herself had taken up years ago. 

Baca’s work, too, got a big showcase this year, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which she has transformed into an artist atelier. In 2021, the Mellon Foundation gave Baca and her arts nonprofit Social and Public Art Resource Center $5 million to extend the imagery of her iconic The Great Wall of Los Angeles into the present. The mural’s new stretches are now being fabricated. Two of the panels were exhibited earlier this year at Jeffrey Deitch’s LA gallery, and until next June, at LACMA, Baca’s team will continue to paint the others on-site.

It would have been unimaginable to find a show like Baca’s at LACMA more than 50 years ago. As the story goes, around that time, a LACMA curator told artist Harry Gamboa Jr. that Chicanos don’t make art, they join gangs; hence why the museum would not display art by them. Shortly afterward, Gamboa with two other members of the artist group ASCO, Willie Herón III and Gronk, spray-painted their name on LACMA’s wall, which was then captured in a photograph by Gamboa. In that image, the group’s fourth member, Patssi Valdez, stands above her cohort’s tags, looking off into the distance.

That ASCO piece, Spray Paint LACMA (1972), would serve as a calling card for Chicanx art, and would eventually move the museum to mount a solo show for another Chicano artist collective, Los Four, in 1974. It moved me to tears to realize that Chicanx painting had moved inward at LACMA, from its exterior to its central galleries, where Baca’s murals are now being fabricated.

Deceased Chicanx artists are still coming into focus, however, and one is Teddy Sandoval, whose work is now the subject of an impressive retrospective by curators C. Ondine Chavoya and David Evans Frantz at the Vincent Price Art Museum in Monterey Park, California. Sandoval’s most memorable works are his painted images of faceless men, begun in the late 1970s; they took on new resonance at the height of the AIDS crisis in the ’80s and early ’90s. (Sandoval died in 1995, the year before antiretroviral therapy—“the cocktail,” as it is informally known—proved to be an effective treatment against HIV, effectively ending the virus’s all-but-sure death sentence.)

But those works only scratch the surface of Sandoval’s oeuvre, which also includes performance, collage, mail art, zines, and riotous ceramics and mixed-media works. (Among the most memorable works are his colorfully glazed “chili penises” and a pair of leather chaps, adorned with chilis and stereotyped imagery of Mexicans.) Yet rather than viewing Sandoval in isolation, the exhibition also suggests that he had a lot to do with many others who followed, hinted at by the inclusion of “and the Butch Gardens School of Art” in its title. As a result, the show also includes fascinating works younger artists, like Troy Montes Michie, Ana Segovia, and Moises Salazar Taltenchi.

With the Sandoval exhibition, Chavoya and Frantz, like many other historians of Chicanx art, are now seeking to show how Chicanx artists have long formed networks. That was also their point of their 2017 show “Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A.,” which opened as part of the Getty Foundation’s PST: LA/LA initiative and included artists such as Sandoval, Baca, Mundo Meza, Tosh Carrillo, Laura Aguilar, and Joey Terrill. The exhibition helped spur on more interest in late-career artists, the most notable being Terrill, known for his paintings that document the intersections of queer and Chicanx life in Los Angeles and beyond.

This year, Terrill’s work is included in two major exhibitions, “Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines” at the Brooklyn Museum and the 2023 Made in L.A. biennial at the Hammer Museum, and he had his second New York solo gallery show with Ortuzar Projects. But the most significant presentation of his work took place at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which acquired and then put on display his 1981 triptych Chicanos Invade New York Series.

Showing three scenes featuring Terrill during his first stay in New York (making tortillas, learning of John Lennon’s death, and visiting the Guggenheim Museum), it’s now on view in a permanent collection gallery dedicated to 1980s New York, alongside the work of artists like Ashley Bickerton, Jeff Koons, Elizabeth Murray, Jenny Holzer, Martin Wong, and Haim Steinbach. In situating Terrill alongside the stars of the era, MoMA suggested he was just as important as them, a bold statement that did a lot to raise his profile, as did the museum’s decision to promote its offerings on social media. So, too, will a forthcoming monograph on Terrill’s work from the AIDS crisis, which will likely touch on his day job as director of global advocacy and partnerships for the AIDS Healthcare Foundation.

MoMA has been slow to acknowledge the work of Chicanx and Latinx artists in a substantive way until recently. Terrill’s appearance in the permanent collection galleries marks a step in the right direction. But, it has been even slower to acknowledge the scholars who created foundational texts, like Tomás Ybarra-Frausto and Mesa-Bains. An exceptional show by Leslie Martinez at MoMA’s sister institution, MoMA PS1, does this well. It includes three commissioned works, including a seven-panel work that takes over the corner of the show’s final gallery. The artist’s no-waste practice, in which rags and other studio detritus are embedded into these eye-popping abstractions, calls to mind rasquachismo, an aesthetic approach by Chicano artists that scholar Ybarra-Frausto coined in 1989. It’s the art of the make-do, being resourceful to create works that speak to the lived experiences of Chicanx communities. Works like Martinez’s subvert expectations of what some might think Latinx art can or should be, and show how artists like Martinez have long been in conversation with canonical figures found in MoMA’s permanent collection galleries.

