There’s no gallery show this year with a more eyebrow-raising title than “The Bitch,” and it would be hard to think of a more singular setting for a duo presentation of art by Matthew Barney and Alex Katz than the decrepit and at least a little bit creepy former restaurant space that currently plays home to O’Flaherty’s in New York.

Followers of the enigmatic gallery founded by the painter Jamian Juliano-Villani have been treated to a wild assortment of exhibitions over the past three years, from shows of sculptures of psycho toddlers to performers rubbing themselves with Vaseline, and “The Bitch”—on view through December 19 and very likely never to be duplicated again—is another one for the annals.

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At the entryway is a centerpiece of a sort: a video for which Barney, continuing his long-running series of “Drawing Restraint” works, filmed the 97-year-old Katz climbing up and down a ladder to make a painting. Katz is more agile than might be expected, and the mix of his movements with the contemplativeness of his gaze is transfixing over the course of close to an hour. Also confounding—especially given the three-screen display split between TVs hanging from the ceiling in an arrangement that evokes a sort of ghostly sports bar.

“I wanted to approach it like an athletic event and focus on Alex’s movement and his physicality, particularly his moves up and down the ladder,” Barney said in an interview at O’Flaherty’s last week. “He has a rigorous and consistent exercise regime. As I understand the way his painting works into his day, it’s a very physical thing for him. It’s a physical practice, and he trains for his physical practice. It’s one of the reasons why it felt like a ‘Drawing Restraint’ could be made with Alex as the subject.”

Amplifying the sporting atmosphere are brief interludes during which the screens turn to squint-inducing flashes of orange and blue soundtracked by moody disruptions of electronic sound. “We were thinking about those as commercial breaks in the context of a sports broadcast, how you’re in one situation and then you’re suddenly thrown aggressively into another,” Barney said. “It’s loud and has a different energy to what you’ve been seeing.”

Lorraine O’Grady, an artist who bravely used her conceptual pieces and performance art to critique systems of power, incisively underlining the ways that class, race, and gender influence one another, died at her home in New York on Friday.

Her death was announced by a trust in her name; its announcement did not specify a cause.

O’Grady developed a loyal following for artworks that often proved unclassifiable. She produced photographs, collages, and performances, and wrote frequently, on topics ranging from her own work to Édouard Manet’s Olympia, from feminism to Surrealism, from rock music to her own biography. Across much of her work, she dedicated herself to prioritizing the perspectives of Black women.

Her art critiqued racism, misogyny, and privilege, but it did so using methods that were ambiguous and occasionally even tough to interpret. She spoke frequently of wanting to use what she called “both/and thinking” that stood against Western systems, which she wrote are “continuously birthing supremacies from the intimate to the political, of which white supremacy may be only the most all-inclusive.”

O’Grady’s defining artworks are the performances she did during the early ’80s in which she took up a character called Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, a vampy pageant queen who wore a sash bearing her name and brought with her a cat-o’-nine-tails. Without invitation and performing in character, O’Grady arrived at New York gallery openings, where she whipped herself and read aloud a brief statement. It culminated in an abrasive diagnosis of the cultural scene: “Black Art Must Take More Risks!” Few could accuse O’Grady of failing to fulfill her own directive.

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’Tis the season, which means it’s time to start racking your brain for gift ideas. But if your list happens to include artists or art lovers, the choice is a no-brainer: Give them a book on art. Whether it’s an artist bio, a novel, or a sumptuously illustrated catalog, it’s bound to be appreciated (unless you’ve seriously misjudged the recipient’s preferences in art—in which case, it’s the thought that counts). Needless to say, there are thousands of titles out there. To help you make the right choice, we offer our recommendations for the best 2024 art books for giving. (Prices and availability current at time of publication.)

For 10 years, the critic and educator Maurice Berger wrote a column for the New York Times titled “Race Stories.” Writing about photographs, he wanted to teach visual literacy, and then “racial literacy through visual literacy.” The column championed the work of photographers, like Jamel Shabazz, Zanele Muholi, Carrie Mae Weems, Nona Faustine, and Gordon Parks, whose projects—whether of social documentary or artistic exploration—impressed Berger.

This month, a collection of nearly 70 of those short essays is being published by Aperture, in collaboration with the New York Times, the first in a “Vision and Justice” series of books edited by Sarah Lewis, Deborah Willis, and Leigh Raiford. Berger, who died of Covid in the early days of the pandemic, liked to “write about photographers who tell big stories—not just about the conflagrations… but about what happens every single day in the lives of others,” as he put it in 2018. Edited by Marvin Heiferman, a writer, curator, and Berger’s widow, Race Stories: Essays on the Power of Images is thoughtfully arranged in five sections based on themes woven from Berger’s ideological threads: revisiting images, visibility, history and memory, witnessing, and community.

