The New Yorker:

Julian Lucas
A staff writer covering the arts and the politics of history.

Art is forever changing, but museums and monuments usually stay put—not this year, though. In 2025, the Trump Administration defunded hundreds of art organizations, targeted the Smithsonian for censorship, and called for the restoration of Confederate statues, several of which had already been critically dismembered by contemporary artists for the iconoclastic L.A. show “Monuments.” Kara Walker fused Stonewall Jackson and his horse into a zombie centaur—a perfect emblem for an art world struggling to reinvent itself in an era of culture-war whiplash.

Even straightforwardly historical shows felt like commentary. Surrealism, whose founders fought fascism in Europe, prolonged its centenary, with New York surveys of Man Ray and Wifredo Lam, a perennial refugee who infused the movement with Afro-Cuban spirituality, and with the arrival, in Philadelphia, of a landmark survey of the movement. The vogue for diverse portraiture receded—or fell victim to the anti-“D.E.I.” purge—but MOMA dedicated dazzling retrospectives to two late, great nonwhite abstractionists, Ruth Asawa, who sculpted with wire, having spent part of her childhood in an internment camp ringed with it, and Jack Whitten. A groundbreaking survey on the origins of modern gay and trans identities opened at the Chicago exhibition space Wrightwood 659, after larger institutions, likely fearful of political backlash, demurred.

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