Best of 2023: The Top 10 in Unforgettable Art 

The Best of 2023 in Art

As we near December 31, we’re looking back on the best of 2023 in incredible art, from exhibitions, to major museum shows, to public outdoor installations, and utterly immersive experiences.

“Judy Chicago: Herstory” at the New Museum

This fall in New York, the New Museum unveiled “Judy Chicago: Herstory,” a sweeping career survey of the preeminent artist and feminist activist, sponsored by Dior and on view through January 14, 2024. Encompassing a momentous 60 years of the artist’s inspired practice, the presentation includes a group exhibition, titled “The City of Ladies,” which places Chicago’s luminous works in conversation with over 80 female and gender-nonconforming visionaries, including Frida Kahlo, Hilma af Klint, Georgia O’Keeffe, Simone de Beauvoir, and Virginia Woolf. 

Bests of 2023: William Kentridge’s “In Praise of Shadows” at The Broad

In early 2023, The Broad debuted a wide-ranging survey of the artist William Kentridge alongside live performances, music, and special programming, on view through April 9, 2023. Titled, “William Kentridge: In Praise of Shadows,” the exhibition offered 35 years of compelling artworks, including sculptures, tapestries, theater sets, and drawings. Public programming central to the powerful themes of Kentridge’s practice—like racism, colonialism, and rising above hate—were presented throughout the show. Highlights included “When We Dream in Bittersweet Tongues” on February 4 and April 1, curated by poet and educator Shonda Buchanan, which gathered BIPOC poets and writers to tell their stories to the world; and “Moor Mother and Irreversible Entanglements” on April 1, featuring a performance by the poet, vocalist, and educator Moor Mother alongside free-jazz collective Irreversible. 

The 15th Sharjah Biennial

On February 7 in the United Arab Emirates, art patrons from around the globe gathered to inaugurate the 15th edition of the Sharjah Biennial (SB15). Entitled “Thinking Historically in the Present” and on view through June 11, the major exhibition is hosted across five cities in the emirate of Sharjah, featuring art by over 150 artists and collectives from more than 70 countries. For the 2023 iteration, SB15 recalls the framework of 2002’s Documenta11 in Kassel, Germany, curated by the late Nigerian curator, Okwui Enwezor. “Two decades ago, I experienced Okwui’s Documenta11 which, with its radical embrace of postcolonialism, transformed my curatorial perspective,” said Hoor Al Qasimi, the Biennial’s curator and the Sharjah Art Foundation’s Director. “His idea of ‘thinking historically in the present’ is the conceptual framework for the Biennial, which we’ve sought to honor and elaborate on while also reflecting on the Foundation’s own past, present, and future as the Biennial marks its 30-year anniversary.”

Best of 2023: Lauren Halsey at the Met

Los Angeles-based artist Lauren Halsey’s dynamic, immersive structure for The Met’s Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden was on view April 18 through October 22. The 10th site-specific commission for the sweeping space was an astounding ode to Halsey’s family roots in the community of South Central Los Angeles, juxtaposed with her vibrant interest in ancient Egyptian symbolism and 1960s utopian architecture. The 22-foot work was an experiential mecca composed of concrete tiles, columns, and otherworldly sphinxes. Tagged with powerful phrases such as “Reflection,” “Moving Forward,” and “Look What You Created,” the artist commanded viewers’ attention with fierce imagination and optimism. 

Desert X 2023

On March 4, the fourth edition of the site-specific art exhibition Desert X 2023 opened in Palm Springs, within the heart of the Coachella Valley. Co-curated by Diana Campbell and returning Artistic Director Neville Wakefield, the prestigious event, which has previously drawn over 1.25 million visitors, includes work by 12 international artists in a sweeping array of architecture, film, music, painting, performance, and environmental activism. Inspired by timely themes such as societal metamorphosis, our global climate crisis, and subsequent economic migration, participating artists created astounding works of self-awareness, revealing both poetic and inconvenient truths.  

