Cassie Packard: "The Top Ten Shows in the US in 2024"

Reports of contemporary art’s death have been greatly exaggerated. This year saw spectacular surveys devoted to interdisciplinary artists Joan Jonas, Paul Pfeiffer and Ralph Lemon, as well as thoughtful group presentations that explored alternative energy models and scientific discourses around sex. French artist Sophie Calle and Berlin-based Georgian artist Tolia Astakhishvili had their first US survey and US solo show, respectively, while Prospect’s sixth edition, which cast New Orleans as a harbinger, was organized by an artist-curator team for the first time. In no particular order, here are some of the standout shows of 2024.

Joan Jonas / Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA

Joan Jonas’s artworks misbehave. Old works resurface in new ones; props and sets materialize outside of the videos in which they appear; densely layered projections and performances call perception itself into question. ‘I wanted to pile meaning into all those layers,’ Jonas told Lynne Tillman in a conversation published in frieze’s May issue. Piles upon piles of meaning were on offer at MoMA, where the octogenarian artist was honoured with the kind of rigorous-yet-playful hometown survey her career so merits. It was thrilling to watch the density and self-reflexivity of the works build as the loosely chronological show progressed through her early pieces involving mirrors and cityscapes, subsequent explorations of myths and archetypes, and recent engagements with ecology, which are as visually spectacular as they are tender.

‘Energies’ / Swiss Institute, New York, USA

In the 1970s, a New York co-op – located about a ten-minute walk from where the Swiss Institute building stands today – mounted a solar and wind array on its roof, redistributed energy to the community and won a lawsuit that not only secured a payout from a monopolistic utility provider but also changed national energy regulations. ‘Energies’ builds on this hyperlocal story of community organizing and resilience with energy-oriented work by an international cohort, including Joar Nango’s halibut-stomach insulation (Skievvar #2, 2024) and Haroon Mirza’s rooftop solar sculpture (Oscillations for Caduceus, 2024), which powers not only his own sound piece but also Ash Arder’s installation Consumables (11092024) (2024). It’s the rare kind of show that makes alternative futures feel possible.

Paul Pfeiffer / The Geffen Contemporary at Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

Our Debordian society of spectacle runs on images. Over the past quarter century, Paul Pfeiffer has unpacked them, probing the ways in which media spectacles are constructed, circulated and deployed – and to what ends. This high-octane survey, a frieze pick for must-see shows during Frieze Los Angeles, took exhibition design cues from a soundstage and ranged from early video works – such as The Pure Products Go Crazy (1998), in which Tom Cruise spasms on a couch ad nauseum – to newly commissioned ‘Incarnator’ sculptures (2018–ongoing) that were produced in collaboration with Filipino woodworkers and depict anatomical chunks of Justin Bieber. The show travelled to Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, where it is on view until March.

Prospect.6 / Various venues, New Orleans

For Prospect.6 co-curators Miranda Lash and Ebony G. Patterson, New Orleans is ‘a city where the future has already arrived’, as Lash told Terence Trouillot in a conversation published in frieze’s November/December issue, devoted to the American South. The triennial’s sixth edition, ‘The Future is Present, The Harbinger is Home’, considers the ways in which the city is marked by climate vulnerability and environmental racism, on one hand, and community resilience and radical imagination, on the other. Sprawling across 21 venues, the show juxtaposes such powerful interventions into public space as Raúl de Nieves’s The Sacred Heart of Hours (2024) – which transforms a site that formerly housed a Confederate monument – with poignant, intimate presentations, such as the jazz-club display of L. Kasimu Harris’s photographic series ‘Vanishing Black Bars & Lounges’ (2018–ongoing).