Meanwhile, a sea change is taking place for mid-career and emerging Latinx artists, who now seem to have more opportunities than they ever did before. Look no further than Made in L.A. Not only was a stalwart of the LA Latinx art community like Terrill included, but so were showcases for other major fixtures of the scene, like Guadalupe Rosales, whose room-size installation that features at its center a sculpture of the Mesoamerican deity Quetzalcoatl made from lowrider bicycle parts tied together with blue bandanas, cast in a purple and green neon light with a pyramid disco ball spinning in a corner. Presentations for younger artists like Ryan Preciado, Esteban Ramón Pérez, Vincent Enrique Hernandez, Marcel Alcalá, and Christopher Suarez were powerful as well.

But the standout of this cohort is Jackie Amézquita, who presented a grid of 144 square slabs each of which is made with the soil of a different neighborhood in Los Angeles. Onto these, she has inscribed scenes inspired by those neighborhoods, creating images that serve as tender documents of daily life in parts of the city that don’t exist in the mainstream conception of “Los Angeles.”

One of today’s most closely watched artists, rafa esparza, had two major showings this year: a three-person show (with Rosales and Mario Ayala) at SFMOMA and a solo show at Artists Space in New York. Showcasing a new evolution in the artist’s well-known practice, esparza has created several life-size portraits of his friends and family on adobe, a generational practice that was passed down to him from his father; these works, however, were installed on metal structures and over an adobe brick road that crumpled during the exhibition’s run. It’s a reminder that those we hold close—our family, our friends, our communities, our neighborhoods—can gradually fade away if we don’t take the care to maintain them and their memories.

Memory is also the subject of a powerful exhibition by another LA-based artist, Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Aparicio’s work portrays the aftereffects of the Salvadoran civil war, as seen from the artist’s perspective as a second-generation child born in the US. The exhibition’s centerpiece is large-scale floor installation made of amber poured over objects like ceramic bones, volcanic stones, historical documents from the civil war, and clothes found in MacArthur Park. The work’s shape matches that of El Playon, the site of a volcanic explosion just outside San Salvador that once served as a dumping ground for the bodies of the disappeared during the civil war.

Aparicio’s exhibition found its twin in a survey at the International Center of Photography in New York for photographer Muriel Hasbun, who herself left El Salvador at 18, in 1979, the year before the civil war officially broke out. Her experiments in printing multiple images over each other, including on linens that once belonged to her ancestors, shows how memories past can forcefully collide with the present, their presences serving as haunting reminders of those we have lost.

One could go on about all the artists who have received their due this year. Conceptual artist Celia Álvarez Muñoz had first career retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. Pepón Osorio’s installations were brought together at New York’s New Museum. A Brooklyn Museum survey explored how María Magdalena Campos-Pons’s practice examines the aftereffects of slavery on Cuba, the US, and the world writ large. Yolanda González’s survey at the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, California, provided new insights into the work of a beloved artist, and there were three exhibitions for Gala Porras-Kim, at MUAC in Mexico City, Fowler Museum at UCLA, and the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul.

Carolina Caycedo’s sublime atarraya sculptures currently fill MoMA’s second-floor atrium. Yvette Mayorga’s maximalist paintings and installations were the subject of two solo institutional showings on view this year, at Crystal Bridges’s The Momentary and the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Connecticut. Accompanying a tightly curated survey of his recent work of lush studio portraits, Ken Gonzales-Day organized an exhibition at Scripps College’s Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery that paired selections from his collection of tintypes with works by contemporary queer artists.

Ester Hernandez, Diana Solís, Diógenes Ballester, and Mario Ybarra Jr. were among the artists who received this year’s Latinx Artist Fellowship, which comes with $50,000. Rosemary Meza-DesPlas, a 2022 winner of the Latinx Artist Fellowship, had a solo show at Bushwick’s Amos Eno Gallery, showcasing documentation of her riotous performance–cum–beauty pageant, Miss Nalgas USA. At the Armory Show, Ruiz-Healy Art had on view a powerful installation by Consuelo Jimenez Underwood, who is woefully in need of a retrospective. Ruben Ochoa’s mobile art gallery, CLASS: C, made its return, after nearly two decades of retirement, as part of an outdoor project at Frieze Los Angeles. Nao Bustamante opened an artist-run gallery at her grave plot at the Hollywood Forever cemetery. Ortuzar Projects mounted an exhibition dedicated to Carlos Almaraz and Elsa Flores, looking at how the artist-couple influenced each other’s works.

Galleries like Ortuzar Projects, Ruiz-Healy, Embajada (in San Juan), Commonwealth and Council, and Charlies James (both in Los Angeles), as well as the now five-year-old Latinx Project at NYU, have nurtured these artists’ careers. They remain exceptions in a market that has largely ignored Latinx artists. But a couple signs of a shift taking place in the upper echelons of the market: Firelei Báez got representation with Hauser & Wirth, one of the world’s biggest galleries, and Christie’s mounted a selling exhibition dedicated to contemporary Latinx artists, with works by Aliza Nisenbaum, Freddy Rodríguez, Juan Sánchez, Gisela Colón, Yvette Mayorga, and more offered.

The support of these artists through solo shows can only go so far; they need major thematic exhibitions that draw out the connections of their works and place them in historical contexts that speak to our contemporary moment.

