ARTnews

Perhaps the most iconic artwork by Hank Willis Thomas, guest editor of this ARTnews annual Deciders issue, is a 2003 piece from his “Branded” series. In the stark photograph, a Black man’s bald head is seen from the side. Just above his ear he’s been branded with the Nike swoosh. The image conjures all kinds of associations, from the sports industry’s reliance on and exploitation of Black men to the branding of slaves. Willis Thomas takes an image we know well and makes us see it differently; with his art, he makes us think. You may notice something similar happening, in a far lighter vein, on the cover of this magazine, where Willis Thomas has transformed Damien Hirst’s cover for Drake’s album Certified Lover Boy, released this past September, into Memoji-style…

YELAINE RODRIGUEZ is an interdisciplinary artist and curator who received a B.F.A. from the New School and an M.A. from NYU. Her curatorial portfolio includes exhibitions at NYU, the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute, and the New School. She has also exhibited at El Museo del Barrio, Mexic-Arte Museum, Photoville, IPCNY, American Museum of Natural History, El Centro Cultural de España, and Centro León Biennial in the Dominican Republic. SUMMER SLOANE-BRITT is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU. She has held roles at the National Gallery of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She received a B.A. from Swarthmore College in art history, and sociology and anthropology. MELISSA SMITH is a writer based in Brooklyn. She graduated from NYU with a B.A. before working…

Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s wrapping of Paris’s Arc de Triomphe in September may be only the ninth-largest project the couple ever mounted, but it was certainly one of their most ambitious. Nearly 50 years in the making, L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped saw the 19th-century monument sheathed in more than 269,000 square feet of fabric. The process of installation was long and fraught: an outcry over potential danger to birds caused the work to be delayed, and then the pandemic hit and held it up even further. Neither artist lived to see the work complete—Christo died in 2020, Jeanne-Claude, in 2009—but those who had helped see the project through were overjoyed. Upon its unveiling, Roselyne Bachelot, French minister of culture, called the artwork a “gift.”…

DERRICK ADAMS’S STUDIO in a partially converted Brooklyn warehouse is a bright, tidy space: white walls, a pair of white sofas. In September, a painting hanging on one of the walls is a peephole into another world altogether: a museum gallery is decked out for a party. There are balloons, and a “Happy Birthday” banner. On the museum wall, in this tableau, is a painting of the movie poster for Mr. Soul, the 2018 documentary about groundbreaking TV producer and talk show host Ellis Haizlip and his program SOUL!, which ran on public television from 1968 to 1973, and threw a spotlight on the Black Arts Movement. In the center of the gallery are two sculptures: the late artist Elizabeth Catlett’s 1955 Target, the bust of an African American man…

LaToya Ruby Frazier: Flint Is Family in Three Acts Ed. Michal Raz-Russo (Steidl and the Gordon Parks Foundation, $65) • LaToya Ruby Frazier has been shooting blistering pictures in recent years in Flint, Michigan, a city whose predominantly Black citizenry continues to face a water crisis. This survey of one of the 21st century’s most important photographic projects showcases Frazier’s long-term work there, with an eye on a social disaster afflicting a community in need of all the attention it can get. Art & Crime: The Fight Against Looters, Forgers, and Fraudsters in the High-Stakes Art World Stefan Koldehoff and Tobias Timm, trans. Paul David Young (Seven Stories Press, $35) • The theft of the Mona Lisa and Hitler’s collection of looted art: both figure in this tome by journalists Stefan Koldehoff and Tobias Timm. The book…

Jerica D. Wortham is a poet and the director of the Greenwood Art Project, a citywide public art installation comprising 30-plus projects to commemorate the 1921 Tulsa race massacre in Oklahoma. She is also the founder and director of J’Parlé Art Group Inc. I wasn’t trying to be revolutionaryI was just trying to say somethingTo share somethingBe something more than that moment It was for meI wasn’t trying to transform anyone’s lifeBut my ownBut then it happened I opened my mouthAnd there it wasArt Now it took me a minute to call it thisI hadn’t at that point considered myself an artistI was just a little black girl with big ole hair with something to sayDidn’t necessarily matter who listenedIt needed to be saidAnd then it happenedThe connectionSoul to soulBreath to breath I’d speakAnd things…