For the Critics' Table this week, we continue our year-end reflections. Johanna Fateman makes tough cuts, narrowing it down to what she can count on two hands.
Timing is everything. Were these the 10 best New York exhibitions and performances of the year? They're the ones that lingered in my mind, articulating, crystallizing, or confronting something that felt urgent at the moment of my encounter; the ones that felt in tune—for better or worse, intentionally or not—with the crises, copes, and vagaries of 2024. Please note that my list is chronological (not ranked), compiled from a year-spanning email thread with myself and the enthusiasms betrayed by my camera roll.
1. Faye Driscoll, Weathering (New York Live Arts)
Not 10 days into the year, I was treated to the rarest of art experiences, one that seemed made for me, to explain how I feel about… everything. The dancers in this miraculous 70-minute piece began motionless on a rotating platform. Like frozen zombies reanimating as temperatures rise or Rodin’s Burghers of Calais coming to life, they began to move almost imperceptibly, then faster and faster. They drooled, wailed, and tore each other’s clothes off as their giant lazy Susan, a cramped life raft of sorts, spun out of control.
The first U.S. solo presentation of Stéphane Mandelbaum’s perplexing drawings was one of the most discussed shows in my circle. The Belgian artist, murdered in 1986 at the age of 25, was a portraitist of both heroes (Fassbinder, Rimbaud) and villains (Goebbels, Röhm). The grandchild of Holocaust survivors, who foregrounded this identity quite unusually, left behind an arresting group of carefully rendered and pointedly defaced images—intergenerational trauma refracted through tropes of punk transgression.
3. Thomas Hirschhorn, “Fake it, Fake it – till you Fake it.” (Gladstone Gallery)
What happens to Hito Steyerl’s “poor image” when it’s translated, poorly, into sculpture? Thomas Hirschhorn’s gallery-filling deluge of amateurishly constructed, cardboard-and-tape objects—computer displays pasted with printed screenshots of video war games, or real photos of cities like Rafah, razed—was unexpectedly moving. The artist’s exhausting handcrafted horror had an un-numbing effect; beneath his hectoring swarm of hanging paper emojis, I felt what I think I should feel when I’m lost in a doomscroll.
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A stand-out exhibition in Swiss Institute’s reliably excellent program, the Diné sound artist Raven Chacon’s first major institutional solo show was a formal and philosophical feat. Scores, recordings, sculptures, and film-based works leveraged the poetic and political content of sonic material. The recorded “silence” of a canyon played back as a distorted roar, a symphony of gunshots, and instructions for a family to scream from the windows of a building together were among its arresting elements.
5. Morgan Bassichis, Can I be Frank? (LaMama; directed by Sam Pinkleton)
I literally laughed and cried. Morgan Bassichis’s one-person performance, a dizzying excavation and partial re-enactment of a 1987 show by gay comic Frank Maya (which was likewise presented by downtown institution La Mama), toggled between past and present while shifting—with acrobatic grace—between modes of self-effacing humor, congenial narration, and heart-piercing despair over the unrelenting destruction of Gaza.
6. Ina Archer, “To Deceive the Eye” (Microscope Gallery)
Ina Archer’s show dug deep, with black-and-white film becoming both medium and metaphor to illuminate the legacy of minstrelsy embedded in cinematic convention. The complex show’s most indelible passage, featured in the artist’s three-channel video centerpiece, was a choreographed segment from a 1933 Bing Crosby film: the skin tone of dancers shifts between black and white during a performance of the song Black Moonlight.
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7. Juliana Halpert, “Bountiful Years” (Sebastian Gladstone)
Eight medium-scale, square prints of surreptitiously shot photographs, from 2017, of Juliana Halpert’s former Artforum boss’s office made for a quietly intriguing show. If you—like me—were associated with the magazine as it weathered that year’s scandal, the images may evoke a very complicated nostalgia. If not, I think the artist’s Sophie Calle-ish project would still impress you with its snooping attention to idiosyncratic minutiae.
Kara Walker’s latest breathtaking exhibition showed her working still with her career-defining silhouetted forms. More fragmented than before, her large-scale collages were composed of body parts, scattered, as if by gusts of wind. And these floating pieces were, in a turn for the artist, colored: mottled, moss-toned, granted a washy depth. Some pieces verged on abstraction without straying, somehow, from her enduring figural references and shattering themes.
9. Ralph Lemon, “Ceremonies Out of the Air” (MoMA PS1)
I’ll be happy if Ralph Lemon’s retrospective is the last thing I see this year. A suspended spaceship represents flight by projecting aerial landscape footage onto the floor; “Fuck Bruce Nauman” is spelled out in neon; props, drawings, sculptures, and video reflect the choreographer-writer-artist’s boundless imagination and lawless approach to every medium.
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10. Jasleen Kaur’s Turner Prize Acceptance Speech
In solidarity with those protesting the Tate’s relationship to funding sources tied to Israel—and in support of an arms embargo—Jasleen Kaur spotlit a familiar contradiction. “I’ve been wondering why artists are required to dream up liberation in the gallery, but when that dream meets life, we are shut down,” she said. The Scottish prize-winner's acceptance speech was delivered close on the heels of Nan Goldin’s striking statement at Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie, where the artist expressed outrage at the censorship of pro-Palestinian speech. And so, the most pressing art-world question for 2025 might be one for institutions—can they maintain their professed allegiance to progressive values, and to artists, when even the dream of Palestinian liberation, even in the gallery, is forbidden?
