As a journalist based in Seoul, much of my year-end top ten, which follows below, comes from South Korea, but I am grateful to have finally been able to bounce around the region a fair amount this year with ease.

The best art I saw was on a visit to Kyoto this summer, when, coincidentally, the millennium-old Gion Matsuri festival was taking place with full pageantry, after scaled-back versions during the pandemic. Towering floats—fantasias of ornate architecture, some adorned with sumptuous tapestries—crawled through the streets, pulled by relentless teams of volunteers. It was captivating. However, as an annual event, that glorious affair is not eligible for this list, which is reserved solely for temporary exhibitions that were on view in 2023.

Before revealing my top ten, I have to note a few remarkable shows that did not make the list: feminist artist’s Yun Suk Nam’s captivating portraits of women who fought for Korean independence (plus more than 1,000 painted sculptures of dogs) at the Daegu Art Museum in South Korea; the essential “Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s–1970s” at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), Seoul (and at the Guggenheim for a couple more weeks!); a revelatory survey of painter Guei-Hong Won (1923–1980), a chronicler of postwar daily life in Seoul, at the Sungkok Museum in Seoul; the excellent Yooyun Yang’s presentation of her latest cinematic, mysterious paintings at Primary Practice; Wang Tuo’s time-bending video treatises on Chinese history and censorship at Blindspot in Hong Kong; Rirkrit Tiravanija’s piquantly odd umbrella-repair shop and robots at David Zwirner in Hong Kong; the MMCA’s richly rewarding retrospective for the beloved painter Chang Ucchin (1917–1990) at its Deoksugung branch in Seoul; and Do Ho Suh’s invigorating, interactive installation at the Seoul Museum of Art’s Buk-Seoul location, which invited children to take brightly colored clay and keep adding, and adding, and adding to it.

Without further ado, my top ten:

There is an entire history of artists working at the Museum of Modern Art alone. In the 1960s, sculptor Sol Lewitt worked there as a receptionist, Minimalist Dan Flavin took a job as an elevator operator, and painter Robert Ryman manned the galleries as a security guard. The artist Howardena Pindell even worked as a curatorial assistant in the drawings department; she came up with the idea to use discarded paper punches in her abstract paintings from her time in that office.

This fringe history of artists moonlighting as MoMA workers informed “Day Jobs,” one of the year’s most memorable shows. Held at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas, the exhibition was “an attempt to dispel the stubborn myth of the lone genius, working in isolation in the studio creating masterpieces,” as curator Veronica Roberts put it in an interview with ARTnews.

She pointed to Tishan Hsu, an artist now known for painting and sculptures that combine the imagery of technology with the human body. “Hsu was a word processor in the 1980s, and was doing this with predominantly women at a corporate law firm… He began thinking about how screens were changing our relationships with our bodies, and that question has been the foundation to everything he has made since.” A painting from 1982, Portrait, is on view in “Day Jobs”; it depicts glitchy lips and eyes on a panel with rounded corners reminiscent of early IBM computing screens.

“Day Jobs,” with its assertion that artists’ art is not the only aspect of their life which defines them, and indeed that such circumstances impact what they make, was emblematic of a larger trend that could be seen in US museums in 2023. This year, many institutions began to focus on how constellations of artists form around shared lived experiences. Artists were being celebrated as multihyphenates who are influenced by their peers.

This framing lends itself to explorations of artists’ biographies, which have not always been celebrated in the field of curating. Roberts told ARTnews that while coming up as a curator, mentioning an artist’s biography was disparaged. “There was an endeavor to keep an artist’s life totally separate from their work,” she explained. Of course, there are dangers in overusing biography, which can result in flattened readings of complex works and practices, especially ones by artists from marginalized groups. Now, however, it feels like a misstep to not thoughtfully pay mind to the circumstances of art-making, and this is encouraged in shows that expand the very concept of what it means to be an artist.

