Why These Collectors Are Building a Platform for Southeast Asian Women Artists in London https://ift.tt/lkmZDsQ

After 23 years based in Singapore, Krystina Lyon and her husband Mark Budden are returning to London, but they plan to take the cultural influences of Southeast Asia with them.

Over the past three decades, the couple has amassed around 200 works of art that trace both the arc of Southeast Asia’s contemporary scene and their personal journey as collectors.

In their collection are works by Charles Lim Yi Yong, who represented Singapore at the Venice Biennale in 2015; Maria Madeira, who gave a voice to Timor-Leste in its inaugural Venice Biennale pavilion in 2024; the British abstract expressionist Albert Irvin; and the British Balinese artist Sinta Tantra.

For their next chapter in London, the couple plans to focus their collection on Southeast Asian women artists. “The women artists in my collections are articulating histories, untold stories, and struggles that are important to understanding Southeast Asia now,” said Lyon.

Tentatively named the Nassim Road Collection—after the street in Singapore where they lived—the couple hopes it will become a platform for deeper research into the history of contemporary art in the region.

“It would be nice to make it a place of encounter where students, scholars, and visitors can engage with the collection,” Lyon added. “Where dialogues around gender, history, and contemporary art in Southeast Asia can continue.”

From decoration to devotion

Like many collectors, Krystina Lyon and her husband first began buying art as a way to decorate their home, with early purchases including a set of screenprints from Kee Levi.

When the couple relocated to Singapore in the early 2000s, their business grew, and so did their collection. Paintings, artifacts, collectible Danish furniture: The range widened, and Lyon found herself with more time to devote to her own passion.

She began volunteering as a docent at heritage and history museums, including the Peranakan Museum, the Malay Heritage Centre, and the National Gallery Singapore. “Through them, I gained a much deeper knowledge of national histories in Singapore and in the region,” she noted.

Gradually, her focus shifted from heritage to the immediacy of contemporary art. The turning point came in 2014, when Lyon volunteered as a guide for a major exhibition at the now-defunct Centre for Contemporary Art.

Titled “No Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia,” it featured 19 works by 16 artists and collectives from 11 countries, including Shilpa Gupta, The Propeller Group, and Aung Myint.

It delved into the diversity of art practice, exploring everything from the legacy of major political events such as the Indian Partition to the perception of womanhood and family.

The show had a profound emotional effect. “My husband and I always remember walking into that exhibition and seeing Tayeba Begum Lipi’s bed made of razor blades and Sopheap Pich’s Morning Glory (2011), woven from rattan.”

“These works were no longer about national narratives; they were questioning, reshaping, and telling their own stories,” she said.

Nearly a decade later, in her living room, sit two glass-encased works by Lipi: a pair of palm-sized baby shoes—Lost (2019)—and a set of stiletto heels—Her Stilettos 1 (Day) (2019)—both cut from the glint of razor blades.

For the works, Lipi draws on her roots in Bangladesh, where access to healthcare is limited. The razor blade is a tool used to sever an umbilical cord, and Lipi turns that brutal necessity into a metaphor for the struggles faced by women in her home country.

A collection with an academic catalyst

What ultimately steered Lyon toward collecting women artists with intention was her enrollment in a joint MA program in Asian art histories.

“When I began researching women’s art collectives in Southeast Asia, I started to see patterns, urgencies, and resonances I hadn’t noticed before,” Lyon said. “I realized I had to marshal my resources to build a collection with real depth and coherence.”

One of the first works Lyon acquired by a Southeast Asian women artist was Ad Infinitum (2019) in 2021 by Melbourne-based Indonesian artist Octora Chan. Chan is known for interrogating how ethnographic portraits of Indonesian women produced during the colonial era continue to shape perceptions of gender in the region today. In Ad Infinitum, she restaged a photograph of a Legong dancer. Legong, a classical Balinese court dance, has long been performed by women. Yet under colonial rule, dancers were often stripped of their individuality and treated as objects of exotic curiosity.

“I was immediately intrigued by the layered narrative in the work,” Lyon said. “I was familiar with parts of Dutch colonial history in the East Indies, but this was the first time I encountered a young contemporary artist critiquing that period in a way that also engaged with current sociopolitical issues.”

In 2024, Lyon purchased another work by Chan, Recoup 1920: wuorv egnoj (2023), the artist’s first foray into tapestry.

Here, Chan restages herself as the subject of an ethnographic portrait of Balinese women shown from a three-quarter back view. Golden threads glint in her earrings and hair ornaments, set against the muted tones of merino wool, imbuing the work with elegance and softness.

“This is probably what they would have liked to show the colonizers—not everything, just their backs,” Lyon said. “It’s as if she’s giving them their agency back.”

A collection of dialogue

For Lyon, collecting has always been about “dialogue rather than possession.”

“It reflects what I have learned from living here [in Singapore] for over three decades,” she said.

Her commitment extends beyond acquiring works, as she revealed plans to lend several pieces to museum exhibitions next year in both London and Boston. But the culmination of her research and collecting philosophy will arrive next year with the publication of her book, You Are Seen: Women’s Contemporary Art Practices in Southeast Asia.

