It's a brisk evening in late January 2024. A group of Los Angeles graffiti artists equipped with ladders and spray paint cans slip inconspicuously through holes in the chain-link fence surrounding the luxury real-estate development known as Oceanwide Plaza, a $1 billion project that has sat vacant since 2019. They trudge up several flights of stairs and begin tagging the buildings’ facades in what would become one of the most spectacular street art interventions in recent memory. When city officials cried vandalism, the artists and their supporters said the works had laid bare the real crisis: three luxury towers sitting empty while the city’s homeless shelters are at capacity. The story, reported by Matt Stromberg, illustrates how artists increasingly pushed the limits of cultural norms and public space in the last 12 months. Hyperallergic Staff Reporters Rhea Nayyar and Maya Pontone were on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art at the historic moment when activists unfurled a 65-square quilt in support of Palestine, another of the year’s defining artworks. We were also the first to report on the Noguchi Museum’s termination of three workers who dared defy a policy banning staff from wearing keffiyehs, spawning a series of inventive protests inside and outside the institution. In April, at the brink of the student protest movement that began at Columbia University and radiated across the country and the world, Hyperallergic was the only arts publication covering the Gaza Solidarity Encampments within the legacy of creative nonviolent civil disobedience. Isa Farfan, our newest staff reporter to join the team and a Columbia alumna, investigated students’ battle to recuperate the art made during the encampments, held by the very administration that deployed the police to their campus. With a second Trump presidency looming in the US, artists felt the foreshocks of escalating cultural repression. A sculpture by Shahzia Sikander targeted by anti-abortion activists was beheaded at the University of Houston, and in Tennessee, a museum asked visitors to sign a waiver to enter an exhibition of works criticizing Republican lawmakers. Elsewhere in the world, authoritarian regimes wielded
cultural erasure as a weapon. Lawyer Yelena Ambartsumian exposed how Azerbaijani image copyright laws suppress the memory of an Armenian monument in occupied Artsakh, and Sarah Bond debunked the historical distortions surrounding Turkey’s claims of discovering the “world’s oldest bread.” We chronicled the visual lexicon that emerged online as responses to injustices — from the water jug that became a symbol of student resistance and the memes of Luigi Mangione that reveal our collective fury at a failed healthcare system to a viral emblem of the fight for public education in Argentina. Many of the artists and artworks discussed above, today considered taboo or transgressive, may be hailed as trailblazing in art history books and museum exhibitions in a few years. For now, it’s up to us to continue reporting on them with our heads held high.
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