One such show was “Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969,” which opened at the CCS Hessel Museum of Art in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, in June. The exhibition considered Native North American artists who had incorporated theatre and performance into their work, and took its inspiration from the 1969 proposal Indian Theatre: An Artistic Experiment in Process, written by teachers at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe. The document proposed that centuries-old forms of Native performance could be reinterpreted for a new age, while also noting that all this contemporary practice “cannot be developed overnight.” In the authors’ words, “it will come only as the result of an educational process in which Indian artists are created who can then make their own statements.”

“The document was a revelation to me as it felt like a missing piece of art history,” curator Candice Hopkins said in an interview. “Here were the dual origins of Native theatre and performance art, rooted in practices of experimentalism and cultural difference.”

By rooting her show in what could be labeled experimental theatre, Hopkins was arguing that the artists she included were inspired not just by art history but by the other arts, too. And she suggested that though they were bound by Indigeneity, these artists were also borne from varying experiences, interests, interpretations, and Native nation affiliations that impacted their art. The show included black-and-white videos of IAIA students performing in masks and regalia, but it also included paintings by Kay WalkingStick, a sculpture by Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, and newly commissioned choreography by Jeffrey Gibson. All of these artists were “making their own statements,” as the IAIA teachers might have put it.

Hopkins’s rediscovery of the 1969 manifesto and archives is a testament to how the IAIA students were creating works not meant for art institutions. The contents of “Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines,” a show at the Brooklyn Museum through March 2024, function in a similar way. The exhibition highlights zines (short for fanzines), made in the advent of accessible photocopy machines, from the 1970s to present day.

More than 1,000 objects are packed into the galleries, which present how zines aided in the formation of networks of avant-garde musicians and visual artists, many of whom were queer.  And many wear multiple hats. Vaginal Davis, for example, appears in this show as an artist, a model, and a musician. She was credited in over a dozen wall labels, for her self-published Fertile La Toyah Jackson Magazine (1987–91), for being a subject in Rick Castro’s photographs, and for her collaboration with Lawrence Elbert on the music video The White to be Angry (1999), produced to accompany a song by her punk band Petro, Mureil and Esther (PME). Davis even tracked the interconnectedness of the North American punk scene in the “History of Punk Timeline” (n.d.)—a foldout made for the Toronto-based J.D.s magazine (1985–91).

Branden W. Joseph, an art historian who curated the show with Drew Sawyer, said of the exhibition, “These relationships were not only on the basis of actual lived experience, but also, in many cases, fostered by relationships and situations that artists imagined and then brought into existence for themselves.” The zine, which can be printed matter in addition to video and audio cassettes, was an extension of mail art and artist books, and came into being to meet these community-building desires. And while the exhibition tracks the zine’s genesis in a pre-internet era, it also argues for its enduring popularity with a space devoted to contemporary practitioners.

In a much different way, this year’s edition of the Made in L.A. biennial, titled “Acts of Living” and now on view at the Hammer, mirrors the curatorial thrust of “Copy Machine Manifesto” with stated ambitions to “situate art as an expanded field of culture that is entangled with everyday life,” according to its description. The show includes an exhibition-within-an-exhibition by the Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (LACA), which has installed a break room (including a Bunn coffee maker, microwave, and soft Muzak) to house a selection from its collections. Food, drink, and casual browsing is unheard of in archives, and LACA wanted to create an alternative space for this.

“It’s very much a conversation on preciousness and preservation” LACA’s director and archivist Hailey Loman told ARTnews. “We emphasize that we want you to work in this space, we want you to hang out here … We are not interested in preserving materials ‘forever.’ We care about how looking at a document can make changes to our lives right now.”

The collections include paper trails from the practices of Patricia Fernández, Barbara Kruger, and others. And while Loman described that archives often prioritize press releases and documentation of exhibitions or performances, those that pertain to the nitty-gritty of process receive a subsidiary focus. In LACA’s collections, there are gas bills, studio leases, even paintings that were deemed subpar by the artists and then tossed out. “These are things that help us to learn how art is getting made and how people are living and surviving,” Loman said.