Zun Lee: Bedtime shenanigans with Carlos Richardson and his daughter Selah, 2012. From Race Stories: Essays on the Power of Images, 2024.

Berger’s multiyear column possesses a sustained inner chutzpah that will be especially noticeable to anyone who has written professionally and consistently about art for any significant length of time. The dizzying amount of press releases, constraints of word count, the need to balance personal and house styles: a minimum trifecta of considerations that he would have had to deal with, month after month. He remained on message with obvious dedication; it must have helped that there was always material to work with.

In almost every essay, Berger examines the photographers and their work in adulatory fashion. This is notable. Could this have been because his “greatest passion is to be an educator,” as he says in the foreword? It would have been odd if he were to criticize the work of Black or Indian or Chicana or Japanese photographers, while asking white readers to empathize with their perspectives. But praise is not the absence of conscientiousness, which Berger excelled in. One should only consider how he wrote about figures or images likely familiar to his readers—Joane Wilson in front of a “colored entrance” sign, Malcolm X reading a newspaper, Martin Luther King Jr. in a conversation with his daughter, Brittany Bree Newsome removing a Confederate flag—then re-examined those momentous pictures, carefully assembling cultural and historical data. In “The Faces of Bigotry,” for instance, he draws parallels between Samuel Corum’s 2017 photograph of Peter Cvjetanovic, marching alongside others at a counterprotest led by neo-Nazis, White Supremacists, and the Alt-Right at the University of Virginia; and the 1957 image by Will Counts of students shouting insults at Elizabeth Eckford as she attempts to integrate a high school in Arkansas.

Deborah Willis: Carrie in EuroSalon, Eaton, Florida, 2004. From Race Stories: Essays on the Power of Images, 2024.

He did not spare chastisement, however, when writing about Dana Schutz’s painterly interpretation of Emmett Till’s open casket, which reads, says Berger, “like it was made in a historical and cultural vacuum,” and felt like “another violation” of the teenager’s body. His interest in Schutz’s cross-cultural work—and indeed in other white photographers whose images he wrote about, like Lee Friedlander and Florence Mars —is notable for what it says about how he viewed himself as a Jewish American writing mostly about Black photographers. “Cross-cultural work demands insight, respect, sensitivity, and rigor. It also requires honesty about and self-inquiry into one’s own racial attitudes,” he wrote in that 2017 essay about Till’s image.

President Joe Biden recently announced the establishment of a new national monument acknowledging the history of the residential school system, which oppressed thousands of Indigenous children and their families during the course of more than 150 years.

Pennsylvania’s Carlisle Federal Indian Boarding School National Monument will honor the Indigenous children who were forcibly taken from their parents and communities and barred from speaking their languages or practicing their culture. In government-operated residential schools in the US, these children were also frequently abused.

Approximately 7,800 Indigenous children from more than 140 tribes were sent to the former Carlisle Indian Industrial School between the institution’s founding in 1879 and its closure in 1918. However, federally subsidized residential schools for Indigenous and Native children continued to operate until the 1960s.

The residential school’s campus was designated a national historic landmark in 1961 and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1966. In addition to 24 historic structures, the Carlisle School campus includes school road gateposts that were constructed through children’s labor.

Biden’s proclamation on December 9 acknowledged how thousands of American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian children were removed from their families and tribes, “often by force or coercion,” and sent to educational institutions like Carlisle under the federal government’s goal of assimilation. Indigenous children were subject to physical abuse, compulsory labor, corporal punishment, sexual abuse, inadequate medical care, insufficient nutrition, and non-consensual haircuts, as well as the removal of traditional clothes and names.

Venice will double its tourist entry fee to €10 in 2025, despite data that suggest the measure failed to reduce visitor numbers during its trial period in 2024.

The initial €5 fee was implemented to curb overtourism in a city that has become known for it. The fee was applied on 29 selected days between April and July 2024, all of them coinciding with the Venice Biennale, which brings in a vast number of international visitors from the art world to the city every two years.

According to data collected by city officials, there was an average increase of 7,000 visitors on these days compared to the same dates a year earlier in 2023. Venice, which has an estimated 50,000 residents, draws around 40,000 tourists daily.

In 2025, the plan will be expanded so that it applies to tourists entering the city on 54 days. Those days include weekends, public holidays, and peak travel periods between April 18 and late July. Visitors booking less than four days in advance will pay the €10 fee, which applies to day-trippers over age 14 entering Venice’s historic center between 8:30 a.m. and 4 p.m. Exemptions remain in place for Venetian residents, hotel guests, students, workers, and others.

In a statement to the Art Newspaper, Jan Van Der Borg, a tourism economics professor at Ca’ Foscari University, was critical of the fee structure, which he said would be ineffective at limiting growing crowds in Venice. “The ticket will increase municipal income but won’t impact tourist flows,” Van Der Borg said.