Three group shows come to mind in this regard. The first is a Lisson Gallery’s summer group show in one of its New York spaces. Organized by César García-Alvarez, “Distribuidx” featured artists like rafa esparza, ektor garcia, Felipe Baeza, Sarah Zapata, Carlos Reyes, and Marcel Pardo Ariza, and looked at how these artists employ conceptual strategies to dismantle structures that seek to confine their art. “Ordinary People” at the Long Beach Museum of Art, focuses on how activism by artists can result in significant change. Among those spotlighted are Tlaloc Studios, AMBOS Project, and Slanguage Studio, each of which prove that artists can help us fight for a better, more just world.

The year’s biggest thematic show came in the form of “Xican-a.o.x. Body,” at the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture of the Riverside Art Museum. Bringing together around 125 works, the exhibition looks at how some 70 artists, from multiple generations, have foregrounded their Brown bodies as sites of political agency. Highlights include documentation of Cyclona’s groundbreaking 1971 performance Chicano Wedding, an experimental video by Patssi Valdez, Justin Favela’s large-scale Gypsy Rose Piñata sculpture, and photographs by Fabian Guerrero, William Camargo, James Luna, and Laura Aguilar.

It is wide-ranging surveys like this that create a lineage for Latinx artists. We are witnessing the building of a new canon for these artists on their terms, one that demonstrates just how important Latinx artists are, and have been, to our own understanding of art history.

A posting to fierce pussy’s website said Brody had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2021, and they “went through every step of illness and [treatment] as they had lived, with dignity, humor, grit and grace. They remained true to themselves all the way through. Brody died at home, peacefully, surrounded by their loving chosen family.”

The posting begins, “Extraordinary artist, beloved friend, fierce comrade, sister. Gatherer of mushrooms, connoisseur of oils and scents, numerophile, lover of games, agile handstand cartwheel tumbler, itinerant dj, firefighter, dancer, fan of candles and matches, activist, mentor, debonair dresser, native new yorker, poetic list maker… and all these words fail.”

Brody is best-known for their association with fierce pussy, which was formed in 1991 after an ACT UP meeting. At the time, the AIDS crisis had been raging for about a decade; more than 100,000 people had died. Among them were women, but they were rarely, if ever, diagnosed with AIDS. As Gran Fury, another ACT UP-affiliated artist collective, pointed out in a poster from that same year: “WOMEN DON’T GET AIDS…THEY JUST DIE FROM IT.”

With fierce pussy, its members wanted to counter the invisibility of women, lesbians in particular, with regards to HIV/AIDS and AIDS activism. “We did an open call on the floor of ACT UP, for all lesbians who wanted to,” Brody recalled in a 2018 oral history with Svetlana Kitto for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.

Zoe Leonard, a longtime friend of Brody, joined and hosted one of fierce pussy’s first meetings, as did Joy Episalla and Carrie Yamaoka; these four founding members would reunite in 2008 to relaunch fierce pussy, which remained active until Brody’s death. Other artists who would at one point be members of fierce pussy were Pam Brandt, Jean Carlomusto, Donna Evans, Alison Froling, and Suzanne Wright.

That first meeting would ultimately lead to what would become one of the group’s most iconic series, “List Posters,” which they would quickly wheatpasted across Manhattan, primarily downtown but also in neighborhoods like the Upper West Side. The aesthetic was deliberately lo-fi: blown-up typewritten words. The content, however, was deliberately shocking. “I AM A,” the list would begin, followed by slurs like “lezzie,” “butch,” “bulldagger,” “pervert,” “dyke,” ending with “AND PROUD!” These women wanted to powerfully reclaim the words that had been used against them; they refused to be invisible any longer.

“The worst language that we have is against the female body. … This stuff is real, and that’s why, after all these years, we’re making this work,” fierce pussy, who is quoted as a collective, told ARTnews in 2018, when several of their most well-known works were restaged as part of a commission on the street-facing windows of the Leslie-Lohman Museum in New York.

Subsequent works by fierce pussy would continue this aesthetic but adding in pictures, like “Family Pictures and Found Photos,” in which childhood photos of the collective’s members would be paired with phrases like “lover of women” or “find the dyke in this picture.”

In an email to ARTnews, Leslie-Lohman executive director Alyssa Nitchun said, “fierce pussy unapologetically seized space for lesbian visibility in NYC in the early 90s with graphics and poetry that have become a touchstone for generations of queer artists since. Brody and the rest of the collective’s radical and resolutely anti-market ethos with their freely given and infinitely reproducible work, is among the most valued in our collection and in our exhibition history.”

In their solo work, Brody explored the theme of visibility-invisibility differently, looking at how negative space manifested. A series begun around 2011, “Merce Drawings,” shows low-res printouts of photographs of dancers performing works by choreographer Merce Cunningham; to these, Brody has outlined the dancers’ bodies in a simple black line. A series from around the same time took a more painterly approach to this. For it, Brody would paint oddly-shaped pieces of lead with brightly hued oil enamel paint; then, they would embed the works directly into the wall. Both were exhibited at Andrew Kreps Gallery in 2014.

Klaus von Nichtssagend, the Lower East Side gallery, started working with Brody in 2018 and mounted a solo show of their work the following year. (The gallery had been working with Brody to mount a second solo show of new work at the time of their death; it will open in 2024.) For the 2019 show, Brody installed a work titled 18 feet 8 inch Line into the gallery’s wall, which was also activated by a performance by choreographer Kim Brandt.