The volume, set to coincide with the Art SG art fair in January, spotlights 35 women artists from nine ASEAN countries. Drawing from her personal collection and spanning both emerging and established voices, the book served a crucial purpose for her. “The aim is not to speak for these artists, but to amplify the resonance of their work,” she said. “I hope to continue this journey through speaking, writing, and sharing the collection so that others can encounter them, too.”

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The Artists on Our Radar in 2025 https://ift.tt/sJNVEDG

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The Best Public Art of 2025 https://ift.tt/8QDXqpa

This year’s standout public artworks brought civic imagination into parks, mountains, tunnels, and rooftops. From interactive sculptures to ecologically attuned installations, artists around the world are expanding the role of public art as a catalyst for reflection, play, and connection. The art and design fabrication company UAP has revealed its annual list of the most notable public art projects of 2025, curated in partnership with six internationally recognized curators.

The 2025 projects were selected by Salamishah Tillet, Pulitzer Prize–winning critic at the New York Times; Amanda Abi Khalil, founder of TAP (Temporary Art Platform); Pojai Akratanakul, curator of the 2026 Timor-Leste Pavilion at the Venice Biennale; and Deborah McCormick, a public arts strategist. They collaborated with Natasha Smith, UAP’s director of curatorial, and Danielle Robson, principal curator and curatorial manager at UAP.

“This year’s cohort of contributing curators presents a powerhouse of women, leading in the arts and reporting from New York to Beirut and beyond,” Smith said. “The artworks featured render this year of 2025 in a diversity of forms, color, light, culture and beauty.”

Ja’Hari Ortega

Big Hoops to Fill (2025)

Boston

Travel to downtown Boston until next October, and you’ll come across a large-scale sculpture I would never have imagined as a Black girl growing up in [Boston neighborhood] Dorchester in the early 1980s. Currently on display at the Rose Kennedy Greenway, you can catch Ja’Hari Ortega’s Big Hoops to Fill, a functioning swing set in the form of gigantic gold bamboo earrings, or, as they are colloquially known, “door knockers.” Roxbury-born artist Ortega grew up mesmerized by the jewelry her mother adorned and shared with her. She also remembers how Black and Latinx girls and women popularized gold bamboo earrings within hip-hop’s early days.

Made of steel, resin, and fiberglass composite, epoxy paint, and polyurethane, Ortega’s 10-foot-tall monument recognizes the cultural significance of these earrings and rightly credits the mainly urban, working-class girls and women of color who wear them as critical artistic innovators and fashion influencers.

—Salamishah Tillet

Nekisha Durrett

Don’t Forget to Remember (Me) (2025)

Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania

When Bryn Mawr College, a private women’s liberal arts college in Pennsylvania, admitted its first African American student, Enid Cook, in 1927, she was not allowed to live on campus. Finding housing off campus, she had to travel a mile to attend classes and was the only Black student enrolled there until she graduated in 1931. The only other African Americans she encountered were those hired to maintain campus grounds. Today, Cook’s name and those of other African Americans who worked as groundskeepers, housekeepers, waitstaff, and laundresses from 1900 to 1930 are inscribed on nearly 250 bricks, forming a monument to their lives.

Commissioned by Bryn Mawr College in partnership with Monument Lab, Nekisha Durrett’s Don’t Forget to Remember (Me) is a winding brick pathway outside the cloisters of Bryn Mawr’s Old Library. Woven together, the bricks form braids or plaited hairstyles. This symbol, alongside those bricks made of glass and designed to be lit up at night, invokes Cook’s body and her daily walk on campus, and insists on the remembrance of the many who labored and dedicated their lives to a college that neither they nor most of their children could attend. Subtle and yet sophisticated, Don’t Forget to Remember (Me) engages the complex histories of racial discrimination, diversity, and desegregation in higher education by inviting all who walk on this path to never forget.

—Salamishah Tillet

Shaikha Almazrou

Deliberate Pauses (2025)

Hatta, United Arab Emirates

Shaikha Almazrou’s Deliberate Pauses is a defining gesture in the evolving field of public art in the Gulf. Installed across the terrain of Hatta and Leem Lake, five red, reflective sculptures are dispersed across the mountains and hiking paths, entering into dialogue with the wind, the light, and the bodies that traverse them.

Globally, public art is increasingly shifting from object-based commissions toward situated practices that address ecology, access, and coexistence. Almazrou’s work embodies this shift. It rejects spectacle and decoration, the tropes that have often defined public art in Dubai, and replaces them with presence, attention, and reciprocity.

In a context where visibility is often conflated with value, Deliberate Pauses invites another temporality, one of slowness, listening, and stillness as political gestures. This work opens a necessary space for reflection. It asks how we might inhabit the landscape differently and what it means to pause deliberately within the urgencies of our time.

—Amanda Abi Khalil

Laura Lima

Indistinct Form (2025)

Boston

Laura Lima’s Indistinct Form expands the field of public art beyond the human gaze. Installed within the Boston Nature Center, the work redefines spectatorship by shifting attention toward the nonhuman. Lima creates sculptural environments not for people to look at, but for birds and woodland creatures to inhabit, occupy, and transform.

Working in close collaboration with wildlife experts from Instituto Vida Livre in Rio de Janeiro and the Mass Audubon Boston Nature Center, Lima designed a series of sculptural elements that function as both habitat and gesture. These forms, produced with local artisans in wood and ceramics, operate within a living ecosystem where authorship is shared and unpredictable.