This greater acknowledgement of the labor involved in the arts coincides with a burgeoning workers’ movement in museums. Across the country, staff at institutions ranging from the Philadelphia Museum of Art to the Buffalo AKG Art Museum have led unionization campaigns. Meanwhile, artists are agitating for fair compensation. In 2018, the W.A.G.E. organization released their often-cited fee calculator, which determines project-based payment by both an artist’s participation (i.e. solo or group show) and a nonprofit’s annual operating expenses (i.e., from Apexart to the Met). Institutions can advertise their W.A.G.E certification status if they comply with these rates; the most notable ones to do so have been Artists Space and the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland. 

Roberts, the “Day Jobs” curator, said that her show is connected to both developments. At the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, where she is the new director and where the exhibition travels in the spring, “Day Jobs” will become the first group show held at the institution where participants will be paid a fee. Roberts said this not only has to do with the agency that comes with her directorial position, but also the labor and financial precarity that her show makes clear: “That discussion connects to the exhibition itself, and the consideration of artists’ lived experiences and the conditions of making.”

To put it another way, there are many forces outside the studio that affect what happens within. In 2023, reconciling the two became the job not just of artists, but the institutions that exhibit their work, too. That trend looks to continue as “Day Jobs” travels in 2024. 

“I felt the need to talk about traditions in my work, specifically how objects hold memories that we need to revisit from time to time to remember who we are and where we came from,” Barboza recently told ARTnews.

Born in Lima and currently based in Lobitos, Peru, Barboza began her career as a fashion designer as a way to support her art-making, which initially was photography based. In addition to embracing a new medium, her mother’s death prompted Barboza to create work that reflected on the social, political, and environmental nuances of Lima, with an eye toward exploring the city’s centuries-old herbal traditions.

For her latest solo show, “In a State of Latency” at Nunu Fine Art in New York (through January 6), Barboza is debuting towering tapestries that incorporate photography, patchwork, embroidery, her experiments using natural dyes, and plants she found during inclement weather to reflect on how climate changed has transformed a Peruvian forest into a desert.

“While I acknowledge that art may not single-handedly change the world,” Nunu Fine Art founder Nunu Hung said, “I believe in its potential to contribute by fostering awareness and motivation among individuals who have the capacity to effect change.”

Peru has a long history of weaving, extending as far back as 10,000 years ago with the processing of plant fibers like reed or totora and cotton coming some 5,000 years ago, according to Barboza. Numerous Indigenous communities have safeguarded traditional weaving techniques despite colonization and its aftereffects. Barboza’s decision to use plant-dyed fibers, as opposed to synthetic ones, reflects her commitment not only to environmental awareness but also to the preservation of traditional textile practices. According to Barboza, who is not Indigenous but has spent time learning about different herbal practices throughout Peru, plant dyes reveal the country’s distinctive geography and biodiverse ecosystems as well as centuries of Indigenous knowledge and traditions.

“As I did more research about the origin of textiles, I felt more like a foreigner in my own country,” Barboza said. “Engaging with communities that maintain these traditions is time-consuming but valuable. Oftentimes, the research took a longer time than actually working on an artwork.”

One such work is Emerging Stone (2023), an embroidery of a somewhat abstract sphere in various colors. The work was made using different colors of sheep threads dyed with native plants that thrive during the summer storms, which are identified in a chart below the spherical shape.

Elsewhere, the artist has created a set of textile maps with photographs she took during the rainy season. Barboza collected information about the weather, tides, and storms in order to understand the changes she saw in the landscape each day. She then verified the data by being present, waiting for what the landscape would reveal, which informed how she created these works.

In Between Two Streams (2023), Barboza sandwiches her embroidery around a photograph of a person diving into the ocean; the photo divides the tapestry in two: a mostly blue section that mirrors the ocean’s hues and the other reflecting the palette of a barren desert. Long threads overrun the embroidery, hanging loosely from a wooden stick, evoking a sense of infinite growth.

Barboza’s tapestries are typically displayed this way, without frames, the loose threads spilling out forth—an apt metaphor for how the forces of nature are able to shape our environments beyond our control. “Nature is in a constant state of change, and so too are my artworks,” she said. In Folds in the Desert (2023), Barboza takes this approach further: a stretch of fabric that has been mostly dyed with beige-colored mud hangs from the ceiling, descending onto a tree branch, until it cascades onto the floor. The tapestry looks like a rough-hewn desertscape, with the white fabric’s negative space resembling an intricately carved engraving on wood.