In an email to ARTnews, the gallery said, “The deceptively simple embedding of a length of thin lead directly in the wall and around a corner of the gallery transformed the visual and psychological space completely, taking what could be seen as an empty room and filling it with vibrating energy and active thought. This reflected the thought that Brody brought to all of their work, which was pared down to elemental honesty and beauty.”

The gallery said the work’s installation, involving several people, spoke to how Brody approached their collaborations: “Brody acted as director, conductor, and choreographer in this process, while everyone at the gallery and several extra helpers who were called in to carefully lift and move the delicate material. It was one of those experiences that reminds us of the meaningfulness of true artistic collaboration and practice.”  

Nancy Brooks Brody was born on September 12, 1962, in Manhattan, and grew up in the Upper West Side. Though they grew up making the family’s holiday cards, Brody said they never had the natural ability to draw: “Drawing for me was always a struggle, and it still is. I’m still that kind of an artist, where it’s not —I don’t have like this God-given ability to render,” they said in the SAAA oral history.

When Brody was around 10 years, their mother enrolled them in a pottery class, and then in middle school they took back-to-back art class periods. That eventually encouraged them to apply and then attend the High School of Music & Art, located on City College’s campus. It was there that they first learned printmaking. “I really loved the repetition. I still really love working in series, and that idea of multiples and being able to apply an image to all different kinds of surfaces,” they said.

After graduating from high school in 1980, Brody briefly attended the School of the Visual Arts, where one of their teachers was sculptor Hannah Wilke. At SVA, they also met Mario Fernandez and Nina Seigenfeld, who founded New Math Gallery in 1983. They would have their first solo at the East Village gallery the following year. Through mutual friends, they met photographer Zoe Leonard, who became a close friend. “She agreed to be a live sculpture in my first exhibition, where I covered her in clay” for the opening reception, Brooks said.

Lead sculptures by Richard Serra or Joseph Beuys’s Fat Chair (1964–85), were “making me aware of negative space in a certain way … it’s funny because I hadn’t thought about this. But I still am very much interested in negative space in space, and the body in relation to it,” they said.

Brody didn’t get involved in AIDS activism until the late ’80s after they attended an ACT UP demonstration at City Hall. “By then, I had known that people were dying, and that this thing was upon us,” they said. “I didn’t understand it in full, but I knew enough to want to go to this protest about it, you know, and demand. And I was amazed by this, all this outrage, and amazed by all these—you know, this gathering of people, with all this knowledge and information.”

They soon began regularly attending ACT UP meetings on Monday nights; Leonard was also attending them and soon they met two of fierce pussy’s other founding members Joy Episalla and Carrie Yamaoka. Brody would become an active member in ACT UP, attending protests like the Day of Desperation in 1991, in which the group effectively shut down Grand Central Station during rush hour as well as working with some of its advocacy programs. “With ACT UP, I was definitely involved in—I was interested in how AIDS manifested in women, and how it manifested differently in women.”

In her email, Nitchun, the Leslie-Lohman director, added, “Nancy Brooks Brody gifted our world and our queer communities with their radical creativity while creating a path for newer generations of queer artists interested in exploring the phenomenological space of the body through drawing, architecture, and time. By invoking the corporeal outside the space of figuration, Brody gave us new ways to self-define queerness and the queer body.”

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This year’s winners, who are nominated and then selected by a five-person jury (both anonymous), range in age from 42 (Brooklyn-based Steffani Jemison) to 87 (Chicago-based Barbara Kasten), with five artists being in their 40s. Typically, AWAW gives out ten awards annually, but this year three of the prizes were funded by Meraki Artist Award, an initiative by an anonymous Boston philanthropist, while the other two by anonymous donors.

The other winners include Carolina Caycedo, Liz Collins, Stanya Kahn, Athena LaTocha, Candice Lin, Suchitra Mattai, Dindga McCannon, linn meyers, Erika Ranee, Amanda Ross-Ho, Drew Shiflett, Cauleen Smith, and Saya Woolfalk.

“This year’s nominations were particularly impressive,” artist and AWAW founder Susan Unterberg, who does not sit on the jury, told ARTnews. “Hopefully, the world will see more of their work in the coming years. The winners are a really exciting group, not completely unknown if you look at their resumes, but I would say they are unknown to most people—their names aren’t getting big prices and they aren’t the ones we hear about, which seems to skew the idea that women aren’t doing so well.”

In addition to Kasten, only two artists are based outside of New York and California: Dindga McCannon (in Philadelphia) and linn Meyers (Washington, D.C.). In an interview with ARTnews, McCannon said that the prize will enable her to set up a studio in New York to continue work on her “Blues Queens” project, honoring female musicians, help support the careers of two younger artists, trips to India and Ghana next year, and “buy all the art supplies that I can imagine I need,” she said.

McCannon, who is 76 and whose work has become more visible in the art world since its inclusion in the 2017 exhibition “We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85” at the Brooklyn Museum, continued, “Mentally, it’s an affirmation of my struggles for the last 55 years. It makes it even more worth after all this time, even though I didn’t really need anyone to tell me that, but it’s good to be recognized—while I’m still breathing. I’m closer to 80 than anything else.”

Los Angeles–based artist Carolina Caycedo, 45, said she will use the funds to focus on her current project “We Place Life at the Center,” which will be the focus of an exhibition and publication at the Vincent Price Art Museum in Monterey Park, California, next year as part of the Getty Foundation’s PST ART: Art & Science Collide exhibition initiative. The project, focusing on how communities across the Americas use art in their activism for environmental justice, will also include a number of virtual and in-person gatherings, which “this grant is going to allow me to redistribute funds to these communities.”