Best of 2023: KAWS’s “Holiday” in Indonesia 

In August in Indonesia, KAWS and creative studio AllRightsReserved have unveiled the latest iteration of the traveling installation “KAWS:HOLIDAY” at the UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Prambanan Hindu temple complex in Yogyakarta. On display from 8 AM until 5 PM through August 31, 2023 was the artist’s ACCOMPLICE character where the monumental figure is situated just outside of the majestic temple site. It marked the 10th stop of an ongoing worldwide tour, with support from local partner AKG Entertainment. The installation of KAWS:HOLIDAY offered a curious juxtaposition of heritage and contemporary art at its station on the outskirts of Prambanan—the country’s largest Hindu temple, constructed in the 9th century. Imagined in a bubblegum pink vinyl, ACCOMPLICE’s enormous body measured nearly 150 feet long (the artist’s largest sculpture to date) and could be seen reclining in the grass with its white, gloved hands covering its face. The effect, when presented against the ancient ornate architecture, was quite surreal.

Marco Brambilla at Las Vegas’s The Sphere

In October, U2’s residency at the MSG Sphere in Las Vegas debuted. For the unique setting, the artist Marco Brambilla was commissioned by the band to create a video installation inspired by Elvis Presley and the birth of Las Vegas. During the band’s performance of Even Better than the Real Thing, audience members inside the sphere-shaped venue are taken on a journey through Marco Brambilla’s awe-inspiring, illusory visuals, making up the video collage titled KING SIZE. An ode to the King of Rock and Roll, the immersive video features clips of Presley’s life and performances, formatted with Brambilla’s trademark style, embedded in a mesmerizing, kaleidoscopic display that rolls in constant motion behind the members of the band on the dome of MSG Sphere. 

Best of 2023: Wangechi Mutu’s “Intertwined”

On March 2 in New York, the New Museum unveiled the most expansive survey to date of the Kenyan artist Wangechi Mutu titled “Intertwined.” On view through June 4, 2023 the exhibition featured work spanning Mutu’s practice from the mid-1990s to today with paintings, drawings, sculptures, and film. Organized by Curator Vivian Crockett with the help of the Allen and Lola Goldring Senior Curator, Margot Norton, and Curatorial Assistant Ian Wallace, it occupies the museum’s three main floors, even including a specially-commissioned vinyl installation on the building’s glass façade, titled Sick Planets. Through a comprehensive display of Mutu’s varied oeuvre—one that has yielded a thought-provoking signature of spirit-like figures in fantastic scenarios—viewers may also recognize in her work recurring themes relating to colonialism, globalization, the African diaspora, and historical violence against women. “Mutu’s work has long been characterized by a sense of permeable boundaries and hybridity, invested in the complex encounters of bodies, sites, and structures,” said Crockett. “Her work grapples with contemporary realities and proffers new models for a radically changed future informed by feminism, Afrofuturism, and interspecies symbiosis.” 

Mark Rothko at Fondation Louis Vuitton 

Debuting during the occasion of Paris Art Week in October was France’s first retrospective of Mark Rothko since 1999 at Fondation Louis Vuitton (on view April 2, 2024). Featuring 115 works sourced from the world’s top collections, the Paris exhibition poses a chronological look at Rothko’s famed career. The show takes visitors from the urban landscapes prevalent in the artist’s earlier practice in the 1930s through his evolution towards abstraction and his later work. Featured are prominent and noteworthy pieces like Multiforms from 1946, marking a definite change towards abstraction, the set of murals commissioned for the Philip Johnson-designed Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram building, in 1958, which the artist never delivered, and some of the artist’s last work from the 1969-1970 Black and Gray series.

Best of 2023: Jim Denevan at Manar Abu Dhabi 

On November 20 in Abu Dhabi, American artist Jim Denevan debuted his otherworldly, site-specific land work, Self Similar, on Fahid Island. Currently on view through January 30, 2024, the sweeping presentation launched the Department of Culture and Tourism’s latest initiative and public light art exhibition: Manar Abu Dhabi. Curated by Reem Fadda, Director of Abu Dhabi Culture Programming and Cultural Foundation, and Artistic Director of Public Art Abu Dhabi; alongside Alia Zaal Lootah, Manar Abu Dhabi Curator, Denevan’s awe-inspiring installation joins 35 other site-specific artworks created by both local and international visionaries including Carsten Höller, Latifa Saeed, Mohammed Kazem, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Shezad Dawood, and teamLab. Deeply inspired by the exhibition’s poetic theme, Grounding Light, Self Similar is the artist’s most expansive work, as well as one of the largest artworks in history; the temporary sand installation is comprised of 19 concentric circles which give way to 448 pyramids and mounds in a hypnotic mandala pattern.