Artworks like Between Air and Sea (2023), Machu Picchu montaña (2022), and Pleamar 10:36 am (2023) depict drastic changes in weather like warming of the Pacific Ocean, and bodies of water in general. The compositions are inspired by the El Niño phenomenon, during which Barboza witnessed the drastic climate changes in the forest, the waves, and the beach.

A recurring scene in Barboza’s embroidery is one she can’t shake from her mind: intense rainfall activating desert once dry waterways. The resulting torrents, coupled with powerful landslides and waterslides, forcefully descended into the sea, sweeping away everything in their path. Once the rain stopped, the sea reclaimed the shoreline, inching ever closer and eroding the sandy expanse that was once there.

“Weaving these images is akin to imparting corporeality to this information, creating a record of time and the body’s motion in each woven weft,” Barboza said. “It serves as a means to translate information that is only validated through continuous observation of a place. As the environment transformed, my body became attuned to it.” In a world deeply entwined with the repercussions of climate change, Barboza’s art serves as a poignant reflection on the delicate yet robust nature of our ecosystems. Through her distinctive fusion of traditional craftsmanship and contemporary expression, she invites viewers to explore their connection with the environment. Her work prompts a profound question: Are we molding the environment, or is it shaping us in ways we have yet to fully grasp?

Aside from Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein (1923–1997) is the artist most closely identified with Pop Art. More than that, one could argue that Lichtenstein was the more insistently pop of the pair, as his subject matter, technique, and use of color ultimately derived from a single source—comic books—to which his work remained tied even as it evolved over time.

Within their respective oeuvres, both Warhol and Lichtenstein referenced the dot patterns used to mass-reproduce cartoons and photographs. But as much as this may have linked them in the collective imagination as the key figures of Pop Art, there were major differences between their careers. Not the least of these was the fact that Warhol became far more famous, largely due to the way he transformed the role of artist into a combination of celebrity, scene maker, and commercial entrepreneur.

Lichtenstein was more conventional, sticking to the studio and an interest in art history. He also made no distinction between his public and private selves, even as Warhol adopted a carefully crafted, enigmatic public persona. In other words, Lichtenstein’s view of what it meant to be an artist was fairly modest, best summed up by his observation that “most people think painters are kind of ridiculous, you know?”

Although both artists started out painting by hand, only Lichtenstein kept at it, while Warhol switched to the more mechanical medium of silkscreen. Ironically, he did so largely because his earlier facture was always being compared to Lichtenstein’s, who’d exhibited his paintings before Warhol managed to.

Undoubtedly Warhol left the bigger footprint art-historically. But Lichtenstein blazed an important trail of his own, creating a body of work that was as instantly recognizable and iconic as Warhol’s.

One significant way the canon grew this year was through the addition of figures active before 1900, an area that has received less attention in major museums in past years. Female Old Masters were seen anew, especially in the case of a Baltimore Museum of Art show that spotlights women working in Europe between 1400 and 1800.

Yet the art-historical rewriting hardly ended there. It continued with fresh looks for modernists forewent in the past, as well as with retrospectives for artists who hailed from beyond Western Europe and the US. These shows acted as signs of changing times and increased curiosity on the parts of curators, and the momentum is likely to be felt in 2024 and the years afterward.

Below, a look at 10 artists who received their due in 2023.

Black art speaks to diverse audiences about the lived experiences of Black artists and Black people. It is an ideal way to connect to and understand the conditions under which they exist through unadulterated dialogue between artists and audiences.

Fresh off her epic pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2022, Simone Leigh was given a retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston; it traveled to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and will continue to move audiences as it travels to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2024. “Wangechi Mutu: Intertwined,” the astounding mid-career retrospective showing the dynamism of Mutu’s skills in artistic mediums including painting, sculpture, and video art, debuted at the New Museum in New York City and will move to the New Orleans Museum of Art early next year. At the Baltimore Museum of Art, “The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century” celebrated hip-hop’s 50th anniversary with almost 90 artists exhibited, including Mark Bradford, Carrie Mae Weems, and Arthur Jafa. There were also noteworthy exhibitions of Faith Ringgold, Kehinde Wiley, Charles Gaines, Amoako Boafo, Charles White, and Betye Saar.