Oren and Tal Alexander, major luxury real estate brokers in New York and Miami, were arrested Wednesday in Miami on federal sex trafficking charges. Their brother, Alon, who was not a broker, was also arrested.

A federal indictment unsealed Wednesday accuses the brothers of conspiring to “repeatedly and violently drug, sexually assault and rape dozens of women” for over a decade.

“At times, the Alexander brothers arranged for these sexual assaults well in advance, using the promise of luxury experiences, travel and accommodations to lure and entice women to locations where they were then forcibly raped or sexually assaulted, sometimes by multiple men, including one or more of the Alexander brothers,” the indictment said.

The sex trafficking scheme allegedly dated back to 2010, according to the indictment.

While the Alexander brothers were not art collectors, they orbited in the same ultra-wealthy New York and Miami social worlds. The brothers grew up in Miami and were sons of a wealthy real-estate developer in South Florida. Starting in 2012, the brothers began work at Douglas Elliman, one of the top real estate brokerages in the US, where they quickly ascended the luxury real estate world.

Following the successful reversal of a Tasmanian court case, a women-only art installation will reopen at the Museum of Old and New Art (Mona) in Hobart, Australia.

Artist and curator Kirsha Kaechele’s work, titled Ladies Lounge, made headlines when Jason Lau filed suit against the institution, claiming his rights were violated when he was denied access to the installation in April 2023. He then complained to Tasmania’s Anti-Discrimination Commissioner, who referred him to the tribunal.

In response, Kaechele argued that the artwork is intentionally hypocritical. The piece references a moment in Australian history before women won the right to drink in the nation’s pubs in 1965. Until then, women were either relegated to side rooms, where they were charged exorbitantly, or barred from these kinds of establishments altogether.

Though the tribunal upheld the decision, ordering the museum to stop turning away male visitors from its installation, Australia’s Supreme Court later overturned the tribunal’s order, ruling that the Ladies Lounge was not discriminatory. The installation has now reopened, with champagne served by male butlers available to its female viewers.

“Welcome back, ladies,” Kaechele said in a release. “Through the court case, the Ladies Lounge has transcended the art museum and come to life. People from all over the world have been invited to contemplate the experiences of women throughout history and today.

Zoé Whitley will leave her post as director of the Chisenhale Gallery, a London art space with a record of spinning venturesome emerging artists into bona fide stars.

Whitley’s last day there will be March 1, 2025. The Chisenhale Gallery’s announcement of her departure did not state her next steps.

Her five-year tenure at the Chisenhale Gallery has seen the space mount shows for artists ranging from Lotus L. Kang to Nikita Gale. Both of those artists figured in this year’s Whitney Biennial after having shown there first.

Further signs of the Chisenhale Gallery’s influence arrived at this year’s Venice Biennale, which featured work by Rindon Johnson that had appeared first at the London art space three years prior. Commissioned works by Johnson were acquired out of the 2021 Chisenhale show by collector Bob Rennie and Luxembourg’s MUDAM museum.

Alia Farid, Benoît Pieron, and Rachel Jones also had shows at the Chisenhale Gallery under Whitley’s leadership.

This year, the art world went on a high fiber diet. Abstract weavings, knotted sculptures, expressive basketry, shaggy wall hangings: all are coming out of artist’s studios and museum storerooms, lending much-needed warmth and complexity to exhibition spaces. The moment has been a long time coming. Textile, of course, is among the most ancient of human endeavors; tapestry once outranked painting in the hierarchy of the arts. But modern fiber art has rarely gotten much respect. It’s one period of ascendancy came in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the Lausanne Tapestry Biennale was at its height, and the American counterculture, with its earnestly handcrafted aesthetics, was in full bloom. That was only a brief episode, though. A genre rooted in ancient techniques, adjacent to amateur pursuits, and—above all—mainly practiced by women and people of color? That was never going to command elite institutional attention for long.

Art history has a way of correcting its mistakes, though, and those aspects of fiber art that once marginalized the medium now make it feel relevant. Just like ceramics, which has enjoyed a parallel rise to prominence, textiles offer much of what the art world wants right now: under-explored histories, personal narrative, material intelligence, and demographic diversity.

The revival has taken ten years to gather strength. Arguably, it was initiated by curator Janelle Porter’s pioneering exhibition “Fiber Sculpture 1960-Present,” held at the ICA Boston in 2014. Since then, curator Ann Coxon has mounted well-received retrospectives of Anni Albers and Magdalena Abakanowicz at Tate Modern, and the discipline’s grande dame, Sheila Hicks, has been the subject of several major shows. (She has one this year, too, in Dusseldorf.)

2024 has been truly unprecedented though, with a thick pile of projects to unpick. Here are ten of the best.

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