During the New Year’s weekend, artists linked to a Google Sheet on the social media platforms X (formerly known as Twitter) and Bluesky, alleging that it showed how Midjourney developed a database of time periods, styles, genres, movements, mediums, techniques, and thousands of artists to train its AI text-to-image generator. Jon Lam, a senior storyboard artist at Riot Games, also posted several screenshots of Midjourney software developers discussing the creation of a database of artists to train its AI image generator to emulate.

https://x.com/JonLamArt/status/1741545927435784424?s=20

The 24-page list of artists’ names used by Midjourney as the training foundation for its AI image generator (Exhibit J) includes modern and contemporary blue-chip names,as well as commercially successfully illustrators for companies like Hasbro and Nintendo. Notable artists include Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol, Anish Kapoor, Yayoi Kusama, Gerhard Richter, Frida Kahlo, Andy Warhol, Ellsworth Kelly, Damien Hirst, Amedeo Modigliani, Pablo Picasso, Paul Signac, Norman Rockwell, Paul Cézanne, Banksy, Walt Disney, and Vincent van Gogh.

Midjourney’s dataset also includes artists who contributed art to the popular trading card game Magic the Gathering, including Hyan Tran, a six-year-old child and one-time art contributor who participated in a fundraiser for the Seattle Children’s Hospital in 2021.

Phil Foglio encouraged other artists to search the list to see if their names were included and to seek legal representation if they did not already have a lawyer.

Access to the Google file was soon restricted, but a version has been uploaded to the Internet Archive.

The list of 16,000 artists was included as part of a lawsuit amendment to a class-action complaint targeted at Stability AI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt and the submission of 455-pages of supplementary evidence filed on November 29 last year.

The amendment was filed after a judge in California federal court dismissed several claims brought forth by a group of artists against Midjourney and DeviantArt on October 30.

The class-action copyright lawsuit was first filed almost a year ago in the United States District Court of the Northern District of California.

Last September, the US Copyright Review Board decided that an image generated using Midjourney’s software could not be copyright due to how it was produced. Jason M. Allen’s image had garnered the $750 top prize in the digital category for art at the Colorado State Fair in 2022. The win went viral online, but prompted intense worry and anxiety among artists about the future of their careers.

Concern about artworks being scraped without permission and used to train AI image generators also prompted researchers from the University of Chicago to create a digital tool for artists to help “poison” massive image sets and destabilize text-to-image outputs.

At publication time, Midjourney did not respond to requests for comment from ARTnews.

Christie’s reported a 20 percent decline in its total sales, plummeting from $8.4 billion in 2022 to $6.2 billion in 2023. Meanwhile, Sotheby’s projected in December that its 2023 sales would total $8 billion, less than the equivalent figure from the previous year.

The downturn follows a financial peak in 2022, precipitated by a surge in collecting during the pandemic. Advisors, gallerists, and auction house specialists have told ARTnews recently that, over the last six months, they’ve seen first-hand the significant slowdown in art sales.

Other analyses of the art market show an even starker drop-off. In a recent report by industry analyst Art Tactic, which tracks art sales data globally, the combined auction sales across Phillips, Sotheby’s, and Christie’s amounted to $11.2 billion in 2023, a 19 percent decrease from 2022. (This figure excludes sums generated through private sales.)

Meanwhile, the cumulative sales for the top ten artworks at the three auction houses exhibited a significant drop, totaling $660 million in 2023 compared to $1.1 billion in 2022—a nearly 50 percent decrease. In 2021 and 2022, the prices for top artworks consistently increased, with few works in the top ten selling for less than $50 million. Last year, however, four of the top ten artworks sold for under $50 million—far more than in previous years.

A full view of the economic situation is not yet available, as Phillips has yet to disclose its 2023 results. In 2022, the three auction houses collectively generated $17.7 million in sales and Phillips saw a 10 percent increase from 2021, reaching $1.3 billion in 2022. (Phillips declined to respond to inquiries about its 2023 figures.)

Beyond the auction circuit, where prices are transparent, contemporary art galleries featuring earlier and mid-career artists told ARTnews last month that they had experienced significant pullback in buying, particularly from U.S.-based collectors, starting early last year. Multiple gallerists said that their sales were down as much as 25 percent in 2023 compared to the previous year.

The slower sales environment persisted through Art Basel Miami beach, which has become an important venue for young dealers aiming to boost their year-end sales totals. By the fair’s end, ARTnews found that nearly 50 small-scale galleries participating in ABMB’s specialist sections reported making only $1.6 million combined. This figure represents a minuscule portion of the $41.5 million generated through the sales of just three works disclosed by mega-dealers David Zwirner, Pace, and Gagosian during the fair’s initial days.

Last August, the OMA sued De Groft and the owners of a series of paintings included in the scandal-ridden 2022 show “Heroes & Monsters: Jean-Michel Basquiat.” The museum alleged that De Groft and others used the show and the museum’s reputation to legitimize a group of 25 paintings they claimed were by Basquiat so that they could be sold after. However, the show was shuttered in June 2022 after several reports doubting their status as bonafide Basquiats, which culminated in the FBI seizing the paintings. A subsequent FBI investigation provided evidence that the works were not by Basquiat, with Los Angeles-based auctioneer Michael Barzman admitting in a plea deal to helping paint and sell the works himself.