Unfortunately, not all the exhibitions featuring work by Black artists can be covered in a single article. Unlike Leigh and Mutu’s retrospectives, which were surrounded by much hype, the artists below had major exhibitions—equally expressive of the Black experience—that deserve more notice.

Gravitron is a collaborative installation featured in SFMOMA’s “Sitting on Chrome: Mario Ayala, rafa esparza, and Guadalupe Rosales,” an exhibition by three of LA’s most closely watched artists. Throughout their collaborative and individual works, their use of glittering finishes, bombastic colors, and airbrushed surfaces pay loving homage to the art of the lowrider—a style of custom car that emerged as a postwar emblem of Chicanx culture, distinct from the hot rod in its slow-moving dropped suspension and bouncing hydraulics. Throughout California and the Southwest, lowrider cruising has been a locus for communal gatherings, where ad hoc car shows and raucous parties form in the parking lots of gas stations and grocery stores. Lowriders have also been a resurgent flashpoint for the policing of brown communities, where various bans, blockades, and other crackdowns have come and gone. (California Governor Gavin Newsom recently signed a bill that will lift remaining bans across the state; it goes into effect on January 1.)

As a teenager in East LA in the ’90s, Rosales was arrested “three or four times” as the criminalization of cruising intensified, and signs prohibiting cars from passing the same point “twice within six hours” went up along Whittier Boulevard. “It’s sort of ridiculous, right?” she asked. “Who gets to tell you how many times you can go up and down the street?”

Standing at the exhibition entrance on a bent post, No Cruising (Whittier Blvd), from 2023, is one such sign; Rosales found it not far from her childhood home and cut down with the help of a friend and a handsaw.

“Sitting on Chrome,” on view until February 19, is not actually a show about cars or even specifically about cruising, but how the textures and aesthetics of a uniquely Chicanx art form can be deconstructed, queered, and recontextualized. All three artists describe the importance of hybridity in their work as they mix disparate genres and subjects in defiance of flattening stereotypes. Reassembled as sculptures, installations, and memorials, the lowrider’s abstracted parts strike an acutely specific emotional register for those who recognize them, where the personal coming-of-age memories intertwine with a collective history of communal resistance and self-styled identity, and the reframing of how that history is told.

“The language that we need is being built alongside the work,” said esparza, noting the limits of the standardized European canon. “Centering other modernities and histories prohibits us from starting from scratch and building the language and to understand the work in a real way. When people see our work and cry or dance—yeah, that’s a language.”

The exhibition initially began with SFMOMA curators Maria Castro, Tomoko Kanamitsu, and Jovanna Venegas inviting esparza to mount a transhistorical dialogue with Diego Rivera’s Pan American Unity (1940), a monumental mural on long-term view at the museum. At the center of the piece, Rivera merged the Aztec goddess Coatlicue with an enormous industrial machine in a way that resonated with esparza, a performance artist whose practice frequently mines themes of futurism, hybridity, and Indigenous iconography. Before even asking Rosales and Ayala, esparza answered the museum’s invitation with a proposal for a collaborative show.

“I said that these are two artists in Los Angeles evolving the aesthetics and practices of our neighborhoods and our families,” he recalled. “They care for these histories and lineages while complicating them in very forthright, courageous ways.”

For Ayala, cruising in California’s Inland Empire in the 2000s was a “wholesome social activity,” where he and his father looked at lowriders like works of art in a gallery. His airbrushed paintings have a compelling way of playing with depth, layering images of personal significance in different rendering styles and incongruous planes as a chaotic trompe-l’oeil. His painting Reunion (2021) reads as a collaged tribute to the San Francisco Art Institute, the artist’s since-shuttered alma mater, composed in the style of a Lowrider magazine cover. A loosely rendered version of himself transforms into a cockroach (à la the Animorphs book series) against the Bay Area skyline, surrounded by startlingly photorealistic skateboard wheels, aluminum-wrapped Mission burritos, and paper-bagged cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon. They float over Ayala’s own rendition of the Rivera mural The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City (1931), the backdrop to SFAI’s undergraduate gallery. “No matter what you were doing in that space,” he said, “you were ultimately always having an exhibition with Diego Rivera.”