‘Scientia Sexualis’/ Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

With trans and reproductive rights under siege in the US, there’s an urgency to this curatorial deep dive into the ways in which scientific discourses around sex, gender and sexuality have been wielded as tools of oppression. ‘Scientia Sexualis’ – part of PST ART, an initiative exploring the intersection of art and science – critiques and resists such violent legacies in equal turn. Works on view run the gamut: a sculptural revenge fantasy that addresses the racist origins of gynaecology; an enigmatic vapor made from abortifacient plants; bathroom wallpaper that transforms the discursively obsessed-over, hyper-legislated site into a lovely, queer-trans library.

Eva Hesse / Hauser & Wirth, New York

Coinciding with a moment when Eva Hesse’s influence on a younger generation of sculptors feels particularly palpable, this focused presentation of her sculptures, which I reviewed for frieze’s September issue, was a summer highlight. The five works on view – all major museum loans – hailed from 1967–69, a period during which Hesse grew adept at sculpting with unorthodox materials like latex and fibreglass. Over the years, her creations in these decidedly non-archival media have decayed. Seeing them together increased the pitch of a question that has been dogging them for decades: is breakdown part of their conceptual makeup – evidence of an artist posthumously collaborating with or ceding to her materials – or an undesirable side effect to be expertly mitigated?

Sophie Calle / Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

French artist Sophie Calle has spent five decades making daring work that delves into the games, rules and transgressions that are part and parcel of intimacy (or our performances of it). It’s mind-boggling that the laureled artist’s first US survey only arrived in 2024, but I’m happy it’s here. ‘Overshare’ – whose title suggests that Calle’s early work anticipated a world in which people constantly participate in their own surveillance and seek to surveil others – brings together such cult classics as Suite Vénitienne (Venetian Suite, 1980), a photographic installation documenting Calle’s pursuit of a man in Venice, and No Sex Last Night (1996), a road-trip film she made with Greg Shephard. In 2025, the show will travel to the Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa.

Tolia Astakhishvili / SculptureCenter, New York

Tolia Astakhishvili made excellent use of SculptureCenter’s industrial space in a commission that doubled as her first US solo show. The Georgian-born artist is best known for architectural interventions that tap into the emotional or energetic registers of the built environment, often to haunting or unsettling effect. Collaborating with friends, she overtook the ground floor of the former trolley repair shop with a presentation that spanned sculpture, video, photography, sound, drawing and installation, including walls and chutes that mimicked the existing architecture. The centrepiece of the show was When the others are within us (2024), comprising two large chutes that trapped mundane and evocative debris: a nail, a torn cloth, a plastic figurine.

Ralph Lemon / MoMA PS1, New York

Choreographer and visual artist Ralph Lemon’s survey begins in 2004, nearly a decade after he disbanded the dance company that originally put him on the map. It’s an exhibition with range and several surprises, including an animated drawing of writer James Baldwin (James Baldwin Dharma Talk, 2004) and West African statuettes, on loan from artist and theatre director Robert Wilson, which Lemon dressed and styled as Beyoncé and Jay-Z. The indubitable star of the show, however, is Rant redux (2020–24), a four-channel moving-image installation that grew out of Lemon’s ongoing collaboration with artist Kevin Beasley. The video pairs performers’ frenetic movements with readings of excerpted writing by such luminaries as Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten and Lemon himself. Rant #6 (2024), part of the accompanying performance programme, will take place in March.

Tina Girouard / Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, and Center for Art, Research and Alliances, New York

Tina Girouard’s work is characterized by a ‘stubbornly live ethos’, as Simon Wu wrote in a review for frieze. The Louisiana-born artist, who passed away in 2020, moved to New York in 1969 and, in the span of just a few years, cofounded the Anarchitecture Group, the artist-run restaurant FOOD and the alternative art space 112 Greene Street, among other initiatives. Her energetic retrospective travelled from the Ogden Museum in New Orleans to CARA in New York (overlapping with shows at Magenta Plains and Anat Ebgi Gallery), reflecting geographies important to her biography. The show gives a sense of her élan vital as it draws connections between her textile works and her social practice.

— Cassie Packard