This work is radical in its simplicity: It recognizes that the aesthetic experience is not exclusive to humans and that art can emerge from interspecies proximity, touch, and use. Within a global landscape of public art still driven by visibility and human-centered narratives, Indistinct Form proposes a more porous, ethical, and generous form of creation—one that listens before it speaks.

—Amanda Abi Khalil

Antony Gormley

Close (2025)

Bukhara, Uzbekistan

The inaugural Bukhara Biennial, “Recipes for a Broken Heart,” curated by Diana Campbell, activates the historical UNESCO heritage city, once the heart of the Silk Road. Antony Gormley’s Close (2025), a collaboration with Uzbekistani artist Temur Jumaev and local brickmakers, is one of the biennial’s most ambitious site-specific commissions. Situated within the ruins of the Khoja Kalon mosque built in 1598, the work comprises 95 tons of unfired sun-dried earth and straw. The bricks were hand-made to form “pixelated” bodies, employing the same vernacular techniques of how buildings in the city were made. Visitors navigate the maze-like installation, encountering 100 sculptures in crouching, reclining, or meditating postures, compelling a close proximity and bodily engagement. Absorbing its heritage context, the artwork appears to transform throughout the day with the play of light and shadow. It extends Gormley’s longstanding exploration of material physicality, the way parts come together as a whole, and his interests in human history, while addressing the idea of the body as a dwelling.

The experience is universal, appealing to audiences of all ages. It truly achieves what public art in a biennale setting is supposed to do, and not only connecting with the art crowds, but truly engaging with the site. It prompts visitors, whether local or international, to reconnect with their roots and question how one coexists, belongs, and takes part in history.

—Pojai Akratanakul

Tuan Andrew Nguyen

Temple (2025)

Singapore

Temple (2025) by Tuan Andrew Nguyen is a new sculpture commissioned for the Ng Teng Fong Roof Garden of the National Gallery Singapore, co-presented with the Singapore Art Museum at the launch of the eighth Singapore Biennale, [which is titled] “pure intention.”

Forming the foundation of this work, an abstract and geometrical bright red structure stands with extended curved legs made of industrial steel, evoking construction sites in one of Southeast Asia’s most vertical metropolises. Hung from these frames are six instruments—discs, chimes, bells, and gongs—that create an ambient soundscape. They are forged from alloys of unexploded ordnance (UXO) removed from the ground of Quảng Trị in central Vietnam. This material bears testament to the Vietnam War, which left countries like Laos and Vietnam as the most bombed areas in the world per capita. To this day, the remains of the two million tons of ordnance dropped in the 1960s–70s still threaten daily lives.

Nguyen’s installation subtly demands awareness of this trauma. The instruments, tuned to frequencies believed to promote somatic healing, urge visitors to rest and listen, and perhaps spend time with the piece. Situated right in the center of Singapore’s civic district, the artwork calls for the attention of nearby high-rise dwellers and office workers, making visible the buried history of the war and unheard stories of loss, while making a new form from these remnants, thereby exploring a path towards restoration and peace.

—Pojai Akratanakul

Judy Darragh

Ether (2025)

Auckland

Commissioned by Sudima Auckland City Hotel, Ether takes its inspiration from its location. The hotel sits on Auckland city’s Nelson Street ridge, and Sunset, the rooftop bar, takes in dramatic views west over the Waitematā Harbour to the Waitakere Ranges. At 11 metres in length, Ether is an epic work for the four-and-a-half-star hotel. It is the first permanent artwork of this type and scale in the country. The sculpture redefines the heart of New Zealand’s largest city with adventurous colour and form—appearing to escape from its glassed atrium. The sculpture includes a built-in fan to keep its form fully inflated and alive.

Darragh is a maker of magical artworks that leave memorable impressions on viewers. She says she wants us to “feel knocked out” when viewing this work. “When we look at art...it should be something that is transformative.”

While public art in Aotearoa New Zealand is a growing space, it’s an area dominated by men. Ether presents an opportunity to highlight women’s public art. Darragh coedited the publication Femisphere and has long advocated for better visibility for women artists. Ether is an outstanding contribution to an urban neighbourhood already notable for its public civic art, firmly anchoring the Sudima Auckland City hotel as a contributor to the location and community.

—Deborah McCormick

Mike Hewson

The Key’s Under the Mat (2025)

Sydney

I met Mike Hewson during the Earthquake recovery period in Ōtautahi Christchurch [New Zealand]. His greatest feat, The Key’s Under the Mat, is a masterclass in community and socially engaged public art practice. It is a boundary-testing social sculpture across a 2,200 square metre space in the Nelson Packer Tank and came to life under the curatorship of Justin Paton at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

The ambition is high, with the Kiwi number eight wire innovation mentality across the entire project in spades. Mike’s training as an engineer and a conceptual artist come together to refashion and repurpose found items into one large play space for young and old. Mike’s design ingenuity, resourcefulness, can-do attitude, and ability to think laterally to solve a problem have brought to life artworks, play areas, and places to be. It’s a combination park, playground, barbeque, laundromat, steam room, recording studio, artist-in-residence space, construction site and commons; all for anyone to use.