The artists met in LA around 2015, attracted by the thematic similarities of their dissimilar practices; each has a remarkable gravitational pull that audiences and communities organize themselves around. Both Ayala and esparza were early followers of Rosales’s two enormously popular Instagram accounts, @Veteranas_y_Rucas and @Map_pointz, that serve as crowd-sourced archives of ’90s Chicano youth culture. Posting the imagery and ephemera of that era—personal photographs, mall studio portraits, party fliers, news footage, and beyond—Rosales had carved out a new function for social media in its relatively early years. “She was using this digital platform as a way to archive a history you couldn’t really find anywhere else,” said Ayala. A small sample of her archive is fanned out in a vitrine like a collage, where sitting above a mirror, both the faces of high school portraits and the messages written on the back are visible simultaneously. “I want the archive to be visible from every angle,” Rosales said.

For esparza, Rosales’s accounts humanized a vilified era of collective refusal, where Southern California students had roundly rejected the school system—partly in protest to strident anti-immigration legislation, and partly to organize intricate networks of daytime and weekend raves. As a teenager, esparza was thrilled to spot these scenes on late-night news reports on out-of-control youth. “It was the only avenue to see ourselves in mainstream media,” he shuddered to recall. But for Rosales, he added, these were simply young people creating culture. “She created a radical way of opening up a space for people to reconsider this moment in our history where we felt criminalized, and to rename what we were doing.”

Following the violent death of her cousin Ever Sanchez in 1996, Rosales developed her archival practice, fueled by an urgent desire to study and understand her own history. Inventing a new approach to the archive, her installations and sculptures tap into the memorializing functions of the lowrider, the murals of which often portray loved ones who have passed. Her poetic odes combine the museological task of preserving artifacts with transmissions of memory and the processing of grief: Drifting on a Memory (a dedication to Gypsy Rose), from 2023, is both an altar and the interior of a lowrider, where flowers lie on the quilted velvet upholstery framing a rear windshield. Lying on the museum floor, low and slow (2023) is an example of Rosales’ portals, a recurring sculptural form where two-way mirrors framed by colorful LEDs create a neon mise en abyme. A wallet-sized portrait of a recently deceased friend repeats infinitely into the darkness, shrinking into the distance like a memory fading with the passage of time.

Near No Cruising (Whittier Blvd), the pulsing installation of old-school television sets stacked into a pyramid illustrates the ways in which the artists’ respective relationships with cars, art history, and materiality overlap and diverge. Jump-cutting from screen to screen, the footage shows vintage news reports on high-energy ’90s raves and lowrider shows pulled from Rosales’ archives; shots of Ayala in his studio; and documentation of esparza’s performances, one of which entailed Ayala airbrushing his six-foot-two frame the hot pink of Gypsy Rose, an iconic 1964 Chevy Impala from East LA.

More than a decade ago, esparza came to performance art as a refusal of painting’s inherently Eurocentric traditions. (When he does paint, he paints on adobe, slabs of pressed earth that his father and grandfather have been making their entire lives.) Despite the stack of Mexican realist books that a well-meaning UCLA art professor had given him, esparza said, “Performance art felt much more specific to me and my history and the people that I wanted to be seen by.” Ayala was mesmerized when Rosales first brought him to a performance of esparza’s in 2015, where, wearing a mask of his own face, esparza had ignited his headdress of sage, encircling himself with a crown of flames and smoke. “It was a powerful gesture,” Ayala said, one that recalled his grandparents’ Santeria rituals of blessing. “I was like Lupe, who is your friend?”