She continued, “I feel very honored to be in such a list. What really connects me to this grant is the feminine genealogy that has been constructed. That resonates a lot with some of my practice—the construction of very personal genealogies.”

The list of nearly 300 past recipients is a who’s who of today’s leading artists, many of whom received the award at critical points in their careers. Among them are Carrie Mae Weems (2007), Cecilia Vicuña (1999), Mickalene Thomas (2013), Joan Semmel (2007), Betye Saar (2004), Senga Nengudi (2005), Lynn Hershman Leeson (2014), and the late Laura Aguilar (2000).

“For any artist who’s out there applying for anything, don’t give up—keep trying,” McCannon said. “Sometimes, it might take us years, but you have to be in it to win it, and don’t get discouraged. I know that happens to myself and a lot of other artists: we apply for things and don’t get them. You constantly get a rejection notices, but you have to see beyond that.”

Unterberg, who revealed her identity in 2018, added, “Unfortunately, the need remains urgent for what we do because, unfortunately, gender inequality persists. And artists continue to be under increasingly deteriorating conditions, women, in particular. What we do, I think, is still urgent and necessary.”

The full list of recipients follows below. More information on each winner can be found on the AWAW website.

Carolina Caycedo, 45, California

Liz Collins, 55, New York

Steffani Jemison, 42, New York

Stanya Kahn, 55, California

Barbara Kasten, 87, Illinois

Athena LaTocha, 54, New York

Candice Lin, 44, California

Suchitra Mattai, 50, California

Dindga McCannon, 76, Pennsylvania

linn meyers, 55, Washington, D.C.

Erika Ranee, 58, New York

Amanda Ross-Ho 48, California

Drew Shiflett, 72, New York

Cauleen Smith, 56, California

Saya Woolfalk, 44, New York

The news was first reported earlier this week by the Los Angeles Times. Just days after the article was published, Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and executive chairman, who has recently become a high-profile collector, was spotted at Art Basel Miami Beach, one of the country’s leading art fairs.

Amazon’s decision to cut ties with the Cheech was revealed in a leaked document laying out several of the company’s business and PR strategies for 2024. It was posted to X (formerly Twitter) by Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher, the chief officer of the California Labor Federation, AFL-CIO and a former California State assemblyperson.

The L.A. Times was able to independently verify the authenticity of the document, and an Amazon spokesperson did not dispute its veracity to the paper.

Amazon spokesperson Jennifer Flagg told ARTnews that the L.A. Times article was a “blatant mischaracterization of Amazon’s work, and in fact, Amazon is proud to be engaged philanthropically in communities across the country.”

The document reads, “We will not continue to support organizations that did not result in measurable positive impact in our brand and reputation. Additionally, we will not fund organizations that have positioned themselves antagonistically toward our interests.”

It cites the Cheech as one example because a 2023 exhibition, titled “Life Logistics,” included triptych of screenprints by Toni Sanchez, a student at the University of California, Riverside studying political science. The three prints show an Amazon warehouse with flames beneath it; surrounding the warehouse are block letters reading “BURN THEM ALL DOWN.”

In an email to the Inland Empire–based newspaper the Press-Enterprise, Sanchez said that the work “stems from the fact that we are tired of not being heard from city officials who vote on and approve warehouse building. We need them to listen to us community members when we tell them what we want from them and how we want the land to be used, whether that’s for community parks, community gardens, anything but warehouses.”

Amazon had given a $5,000 donation to the Cheech in both 2022 and 2023. But going forward, the company said it would no longer be providing anymore money because “the artist then gave an interview expressing hostility towards Amazon.”

The Cheech opened in 2022 after the Riverside Art Museum, which manages the center, secured a gift from actor and ARTnews Top 200 Collector Cheech Marin from his collection of Chicanx art, which has long been considered the largest in the world. It has been popular with the local community and tourists, and well-received by critics. The museum said that it had a goal of getting 100,000 visitors in its first year, and that it had surpassed that goal by 30 percent.

The Cheech also had major support from the City of Riverside, which has agreed to give $800,000 annually to the institution for its budget for its first decade of existence. The city council also helped secure $10.7 million from the California State budget that went toward retrofitting the historic building in which the Cheech is located. At the time, Marin told ARTnews of Riverside’s potential, “I think it’ll be the next big art town. It’s set up to do that.”

Riverside Art Museum director Drew Oberjuerge confirmed to the L.A. Times the amount of the donations from Amazon, but said she first learned about Amazon ending its donations from the leaked document.

“Neither payment was designated for an exhibition, and the company has not communicated any questions or concerns about an artwork or requested the return of its donations,” Oberjuerge said in a statement. “We believe in supporting artists and curators who challenge, surprise, delight, annoy and anger. It’s through this dialogue we better understand our shared experience.”

Speaking to ARTnews in 2021, ahead of the center’s opening, the Cheech’s artistic director María Esther Fernández said, “When you think about Chicanx art, it comes from a political movement that was concerned with social justice and issues of equity,” she said. “You can’t have a center that’s focused on this kind of art without thinking locally. It’s important to understand its roots in community.”