The case figures to be a complicated one. Akerman LLP, the law firm representing the museum, said in the case-management report that it expects to depose 50 “art scholars and museum directors” for the case. Further, a representative for the firm told the Sentinel that the lawsuit could cost the museum $500,000. That’s in addition to the more than $100,000 OMA has already paid Akerman since June 2022, according to the Sentinel, when the FBI raided the museum and seized the allegedly phony paintings.

Further delay in the suit could be caused by a series of countersuits against the OMA. DeGroft filed a countersuit against the OMA in November claiming wrongful termination, breach of contract, and defamation. In the countersuit, DeGroft claimed he is being made a scapegoat as part of the OMA’s media strategy for dealing with the scandal. He alleged that Cynthia Brumback, the OMA’s former board chair who resigned in the wake of the Basquiat scandal, and an outside legal team, had approved of the exhibition, even after it was clear the FBI, which subpoenaed the OMA for records regarding the paintings a year before they were seized, was investigating claims of forgery.

Additional countersuits for defamation are expected from defendants in the case, including the group of artworks’ owners called the Basquiat Venice Collection Group/ who claim “that the value of the Basquiat works of art has been tremendously devalued by OMA’s statements to various outlets, including but not limited to the filing of this lawsuit,” according to the court documents. 

De Groft and the owners of the supposed Basquiats have denied wrongdoing and maintain that the pieces are real.

There have been reports that mediation and a settlement could resolve the dispute between museum and DeGroft, though, according to court documents, “certain parties” have entered into negotiations and “appear to be far from settlement,” however they have agreed to a neutral mediator.

Newly released documents from two decades ago show correspondence from culture policy adviser Sarah Hunter writing to Blair in April 2003, recommending the political leader privately and publicly “encourage” the British Museum to seek an alternatives to the long-contested ownership issue.

In October of the previous year, then Greek Prime Minister Costas Simitis sent to Blair a proposal for a “reunification” plan that would place the marble statues in a purpose-built museum at the Acropolis in time for the 2004 Olympics in Athens.

The UK government’s longstanding position—both then and now—is that the Parthenon Marbles are under the management of the British Museum and its trustees. But at the time of Hunter’s writing, Greece was about to host the Olympics and had become president of the European Council. Hunter wrote that these were “good reasons to change tack.”

“The Greek case has become more sophisticated – arguing for a loan rather than restitution of ownership – and contrasts with the BM’s blinkered intransigence to consider any compromises,” she wrote in files released by the National Archives on Friday.

“The marbles could be a powerful bargaining chip in IOC [International Olympic Committee] vote building for a 2012 Olympic bid. The publicity attached to this move could secure the Greek nomination and help garner a wide range of other IOC votes, although we would have to guard against other nations asking for reciprocal acts.”

Hunter acknowledged that trying to make a loan during the museum’s 250th anniversary year would “be met with resistance and much broadsheet angst” but asked Blair about exploring the issue of a sharing agreement, a suggestion from former foreign secretary and SDP leader David Owen.

The Prime Minister agreed, suggesting Owen be put in charge of negotiations in his handwritten reply. “It would give it profile, he has clout, and could probably help with the BM whilst distancing it a little from govt,” Blair wrote.

The released documents also show Owen’s previous correspondence to the Cabinet Office, which had been forwarded to the Prime Minister. The documents said the former foreign secretary had been told “that the host country is consulted by the IOC extensively about the suitability of future applicants and it would not be difficult to get the Greeks to put their support behind a London bid for 2012 as a quid pro quo … ”

News of Hunter and Blair’s correspondence about a possible long-term loan of the Parthenon sculptures was first reported in the Guardian.

Last month, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak canceled a meeting with Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis after the latter was interviewed by the BBC over the ownership question of the ancient sculptures.

Greece has also recently offered to lend some of its “most important” artifacts to the British Museum to “fill the void” left behind if the London institution returns the Parthenon Marbles to Athens. Greek culture minister Lina Mendoni told the Guardian a promised trade agreement would ensure treasures from Greek antiquities are always displayed at the London institution.

Pope.L brought art to the people, reaching beyond institutions and into the street, putting statements about the condition of Black Americans out into the open. With vivid defiance, Juanita McNeely captured American women’s experiences, making a painting about abortion before the original passing of Roe v. Wade. Vera Molnár propelled us forward with her early usages of computers in her art.

Others left far too soon: Lin May Saeed, whose art encouraged empathy with animals and activist musings, and Vincent Honoré, whose cutting-edge exhibition and criticism championed women and queer artists.

In the case of painter Brice Marden, Barry Schwabsky recalled for Art in America, “It seemed as though Brice Marden had always been there and always would be.” While we may take these continued presences for granted, it’s important to recall the impact that Marden and others have made. As Schwabsky writes, “He managed to make each of us a little bit more an artist.”