Before meeting esparza, Rosales had never encountered another artist who was so visibly Mexican, or whose family looked so much like her own. “What is this guy doing with adobe?” she had wondered, her curiosity stoked by a vague sense of familiarity. She and esparza had in fact been to all the same places growing up, both physically and emotionally. He had unknowingly watched her play guitar in younger days in a punk band, and in 2008, they had also both been radically inspired by the Los Angeles County Museum of the Art exhibition “Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement.” Years into their friendship, Rosales saw documentation of No Water Under the Bridge (2014), esparza’s performance in which he cut his fingertips underneath the 4th Street Viaduct. Suddenly she remembered years earlier driving past a terrifying set of bloody handprints on the walls of an underpass, and realized they must have been his.

In October, in the shadow of Rivera’s industrial Coatlicue, esparza became his own hybrid machine, stretching his body into the sculptural likeness of a souped-up lowrider motorcycle and inviting select viewers to climb on top and ride. This performance, first staged last December at Art Basel Miami Beach, was an activation of Corpo RanfLA: Terra Cruiser (2022), a kinetic sculpture built in collaboration with artist Karla Ekatherine Canseco from many different parts: the repurposed base of a bucking mechanical pony ride, shiny gold handlebars and wheels, and conceptual allusions to queer and Chicanx culture that may need to be explained at length.

Growing up in Pasadena, esparza had understood the customization of an old car as a right of passage for the men in his family, but he was particularly fascinated by the overt femininity—the saccharine colors, florals, and plush interiors. (As a queer woman with a slight frame, Rosales disagreed: “For me it’s always felt hypermasculine, no matter how many flowers you fucking put in there.”) There was also the inherent pageantry and seductive nature of cruising; once, when esparza was a teenager waiting in the back seat of his older brother’s Regal, another boy had invited himself to sit inside. The moment was wholly innocent but nonetheless electrifying. “When I think back to that moment,” esparza said, “I wonder how many times my brother must have made out in the backseat of that car.”

The artist executed an early iteration of Corpo RanfLA in 2018, asking Ayala to paint his body like a lowrider. Essentially this was drag, another glamorous art form similarly built in the margins that also suffers from over-policing. They spent 12 hours cutting stencils out by hand, applying an image of two cholos locked in a passionate kiss on the trunk (esparza’s back) and a commemorative portrait of Chicanx drag icon Cyclona on the hood (esparza’s chest). Once sculptor Tanya Melendez adorned his hair and nails with golden accessories, esparza took the performance to Elysian Park, a popular site for both types of cruising in cars and for lovers—both male outdoor rituals, but only one makes its sexual intentions explicitly known.

These themes came together with more permanence in 2022 when the sculptural version of Corpo RanfLA debuted in Miami Beach. esparza’s collaborators—including Canesco, Ayala, and Rosales, as well as performance artist Gabriela Ruiz and photographer Fabian Guerrero—had all flown in from Los Angeles for support. For a minute at a time, riders would climb onto esparza’s back and listen to his voice through a pair of noise-canceling headphones. As he spun his golden wheel, they listened to a story about the futurity of land and seeds, a metaphor for lineage, the preservation of memory and the endurance of self. There was a surprising and surreal intimacy to it, intensified by the specificity of the artist’s allusions and the warmth and softness of his voice. For me, the piece struck emotional chords where our lived experiences had overlapped, connecting LA’s distant past with an optimistic vision of its future.

Below, a look back at the defining artworks of 2023.

“I developed an interest in Ambera’s work and, in discussions with her, and then with Sophie [Morner, the owner of Company Gallery], I thought [collaboration] would serve the artist better, as well as support a gallery that is doing a great job in New York,” Hauser & Wirth co-president Marc Payot told ARTnews.

Morner, who opened Company in 2015, said of Wellmann, that “a joint partnership will be the strongest way to support her career right now.”

Wellmann, who is in her early forties and whose paintings depict abstracted bodies intertwined in erotic scenarios, joined Company in 2020 and had her first solo show there the following year. Since then, she has had solo exhibitions at Pond Society, the Shanghai space run by collector Yang Bin, the Metropolitan Art Centre in Belfast, Ireland, and, last April, at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, a private museum founded by collector Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in 1995.

Morner said she was attracted to the idea of a closely collaborative representation because she’s been interested in new gallery models and how younger galleries like her own can continue to work with artists as they grow.