You could travel all the way to West Palm Beach to visit ARTnews Top 200 Collector Beth Rudin DeWoody’s collection or take in closer ones like those of the Rubell Family and Jorge Pérez. At the museums, the offerings range from a disappointing solo for Miami-based Hernan Bas to a standout survey for Charles Gaines at the Institute of Contemporary Art. 

Below, a look at some of the good and the bad on view in South Florida ahead of the fair.

Collectors with an Eye

DeWoody and her curatorial team, Maynard Monrow and Laura Dvorkin, are on a roll this year. Those who made the trek to West Palm Beach to visit her private exhibition space, the Bunker Artspace, could find a group of spectacular exhibitions that acted as a testament to the depth of DeWoody’s collection. Thankfully, those shows also don’t take themselves too seriously.

The best of them was “Utility,” set in a gallery decked out to look like a utility closet. It was filled mostly with sculptural pieces depicting everyday household items, like a Target bag by Lucia Hierro, an iron by Willie Cole, and a copper FedEx box by Walead Beshty. But the starriest show was “Family Affair,” the result of a yearlong dialogue between DeWoody and dealer Peter Harkawik.

“Family Affair” is a maximalist, salon-style exhibition that is teeming with gems, some of which are placed in conversation with one another. There’s a wall devoted to works by members of the Saar family: Betye and her daughters Alison and Lezley. And there’s a section for the Mullicans: Lee and his wife, the painter Luchita Hurtado, plus their children Matt and Lucy. Harkawik, in an essay accompanying the show, says that his exhibition has “no curatorial position, nor does it make attempts at comprehensiveness, concision or timeliness.” Rather than making a grand statement about the art included, it makes the case for how creativity is passed down among the generations.

DeWoody kept especially busy this year, and with Monrow, Dvorkin, and Zoe Lukov, she curated the exhibition “Gimme Shelter” for the Historic Hampton House Museum of Culture & Art. A former Green Book Hotel, the venue was Miami’s only luxury hotel for African Americans during Jim Crow–era segregation. Presenting contemporary art upstairs—by the likes of Richard Mayhew, Carrie Mae Weems, Nick Cave, Terry Adkins, Lauren Halsey,Christopher Myers, Bony Ramirez, Kandy G Lopez, Devin Reynolds, and Moises Salazar—alongside two preserved rooms where Martin Luther King Jr. and Muhammad Ali once stayed was truly special. That the sense of history was palpable and its meeting cutting-edge, contemporary art poignant. That the Historic Hampton House was almost demolished more than 20 years ago shows just important it is to hold onto history like this.

Also in Miami proper, Jorge Pérez’s El Espacio 23 has “To Weave the Sky,” expertly curated by Tobias Ostrander, the Tate’s adjunct curator for Latin American art. Here, textiles meet abstract works, resulting in pure beauty. A recently acquired Lee Krasner work from 1951 and a 1973 Joan Mitchell hang near a woven floor piece by Ximena Garrido-Lecca. Elsewhere, an Etel Adnan tapestry is shown alongside her enamoring paintings.

The close-by Rubell Museum has given over several rooms to LA-based artists, including Patrick Martinez, Danie Cansino, Mario Ayala, Noah Davis, Sayre Gomez, Alfonso Gonzalez Jr., and Lauren Halsey. You will want to spend time with them all. And in the Design District, Craig Robins hosted a reception to see the works on view from his collection in the offices of his Dacra Development, while the Juan Carlos Maldonado Collection has recently moved to a new space and has on view works from his deep holdings of international geometric abstraction, including Gego, Josef Albers, Kenneth Noland, Noboru Takayama, César Paternosto, Glenda León, and Alexander Apóstol. Miami’s private collections continue to play to their strengths.

The State of Museums

While I was in West Palm Beach, before heading to the Bunker, I checked out the Norton Museum of Art, which has a significant collection of European, American, and Chinese art. While the older stuff is middling at best there, it’s clear that the museum has built up a formidable contemporary art collection. Works by Awol Erizku, Gisela Colón, and Cheyenne Julien—all acquired within in the past few years—show that the curators have their fingers on the pulse.

The state of museums in Miami and Miami Beach, where quantity trumps quality, is direr. Take the Bass in Miami Beach, which is staging so many shows that one devoted to Etel Adnan, an important artist whose spare landscapes are enchanting, ended up in a glorified hallway. An exhibition about Nam June Paik and his connections to Miami also didn’t feel scholarly enough to merit much attention.

The most buzzed-about Bass show, a solo exhibition for Hernan Bas, was another big disappointment. I’ve never been a fan of Bas’s painterly aesthetic; his handling of the figure is a bit uninspired, and his focus on specifically white gay subject matter has started to feel retrograde. But I went into the exhibition with an open mind, hoping to be swayed. I left feeling even less convinced than I was before.

Titled “The Conceptualists,” this series has Bas imaging different types of conceptual artists who take exacting approaches. The work that opens the show is also the first in the series, an artist who “exclusively mixes his paints with water from Niagara Falls,” per the work’s title. I’ll admit it made me chuckle. But further along was less compelling subject matter: artists who work with popsicle sticks, make snow angels out of blood, take Polaroids of themselves and put them on milk cartons. Conceptual art is an easy punching bag, and these tableaux featuring interchangeable white twinks are low blows.