Perhaps, then, we ought to remember signs of the people who left us in 2023 will always be with us. Below, a brief look back at the lives of 28 artists, collectors, curators, and more who died in 2023.

In October, Poland announced the choice of Ignacy Czwartos, who had planned to exhibit paintings that envision the country as having been oppressed by Germany and Russia throughout the 20th century. Instead, Open Group, a collective that includes Yuriy Biley, Pavlo Kovach, and Anton Varga, will now represent the country.

The Polish Ministry of Culture issued a statement this past Friday saying the decision had come after “analyzing the competition procedures for the exhibition design as part of the 60th International Art Exhibition in Venice in 2024 and after getting acquainted with the opinions and voices of the communities.” Warsaw’s Zachęta – National Gallery of Art remains the institution in charge of organizing the show.

Czwartos’s pavilion was to include more than 35 works, one of which was to show German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin near a swastika, according to the project’s initial outline.

Many had criticized the project for echoing the nationalist-populist politics of the Law and Justice party (PiS for short) that, from 2015 until earlier this month, had reigned in Poland. Party members had taken control of the media and museums, and severely curtailed the rights of women and queer people.

After a general election held in October went in favor of the opposition party, many expected that PiS would leave power before the Venice Biennale opens in April. But it was not always clear whether Czwartos’s pavilion would be installed. Joanna Warsza, a curator of the 2022 Polish Pavilion, told the Guardian in November that the planned Czwartos presentation was the “end game of eight years of rightwing rule.” In that same report, Karolina Plinta, an editor at the art magazine Szum, called the exhibition “an anti-European manifesto.”

In an unusual development, the issue so severely split the jury that three members, including Warsza, were moved to issue a dissenting opinion on the matter.

Few details were announced on Friday about the new pavilion by Open Group, other than that it will be titled “Repeat after me” and curated by Marta Czyż.

According to New York law firm Kaye Spiegler, which facilitated the painting’s return, museum officials raised flags internally over the painting’s ownership record after uncovering a label with Goudstikker’s surname on the painting’s back frame. Provenance researchers concluded that the work was one of more than a thousand paintings illicitly taken from Goudstikker’s art holdings, according to a statement.

The painting’s donors, whom the firm declined to name citing confidentiality, were unaware of the work’s suspect ownership record. After conducting internal research, officials of the French museum, which is host to a collection ranging from archaeological artifacts to 20th-century paintings, contacted Goudstikker’s sole heir, Marei von Saher, to notify her that the painting had resurfaced from a private collection.

The date of the museum’s message to Von Saher has not been disclosed. A representative for Kaye Spiegler declined to provide details about the insurance value for the Van Haarlem work.

The latest case is one of only a few returns that Goudstikker’s surviving relatives have secured. Last year, officials of the German city of Trier restituted a 17th-century Dutch painting by Adam van Breen titled Ice Skating to Von Saher, following a legal claim. The painting had circulated at auction in the late 1980s. In 2019, Von Saher attempted to appeal to the United States Supreme Court a lower court ruling that allowed the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California, to keep two paintings by Lucas Cranach the Elder once owned by Goudstikker that were illegally taken by Nazis. The appeal came after a long legal battle with the museum for their return, but the Supreme Court declined to take up the case.

The Goudstikker Art Research Project, which oversees restitution claims related to Goudstikker’s property, is currently seeking the return of 800 remaining works illegally exported from Amsterdam to Germany by Nazi officials.

Around 1,100 works looted from Goudstikker’s holdings were taken in Amsterdam by Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, a high-ranking Nazi official. A portion of the stolen works were eventually returned to the Dutch government, which facilitated the restitution of 200 paintings to the family in 2006, eight years after the family’s initial claim seeking their legal return was denied.

The statue depicts the mythical figure Khru Kai Kaeo, a winged demon with fangs and crimson talons who is said to be the teacher of Jayavarman VII, a former king of the Khmer empire. Some also regard Khru Kai Kaeo as a god of wealth.

The statue, which was erected in August, drew criticism because some locals found it to be “un-Buddhist and scary,” according to the Nation Thailand. Aside from startling passersby, it spurred online group discussions of devotion to Khru Kai Kaeo.

In response, a group called the Council of Artists Supporting Thai Buddhism urged the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration to remove the statue. They claimed that the statue’s worshippers were engaging in practices such as animal sacrifice.

On Thursday, the statue was removed from its place in front of the hotel, the Nation Thailand reported. Instead, it will now be sited at the back of the hotel.

For violating the Building Control Act, the hotel’s operator, Suan Lum Night Bazaar Ratchadaphisek, has also been ordered to pay a fine of 1.3 million baht (approximately $37,793).

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.

For end-of-year coverage, we’ve also got lists of the year’s defining art events, exhibitions, and artworks, as well as roundups of under-recognized artists who got their due and assessments of the year’s major news stories, from the Israel-Palestine conflict to the British Museum’s various controversies.

Thank you for reading, as always, and we look forward to seeing you in 2024.