“If anyone is going to change these gallery models, it’s the galleries like Hauser & Wirth,” Morner said. “If the bigger galleries start thinking outside the box about what is best for the artists. Because it’s not always best for the artists to leave a young gallery for a big one.”

Company has proved to be one of the more ambitious spaces to open in New York over the past decade. In 2021 Morner moved Company from its original modest space in downtown Manhattan, to a 4,000-square-foot, stand-alone space on Elizabeth Street nearby in Chinatown. She said she sees her gallery as “constantly growing and expanding.” At the same time, at least one artist has departed. The new space opened with an exhibition of work by Barbara Hammer, curated by gallery artist Tiona Nekkia McClodden. Shortly afterward, McClodden left Company for a larger gallery, Mitchell-Innes & Nash, and then an even larger one, White Cube.

Payot characterizes the collective impact initiative as an “entrepreneurial model” that he hopes will “support an ecosystem,” before adding that he would be happy if it is copied by other large galleries.

“I don’t see myself as having created something that unique. It hopefully will change some structures within our system,” he said.

Payot added that working with Nicola Vassell on Uman, the first shared artist in the initiative, at last week’s Art Basel Miami Beach fair “went incredibly well, and that in itself is a message true to the art world that things can maybe done a little bit differently.”

Those questions are asked by one of the most visible installations currently on view in Miami: Topography of Memory, by the Brazilian artist Sallisa Rosa, which comprises 100 ceramic forms—sculpted from clay forged by friends and volunteers in Rio—that rise from the Collins Park Rotunda in Miami Beach. No two of its pieces are exactly alike, and the lot is easily mistaken for a hauntingly beautiful stalagmite grove. Celestial bodies descend from the ceiling, while soft mist drifts through the negative space, illuminated by an amber glow. Something precious and ancient brews.

Commissioned by Audemars Piguet Contemporary and guest-curated by Thiago de Paula Souza, Topography of Memory marks Rosa’s first solo exhibition in the United States and her largest ceramic project to date. Following its run in Miami, it will be presented next year at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo (March 16 to July 28), also marking the first time Audemars Piguet Contemporary’s first commission in Brazil.

From the communal forging, to the materials and their firing in a kiln built underground, each step of the process was part of long artistic tradition.

“In Topography of Memory, Rosa builds upon the notion of ‘memory programming’ introduced in her previous work,” de Paula Souza said. “Each of the sculptures is a unique expression of Rosa’s memories. The installation mirrors an underground environment, bathed in earth-toned lights, where visitors will encounter interactions between the stories engraved in the ceramic objects and the memories embedded in each grain of soil within the installation.”

It will be on view in tandem with Art Basel Miami Beach, which buzzes nearby as a sort of counter-experience. The intimate Topography of Memory rewards slow looking; the star-studded bazaar is a perpetual machine of motion and money. At any art fair—especially one of such magnitude—attention spans generally run shorter. Rosa’s work is serene and solemn, like a ritual site; it isn’t likely to be lost in the crowd. 

In addition to her installation, she has new ceramics and watercolors in the Kabinett section of the fair, in a booth hosted by the Brazilian gallery A Gentil Carioca.

Born in Goiânia and based in Rio de Janeiro, Rosa makes sculptures, photographs, and videos informed, in part, by the experience of life as an Indigenous person in urban environments. Tethered to an ancestry that actively faces erasure, she seems to be thinking relentlessly on what was lost, what remains, and what could be, which is yet undetermined. A startling ascendant self-taught artist, she had her first solo exhibition at Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio de Janeiro in 2021 and has also participated in group shows at Théâtre de L’Usine, Geneva, the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and SNAP, Shanghai, and São Paulo’s Paço das Artes.

Her work has touched on surveillance, invisibility, conservatism, fascism, but is always underpinned by the fragility of culture. Land, language, artistic traditions—these are what sustains the self, what is worth bequeathing, and what is easily diluted.

“The earth is the place of memory,” Rosa said of the Miami piece. “While shaping the clay, I encoded memories into each piece, turning them into extracorporeal memories. People can move through the work, and my intention is that this movement will activate collective memory.”