For me, this artwork ultimately challenged our perceptions of the gallery environment (especially how we can behave within it), and what is public art. With over 100,000 visitors since the opening in October, the community’s response to this project is a message to the art institution: This is right on the pulse of what people want from their public art gallery.

—Deborah McCormick

Tony Albert and Nell

The Big Hose (2025)

Brisbane

The concept behind Tony Albert and Nell’s The Big Hose speaks to the quintessential Queenslander vernacular, where one might find the garden hose strewn across the front yard after a bit of water play on a hot summer’s day. This hose is supersized to join Australia’s list of “big” things and to take your imagination to new heights. The work is much more layered and nuanced than just this of course, with meanings inspired through local histories of First Peoples, migration, and art.

Measuring 119 meters in length, twisting and looping around the bright orange soft fall ground, it seemed to me like a friendly green tree snake. Its bright surface is adorned with an intricate boomerang pattern (so very Tony), emulating a braided hose design. It is truly a sight to behold, with treasures to discover, like the Lemon Migrant Butterfly who gently perches on its tallest arc, the smiley face wooden seating (so very Nell), and the sleepy “Kuril” water rat, hiding in the cool of the hose connector.

I am such a fan—as a public art curator, as a mother of an 11-year-old, and as an adult dreaming of being young once more—it has something to offer us all!

—Natasha Smith

Maurizio Cattelan

Where is Maurizio? (2025)

New York, London, Amsterdam

Public artwork, participatory game, marketing gesture, or conceptual prank? Maurizio Cattelan’s Where is Maurizio? was all of the above—and deliberately so. Conceived as an international treasure hunt, the project was commissioned by Avant Arte, unfolding online and in real time between September 30 and October 7, 2025.

Three hand-painted, miniature self-portrait sculptures [each individually titled We are the Revolution] by Cattelan were discreetly placed for sale in everyday retail settings: a New York bodega for $0.50, a London fruit stall for £0.99, and an Amsterdam antique shop for €5.00. This radical repositioning stood in stark contrast to the editioned works’ gallery price of €1,500, humorously subverting notions of value, access, and authorship in the art market. Digital clues to each sculpture’s whereabouts invited global participation: The New York piece could be purchased in person, while the London and Amsterdam works were sold via an online entry form stating the correct location. The first find—resting on a newspaper in a Soho corner store—occurred within two hours of a nondescript image being shared online.

Cattelan is renowned for his incisive, satirical practice that interrogates and destabilises the hierarchies of the art world through wit and provocation. When developing his idea for Where is Maurizio?, his duct-taped, store-bought banana work, Comedian (2019), had recently sold at auction for $6.2 million. America (2016), Cattelan’s fully operational toilet cast in solid gold, was also making headlines, and at the time of writing, has just sold for $12.1 million.

For the 11,000 participants who hunted for a “bargain” artwork, there were countless others who may have seen the small, hunched figure for sale while going about their day, unknowingly missing the chance to acquire an “art jackpot.”

—Danielle Robson

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The Most-Read Artist Profiles of 2025 https://ift.tt/uoWg3Mc

Over the course of 2025, Artsy writers highlighted some of the most exciting artists working today. This year, we brought you closer to rising painters poised for major success as well as monumental artists whose recognition is long overdue. Nostalgic landscapes, energetic figuration, and boundary-breaking works that redefine painting are just a few of the themes that our readers were captivated by. Talking to artists is one of the privileges of writing about art: Their stories help draw back the curtain on how they create, bringing the magic of art closer to more people every day.

Here, we round up some of the Artsy profiles of artists you loved the most this year.

At 94, Isabella Ducrot Is Gaining Overdue Recognition for Her Tender Paintings

“Ducrot’s life story proves the maxim that it’s never too late. The artist herself is a model of persistence. Over the past four decades, Ducrot has created a body of work that invites us to examine the world more closely: how it moves, recurs, and affects us.”

Read our interview with Isabella Ducrot to discover the painter’s daily rituals.

Rising Painter Eva Helene Pade Captures the Rhythm of Dancing Bodies

“Over the course of her ascendant career, she’s earned a reputation for well-placed art-historic references, evoking the Expressionism of German painter Otto Dix and the golden haze of Vienna Secessionist Gustav Klimt alike. ‘Some of it is conscious, and some of it is unconscious,’ Pade commented.”

Explore the artist’s inspirations in our interview with Eva Helene Pade.

At 92, Olga de Amaral Is Still Pushing Fiber Art Forward

“Handmade fiber, horsehair, plastic, and gold: The materials interlaced into Amaral’s textiles testify to her meticulous, lifelong attention to texture and form. For six decades, her sculptural, often colossal work has challenged categorizations of ‘craft’ and ‘art,’ an approach that has also brought newfound recognition for contemporaries in textile art Sheila Hicks and Magdalena Abakanowicz. At 92, Amaral is now receiving recognition for her intricate textiles, such as the ‘Brumas.’”

Learn more about Olga de Amaral’s career in our interview.

Geoffroy Pithon’s Kaleidoscopic Works Redefine What Painting Can Be

“He rarely begins with a blank page; sometimes the works begin with digital prints of rough sketches he produces on the computer, or hand-drawn pencil lines for guidance, and other times he searches the large-format works leftover from site-specific installations for “the most efficient parts,” which he then cuts out and reworks. He compares this process to sampling with music, ‘only instead of sampling from another artist, I am sampling from my own work,’ he said.”