Ironically, the biggest work in the show, the 21-foot-wide Conceptual artist #37 (he exclusively paints portraits of conceptual artists who have never existed), seems to assert Bas as a conceptual artist. In it, an artist stands in his studio surrounded with the various studies for the other artists as well as the calling cards of their practices. Good conceptual art is all about ways of working—how one executes an idea. Ironically, Bas doesn’t seem very interested in thinking much about it all. If he tried any of these approaches, he’d realize how bad the art is.

By the way, it’s worth remembering that although Art Basel Miami Beach is a selling event, museums are not immune to the whims of market either. Several works from this series have already been shown in the past year at two of the artist’s galleries, Victoria Miro in London and Lehmann Maupin in New York, who also provided support to the show. A few of the works at the Bass have been scooped up by collectors, who can now boast that their painting has the bona fides of being shown in a museum.

Across Biscayne Bay, at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, most shows also promise more than they offer. Exhibitions for the Egyptian-born nonagenarian Ahmed Morsi and the young Brooklynite Sasha Gordon are being billed as firsts for these respective artists, but they’re formless and small. These are mainly just milestones to put on the artists’ CVs. In the case of Morsi, a 13-painting show isn’t going to reveal much that hasn’t already been covered by his acclaimed 2017 retrospective at the Sharjah Art Foundation. As for Gordon, I was hoping to be learn a bit more about why the art world is buzzing so much about this young artist, but failed to do so.

There is, however, a solid Charles Gaines survey at the ICA. Focusing on works from the early ’90s to today, the two-floor show is highlighted by Falling Rock (2000–2023), a grandfather clock–like structure in which a 65-pound chunk of granite is lowered toward a sheet of glass every ten minutes. When I entered the gallery, the granite happened to crash into the glass, shattering it. It provided a welcome shock to the system amid mostly bland museum offerings here in Miami.

“The fair feels sluggish, to me, and not as convivial as years past. Collectors don’t seem to have the same urgency and competitive spirit that has made the first day feel like a running of the bulls,” New York–based adviser Alex Glauber told ARTnews.

Since late summer, there has been much talk about whether or not the market is softening. That clamor has only increased since the Hamas attack of October 7 and Israel’s subsequent airstrikes on Gaza. Are sales really that depressed? Dealers queried about this Art Basel Miami Beach seemed split, with some agreeing that the market had weakened and others saying that their sales had picked back up. Most expressed a cautious sense of optimism about what’s to come.

What was clear was that the fair was physically different than it was before. Its floor plan has shifted—a welcome change after last year’s much more chaotic arrangement. While the fair might be a bit harder to navigate the aisles vertically (east to west, per the map), a methodical approach can be had with by tackling the aisles horizontally (north to south, beginning from the Meridians section). Plus, there are now mini cafes that dot the fair; these had shorter lines that took only 10 minutes to get food, as opposed to the usual 45-minute-plus waits that often accompany food options on opening day.

Art-wise, the pickings are rather safe this year—which is typically the case in a soft market, as galleries look to balance their books come December 31. But you will find gems among the 175 booths no less.

Below, a look at the best booths on view at Art Basel Miami Beach, which runs until Sunday, December 10.

Zipping to and from each fair was the main item on everyone’s agenda. With more than 160 exhibitors, there is a lot to see. Several great booths are even spread among them.

To point you in the direction of those standout booths, below is a look at the best presentations at Untitled Miami Beach, which runs through Sunday, December 10.

A major change to this year’s edition is that its dates have been pushed back two weeks; the fair’s previous editions have typically taken place during the second week of February and often coincided with Valentine’s Day and the Presidents Day holiday weekend in the US.

“People tend to skip away for that long weekend,“ Christine Messineo, Frieze’s director of Americas, told ARTnews in an interview. “Since we’re a four-day fair, the hope is. that this will draw more people to come to the fair and spend more time in LA.“

The fair will return this year to the Santa Monica Airport, where it relocated beginning with the 2023 edition. For this edition, Frieze LA will reconfigure its floor plan and now include a central outdoor space that will be designed by WHY Architects. The fair will also not make use of the Barker Hanger, where a portion of exhibitors had been located last year. This edition of Frieze will also activate the athletic field and community park with performances and sculptures, respectively.

“The layout for 2024 is streamlined and efficient but designed with good sight lines and discoveries at every corner,” WHY founder and creative director Kulapat Yantrasast said in a statement. “Inside is a focused art experience with uplifting filtered natural light while the outside courtyard is full of art and cultural activities for friends to linger and connect.”

Messineo said she wanted to re-design the fair’s layout after her observations from last year’s fair where she noticed that visitors had decided to spend the day at the fair, as opposed to “dipping in and out” like they might in New York before gallery hopping in Chelsea. The central outdoor space itself responds to where many visitors congregated during the 2023 edition. “We have the feeling of a campus—and that’s something to embrace,” said Messineo. “We wanted to give visitors comfortable moments there.”

As with past editions, the fair will be split in two sections, with 83 exhibitors in the main Galleries section and 12 in the Focus section, dedicated to emerging US-based galleries. Across the fair, nearly 50 percent of participants have a location in the Greater LA area, and 13 will participate in the LA fair for the first-time, including closely watched galleries like Silverlens (of Manila and New York), Bank (Shanghai), and Kasmin (New York).

Among the leading LA galleries that will participate in the main section are David Kordansky Gallery, Blum (formerly Blum & Poe), François Ghebaly, Night Gallery, Nonaka-Hill, Regen Projects, Various Small Fires, and Anat Ebgi, which had previously participated in the Focus section.