Read our interview with Geoffroy Pithon to get a feel for the artist’s process.

Late Painter Mavis Pusey’s Geometric Abstractions Were Always Ahead of Their Time

“Though prolific in her work and well-connected, Pusey, like many other women artists of her time, was largely overlooked within art history. ‘She was a woman artist, but she was also a Black woman artist working in abstraction; the art world has not been kind to Black women abstract artists.’”

Explore the legacy of this underrecognized Black woman artist in our interview with Mavis Pusey.

Painter Bianca Raffaella Is Registered Blind—and Depicts the World as She Sees It

“She is drawn to flowers in particular as a symbol of finite beauty in the world that is often undervalued. ‘Sight is also finite, and we often don’t appreciate different layers of vision. My work is a conversation between these two important subjects,’ she said.”

Dive into an unconventional practice through our interview with Bianca Raffaella.

Rising Painter Emil Sands Finds Beauty in the Vulnerability of the Human Form

“Today, Sands obsessively paints bodies—imagined, inspired by friends, or his own. These figures inhabit isolated, sometimes eerie, landscapes, often near water. The resulting impressionistic tableaux present an intimate study of the human form, where partially bare bodies are subject to the same attention that Sands gives himself.”

Read more about these paintings of bodies and perception in our interview with Emil Sands.

Christina Kimeze’s Freewheeling Paintings Capture the Joy of Rollerskating

“For ‘Between Wood and Wheel,’ Kimeze has homed in on Black roller-skating groups in the U.K. and U.S. These paintings evoke ideas of flight, freedom, and movement. Her figures, shown in fragments of faces and torsos, appear lost in serene or elated action, soaked in bright purple, yellow, and orange.”

Explore this vibrant solo show through our interview with Christina Kimeze.

Ronan Day-Lewis on Directing His Father and Painting from Nostalgia

“Many of his paintings feature…lustrous, dreamlike landscapes. This inspiration traces back to his childhood, particularly the months he spent in Marfa, Texas—when his father filmed There Will Be Blood (2007)—where the desert ‘embedded itself’ in his consciousness.”

Discover how memory informs this painter’s art in our interview with Ronan Day-Lewis.

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How One of New York’s Favorite Art Couples Built Their Exceptional Collection https://ift.tt/PEqs7fH

In 1990, Marc and Livia Straus spent several days with Anselm Kiefer in the Black Forest in southwestern Germany, where the artist maintained a studio. One work, titled Sefirot (1990), stopped the Strauses cold. The artist apparently liked it too—he was planning to keep it for himself.

Livia, a theologian, slipped into an intense back-and-forth with Kiefer about the Kabbalistic ladder embedded in the painting. Marc remembered thinking, “I just have to have this piece.” Moved by the interaction, Kiefer decided to part with the work. That towering piece now lives in the Strauses’ house in Chappaqua, New York, which they built in 1978. The episode is emblematic of how the Strauses collect: by instinct and by sustained engagement with living artists.

Today, Marc and Livia are among New York’s most respected champions of contemporary art. They’ve shaped their collection via decades of conversations in studios around the world. The couple lives between Manhattan and their Chappaqua home, filling their walls with mementos of these intimate experiences. Livia’s fascination with color and spirituality shaped their early taste. Marc is a retired oncologist and poet who gravitates toward difficult work he feels compelled to live with. In 2011, he founded the New York gallery Marc Straus. Together, the pair built Hudson Valley MOCA in Peekskill, New York, in 2004. Many of the works in their deeply personal collection wouldn’t exist without their patronage.

The story of the Strauses’ partnership began long before the Kiefer. Marc and Livia met on the first day of ninth grade in Long Island. They were friends before they started to date in their senior year. “I just knew I was going to marry this girl,” Marc recently told me. I was visiting their Chappaqua home, and he was sitting across the table from Livia. The pair wed in 1964 in their very early twenties. Marc entered medical school, and the pair moved into student housing in Brooklyn. There was barely enough room for the two of them, let alone an art collection.

The Strauses’ first acquisition was Kenneth Noland’s color-field painting Shift (1966), which now hangs in their son’s house. Their taste developed as they lived closely with every piece they bought, especially while they were surviving on modest salaries. Buying just one artwork a year taught them patience and precision. “One piece a year would be a lot for us,” Marc said. “It created a lot of discipline.” He still advocates a slow, thoughtful, and immersive approach to collecting.

While the couple made significant early purchases, they trace the true beginning of their collecting life to 1972. That year, they saw Ellsworth Kelly’s “Chatham” series, which features 14 paintings composed of two panels of solid color joined in upside-down “L” shapes. At the time, they were living in a small apartment in Maryland with two kids and a dog. They spent three months choosing the right “Chatham” work, then another six trying to secure a loan. Their ultimate purchase, Chatham VIII (1971), cost an entire year of Marc’s fellowship salary and took three years to pay off. That thrilling leap, Marc said, solidified their appetite for art.

The Kelly now lives in Marc’s office to the left of his desk. Another wall features Antonio Santín’s Trampolín (2025), a photorealistic painting of a crumpled, intricately patterned carpet. On the opposing wall is Susan Rothenberg’s Accident #3 (1993), part of the artist’s horse crash series. The second iteration of the series lives in the dining area downstairs. Nearly every artwork in the Strauses’ home has a personal anecdote attached. Marc recalls “many thousands” of studio visits around the world and a simple rule: “We never bought something we didn’t install,” he tells me. Living with the work was essential; it was how they learned from it.

Even contentious artist-collector relationships have proven fruitful. Soon after the Strauses moved to Chappaqua, they invited sculptor Richard Serra to make an indoor sculpture for the large gallery room. Serra instead walked the home’s perimeter, came back inside, and announced he knew exactly what he wanted to do: install a massive steel wall that would block their view of the lake. Marc told him he wasn’t legally allowed to build that close to the water. “Then you can’t get a piece,” Serra replied, and left it at that for two years. Eventually, he relented and created a much smaller steel work that sits next to the Kiefer in the main room.

Other acquisitions were more spontaneous. In 2012, Livia brought Marc to visit Jeffrey Gibson’s Brooklyn studio. “If Livia had told me we were going to visit an artist who makes punching bags, I might have skipped it,” Marc jokes. Instead, he walked in, saw a beaded Everlast bag and was dazzled by Gibson’s craftsmanship. According to Marc, Gibson didn’t have the means to complete the work, but they bought Deep Blue Day (2014) as it was. It hangs from the ceiling of their house, only half covered in beads, recalling a moment of collectorly love at first sight.

The Strauses’ passion for emerging art extends internationally as well. On a 2008 research trip through Eastern Europe—one of more than 200 studio visits that year alone—they met Adrian Ghenie, a young Romanian painter who was unknown in the U.S. Marc found himself trying to convince fellow collectors to buy one of the painter’s 8-foot canvases for $10,000. Few did. Today, Ghenie is represented by Pace Gallery and Thaddaeus Ropac.

The deeper the Strauses went into artists’ studios, the more urgent it became to create spaces for the work beyond their own walls. By 2000, their collection was large enough that they needed storage. As Marc recalled, “Livia said, ‘We can’t just put it away. We have to use the art to teach.’” They decided to open Hudson Valley MOCA, a space where their art collection helps engage the community.

Similarly, Marc felt driven to open his gallery after retiring from oncology. His program champions living artists and features unconventional, sometimes bizarre solo shows that include pieces ranging from salvaged-material sculptures to a 43-foot painting. “You’ve always loved helping artists develop their careers,” Livia said to her husband. “It makes perfect sense that…you want to start with young, emerging talents.” For example, Straus has supported Yael Medrez Pier and Anne Samat, who just staged a major installation at Art Basel Miami Beach 2025.

Back in their Chappaqua home, the Strauses continue to learn from the art and artists they’ve supported over the years. Marie Watt’s Skywalker/Skyscraper (Portrait of Livia) (2021), in their basement gallery space, exemplifies how embedded their lives are with this work. It uses 15 of the Strauses’s family blankets to create a tower of textiles atop 21 cedar blocks. “I can now track my family history through Marie’s steel-pierced pillar of neatly folded blankets, that steel for me representing the strength of generational ties,” Livia said. “I had worried about what would happen to these memories of my past. Surely my children would have disposed of them. And what better way than to partner with an artist like Marie whose works entwine memory of word, of song, of security, of blanket-ness.”

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The Most Influential Artists of 2025 https://ift.tt/lu0HYD7

In 2025, art world influence proves harder than ever to define. Artists are breaking through in radically different ways: viral blockbuster solo exhibitions, sustained institutional recognition, fast-rising gallery momentum, viral robotic art fair presentations, and public advocacy that extends beyond the gallery walls.

This year was unusually volatile. As artists grappled with accelerating AI adoption, cuts to arts funding in the United States, and the aftershocks of climate catastrophe—particularly the devastating fires in Los Angeles—much of the year’s most resonant work addressed contemporary crises. In the face of these conflicts, artists who won a groundbreaking award or received a long-overdue solo exhibition are still cause for celebration. The names on this list, from Amy Sherald, who refused to compromise her values for the sake of an institutional show, to Beeple, who created the year’s biggest art fair spectacle, defined 2025 as they confronted contemporary anxieties and still managed to shock and move us.

Here are Artsy’s most influential artists of 2025.

Amy Sherald

Amy Sherald made headlines this year by walking away from a show. The Baltimore-based painter, who rose to prominence for her 2018 portrait of Michelle Obama, was the subject of a high-profile traveling exhibition, “American Sublime,” organized by SFMOMA and shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art this summer. Sherald canceled the tour’s third stop, at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., due to disagreements about her painting Trans Forming Liberty (2024). It was a rare and consequential act of institutional refusal.

The painting depicts a transgender woman posed as the Statue of Liberty. The National Portrait Gallery was considering replacing the work with a video of people reacting to the painting, a strategy to avoid provoking President Donald Trump. Instead of acquiescing, Sherald asserted artistic autonomy and sparked conversation about who gets to define American imagery. “When I understood a video would replace the painting, I decided to cancel,” she said in an interview with the New York Times. “The video would have opened up for debate the value of trans visibility and I was opposed to that being a part of the ‘American Sublime’ narrative.” “American Sublime,” in its unadulterated curation, remains on view at the Baltimore Museum of Art through April.