Blue-chip galleries like Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, Lisson Gallery, Pace, White Cube, and David Zwirner will also participate, as will Pilar Corrias, Gladstone, Xavier Hufkens, Gallery Hyundai, Jenkins Johnson, Mendes Wood DM, Ortuzar Projects, and Proyectos Monclova.

“What I have loved witnessing about LA is its growth over the past three years,” Messineo said. “LA has really been embraced the commercial art world, as evidenced by galleries who plant to open spaces there or have recently done so. And the city’s institutions have also embraced the fair. There’s a sense of excitement for this edition.”

Looking at artists “ecologies as a vibrant framework for art making,” the Focus section—which includes galleries like Matthew Brown, Lyles & King, Shulamit Nazarian, Make Room, Ochi, and Hannah Traore Gallery—will be curated this year by Essence Harden, visual arts curator at the California African American Museum.

In a statement, Harden said, “I was deeply interested in the possibility of stretching the term ecology to include position, geography, material and theoretical concerns within art making. The presentations chosen for this year’s Focus section reflect that winding impulse, highlighting a series of dynamic emerging galleries and artists.”

The full exhibitor list follows below.

Galleries

Focus

Billed as “the only fair devoted to self-taught art, art brut, and outsider art,” the upcoming edition will feature galleries from 32 cities, among them are stalwarts in the field, like Cavin-Morris Gallery (of New York), Fleisher/Ollman Gallery (Philadelphia), Carl Hammer Gallery (Chicago), and Ricco/Maresca Gallery (New York). Likewise, the fair will include nine first-time exhibitors, including Montreal’s Galerie Hugues Charbonneau, Baltimore’s New Door Creative, Nashville’s Elephant Gallery, and the Ruffed Grouse Gallery of Narrowsburg, New York.

As with past editions, next year’s Outsider Art Fair will include two curated sections. Titled “Beat Art Work: Power of the Gaze,” the first is to be organized by legendary American poet Anne Waldman and will include visual art by poets like William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Diane di Prima, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Joanne Kyger.

The second curated section will celebrate the 50th anniversary of long-time exhibitor Creative Growth Art Center, the Oakland-based nonprofit that is the longest running organization of its kind, dedicated to supporting the work of artists with disabilities. Tom di Maria, Creative Growth’s director emeritus, will organize the presentation, titled “Expanding the Canon: 50 Years of Creative Growth”; it will feature never-before-exhibited works by artists like Dwight Mackintosh, Donald Mitchell, William Scott, Monica Valentine, Aurie Ramirez, William Tyler, and Judith Scott. In October, the San Francisco Museum of Art announced that it had acquired 114 works by 10 Creative Growth–affiliated artists and that it would mount an exhibition of the acquisitions next spring.

“For anyone who’s ever been to Creative Growth, every day feels like a celebration,” Outsider Art Fair owner Andrew Edlin told ARTnews. “And Tom Di Maria, in particular, deserves tremendous accolades for his stewardship—guiding these artists on their journeys from [founders Elias Katz and Florence Ludins-Katz’s] garage to the Venice Biennale. With the major acquisition and exhibition plans by SFMOMA, Creative Growth and its artists have solidified their place in art history. OAF is always delighted and takes pride when the art world embraces work that we have been championing these last 32 years.”

The full exhibitor list follows below.

In its email, the gallery said, “Cheim & Read has had the privilege of working with an exceptional group of artists, mounting important exhibitions, and producing scholarly catalogues over the past twenty six years.”

The gallery was founded in 1997 by John Cheim and Howard Read, who had previously been directors at the iconic Robert Miller Gallery. The duo quickly became known for mounting major exhibitions by artists like Louise Bourgeois, Lynda Benglis, Diane Arbus, Ron Gorchov, and Joan Mitchell, whose foundation departed the gallery in 2018 for David Zwirner.

Later same year, Cheim & Read announced that it would leave its longtime home of Chelsea for the Upper East Side and transition to “private practice, concentrating on the secondary market, ​sculpture​ commissions​ and special projects,” according to an email announcement it sent out. The new location would be helmed by Maria Bueno, a partner at the gallery. The Upper East Side space opened in September 2019 with a show dedicated to Gorchov.

But then in May 2021, Cheim & Read returned to its Chelsea space, with an exhibition of Matthew Wong, whose estate it had begun representing. Earlier this year, the gallery mounted a solo show of the self-taught artist who uses the moniker Cumwizard69420, whose “work reflects the chaotic topography of the internet, with subject matter that leans heavily on the scatalogical, the sexual, and the pop cultural,” as ARTnews reported.

Cheim & Read continued to mount shows in both Chelsea and the Upper East Side, though the latter space quietly closed at the end of a group show in July. During this month’s New York auctions, John Cheim also consigned several works from his personal collection, including Mitchell’s Sunflowers (1990–91), which sold for $27.9 million (with fees); the total value of works sold achieved $34.7 million (with fees).

Bueno will soon open a new fine art dealership, Bueno & Co., that will “focus on private sales of works by historical and contemporary masters” according to Tuesday’s email and exhibit work by Bourgeois, Benglis, Gorchov, Mitchell, and Wong, as well as Basquiat, Warhol, William Eggleston, Louise Fishman, Alice Neel, Pat Steir, and Sean Scully.