—Maxwell Rabb, Staff Writer

Anne Imhof

For 10 days this spring, Anne Imhof’s massive durational performance DOOM: HOUSE OF HOPE dominated art world conversation in New York. Staged at the Park Avenue Armory from March 3rd to 12th, the three-hour, open-format experience transformed the Wade Thompson Drill Hall into an immersive environment with no fixed seating and no privileged point of view.

Curated by Klaus Biesenbach, DOOM choreographed a cast that moved fluidly between high and low cultural registers. The performance folded dialogue from Romeo and Juliet into scenes of American high-school angst: Imhof staged tailgate parties atop black Cadillac Escalades and school dances drained of romance. It all unfolded beneath a looming doomsday countdown clock, which promised a catastrophe that never arrived. Instead, audiences got prolonged anticipation and unease.

The groundbreaking piece raised questions about power, alienation, and spectatorship.

Imhof’s last project of this scale was Faust (2017), an immersive performance critiquing power and late capitalism, which earned her the Golden Lion at the 2017 Venice Biennale. The making of DOOM will be the subject of a documentary produced by Art21, out next year.

This December, Imhof released an album and booklet titled “Wish You Were Gay,” an extension of her 2024 exhibition at Kunsthaus Bregenz of the same name. She also opened “Fun ist ein Stahlbad,” an exhibition at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Portugal. The centerpiece is a newly commissioned 60-foot swimming pool sculpture.

—M.R.

Arpita Singh

At 88, Arpita Singh is one of India’s best-known artists. She’s celebrated for her stunning, surreal oil paintings, which bring a deeply personal approach to Bengali folklore, mythology, and urban life. Cars, planes, and figures float against her pastel backgrounds. The artist often incorporates text and ink into her work (she’s become a master of watercolor as well). Singh represents a second generation of Indian Modernism, and her paintings reinterpret contemporary life via scenes that feel simultaneously historical, timeless, and new.

Though it opened in 2024, “Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975–1998” at the Barbican set the tone for 2025’s increasing international focus on Indian art. The London show featured Singh’s work alongside that of Nalini Malani, Madhvi Parekh, and other contemporaries. But it was in March that Singh’s paintings received London’s full attention: The Serpentine North opened “Remembering,” her first institutional solo show outside of India. It marked a major turning point for the artist, and for the international art world, which has been slow to appreciate the significance of 20th-century South Asian artists like Singh.

—Josie Thaddeus-Johns, Senior Editor

Ayoung Kim

Ayoung Kim’s slick, futuristic visions have popped up across Asia for the last few years: In 2025, her influence reverberated across the globe. In February, the artist opened “Many Worlds Over” at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. The show brought together two of the videos from her “Delivery Dancer” series, along with sculptures, wallpapers, and a playable video game based in the same universe. In November, the Performa biennial brought Kim’s live-action interpretation of the films to New York. Now, the full “Delivery Dancer” trilogy is on view in the city as MoMA PS1 hosts the artist’s U.S. solo institutional debut.

These films use cutting-edge techniques—from motion capture to AI—to present a captivating universe where two rival female motorcycle delivery drivers are locked in a sci-fi love story as they race against time. With an aesthetic that references mind-bending action movies like Inception, the films nod to the infinite availability of our always-on contemporary culture. Kim is responding to her perception of Seoul, where she lives. As the artist told me in an interview earlier this year: “This ‘survival game mode’ is embedded in all Korean people in all sectors of society…I wanted to call out this competition.”

—J.T.J.

Beeple

At Art Basel Miami Beach, Beeple propelled himself onto this list with Regular Animals, an installation of robotic dogs topped with the hyper-realistic heads of tech billionaires. It quickly became one of the fair’s most talked-about spectacles.

The machines featured the faces of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Andy Warhol, Pablo Picasso, and the artist himself. They roamed a transparent pen inside Zero10, the fair’s new digital art section. The dogs periodically entered “Poop Mode,” taking photographs of one another and printing them out from their backsides.

The work sparked conversation about how tech leaders and AI are increasingly shaping how we see the world, as artists like Picasso and Warhol changed people’s perceptions in the 20th century. “There is an analogy; we’re increasingly going to view the world through AI,” Beeple told The Art Newspaper. “We’re also seeing the world through the lens of artists and tech leaders like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, who shape what we see, probably more than anybody else.”Beeple is known for this type of art world provocation. The digital artist, born Mike Winkelmann, rose to prominence with his record-breaking $69 million NFT sale at Christie’s in 2021.

—M.R.

Danielle Mckinney

Danielle Mckinney’s saturated, cinematic paintings focus on the intimate lives of Black women. The artist depicts her subjects in dimly lit interiors as they lounge, read, smoke, think, and find contentment within themselves. These pieces commanded attention from Maastricht, the Netherlands, to Massachusetts this year.

Mckinney debuted eight new paintings with Marianne Boesky Gallery at TEFAF Maastricht in March. Then, her first U.S. institutional solo show, “Tell Me More,” opened at Massachusetts’s Rose Art Museum in August. She capped off her remarkable year with a solo exhibition at London’s Galerie Max Hetzler, which opened in September.

The 44-year-old artist was born in Montgomery, Alabama, and is now based in New Jersey. Mckinney started her work as a photographer at 15 and earned an MFA in photography from Parsons School of Design in 2013. She only took up painting in 2020, during the pandemic. In just five years, Mckinney has cemented her reputation as an era-defining painter.

—M.R.

Kelly Akashi

Kelly Akashi’s year was marked by perseverance. In January, Los Angeles wildfires destroyed her Altadena home and much of the work for her first exhibition with Lisson Gallery in L.A. Yet the artist moved quickly to remake the show while advocating for fellow artists and art workers who had lost everything.

The Lisson exhibition opened during Frieze Los Angeles and quickly became a highlight of the week. Glass and bronze sculptures filled the gallery, their precision belying the circumstances of their making. A handful of salvaged works revealed the patina of flames and ash. The presentation amplified enduring themes in Akashi’s practice—time, impermanence, personal history—now sharpened by fresh grief.

Akashi’s influence carried throughout the year, with group exhibitions at institutions including the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, the Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art in Malibu, California, and The Warehouse in Dallas; a residency at the Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, Washington; and news of a public commission for JFK Airport’s new Terminal One. Just this month, the Whitney Museum announced that Akashi will create a major terrace commission for the 2026 Whitney Biennial. The work is an homage to the L.A. wildfire victims. It will reimagine the artist’s chimney, the only part of her home that survived.

—Casey Lesser, Editor in Chief

Kerry James Marshall

During London’s packed fall calendar of museum and gallery shows, art world wags recommended one exhibition more than any other: Kerry James Marshall at the Royal Academy of Arts.

“The Histories,” the artist’s largest European show to date, definitively cemented Marshall’s status as a master of contemporary history painting for a global audience. The survey spanned four decades and documented a creative career spent rewriting and enriching the Eurocentric canon of Western art history by centering Black figures and experiences.

However, the show was not just a retrospective glance at Marshall’s oeuvre. A provocative series of eight new paintings explored the complex and often avoided topic of the active role of Africans in the transatlantic slave trade. At 70, Marshall continues to contribute to difficult global conversations about history, power, and representation.

—Arun Kakar, Senior Market Editor

Nnena Kalu

British artist Nnena Kalu shattered a glass ceiling in December when she became the first neurodivergent awardee of the Turner Prize. Kalu is known for hypnotic, intuitive sculptures, drawings, and paintings that resist translation or explanation. Instead, they operate as direct expressions of self for the nonverbal artist.

Born in Glasgow in 1966, London-based Kalu repurposes found VHS tape, rope, discarded paper, and other materials to make the vivid sculptures for which she’s best known. Her cocoon-like forms emerge through repetitive wrapping and binding gestures that emphasize the importance of accumulation in her practice.

Long affiliated with ActionSpace, a London-based studio supporting artists with disabilities, Kalu spent decades working outside the mainstream. In 2024, she gained recognition at Manifesta 15 in Barcelona and in a group show, “Conversations,” at Liverpool, England’s Walker Art Gallery.

—M.R.

Otobong Nkanga

Otobong Nkanga works with materials like soil, stone, glass, and fiber—alongside sensory elements such as scent and sound—to explore how landscapes absorb human activity and memory related to extraction, migration, and agriculture. This year, the artist powerfully shaped conversations around environmental art.

Nkanga began 2025 with a major MoMA atrium presentation, “Cadence,” which featured sculptures, a monumental woven tapestry, and the sounds of deep breathing and visceral emotion. These interventions transformed the space into a lifelike ecosystem and a site of communal mourning for ecological upheaval.

The artist’s momentum continued in the spring, when Nkanga was celebrated as the 2025 Nasher Prize Laureate and opened her exhibition “Each Seed a Body” at Dallas’s Nasher Sculpture Center. The show centered on a 53-foot installation encrusted with plants and spices connected to North Texas; visitors were invited to kneel down and inhale its essence.

This October, a sprawling tapestry by Nkanga welcomed visitors to Lisson Gallery’s booth at Frieze London. And a week later, the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris opened “I dreamt of you in colours,” a major exhibition—on view through February 22, 2026—bringing together early drawings, installations, and recent tapestries that chart the evolution of Nkanga’s practice.

—C.L.

Tyler Mitchell

Tyler Mitchell first entered the cultural spotlight in 2018, at just 23, as the youngest and first Black photographer to shoot Vogue’s cover. What once looked like a breakout moment has hardened into sustained influence. This year, gallery shows, a major Met commission, and a monograph solidified Mitchell’s position as a generational talent. His photographs foreground the lives of Black people, focusing on tenderness, joy, and interiority.

In February, Mitchell presented “Ghost Images,” his first solo exhibition with Gagosian in New York. The gallery mounted another presentation of his work at their Burlington Arcade location in London this September. The Metropolitan Museum of Art tapped into Mitchell’s intimate engagements with Black dandyism and identity by commissioning him to shoot the catalogue for the “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” the Costume Institute’s show tied to the Met Gala. This placed his images of figures like Spike Lee and Ayo Edebiri in dialogue with a longer visual tradition.

In September, Aperture published a new monograph for the artist, Tyler Mitchell: Wish This Was Real. And the following month, Mitchell’s traveling exhibition of the same name opened in Paris at the MEP – Maison Européenne de la Photographie—marking his first solo exhibition in France.

—M.R.

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