Best Art of 2025
Dec. 12, 2025 Updated 9:57 a.m. ET
By Holland Cotter
The art world moved forward with glowing renovations to some of New York City’s cultural jewels, as well as sweeping surveys of ballroom queens, Indigenous artists and more.
It was a bright and dark year for art. A mold-breaking New York City museum debuted an awesome new home; two others expanded and refreshed themselves. In large and small shows under-the-radar artists surfaced and were hot. At the same time, the arrival of a new political order firing off anti-diversity mandates cast a pall over both the year and the cultural future.
“Fanny Sanin – Geometric Equations”, Americas Society, New York
I’ve encountered the work of the Bogotá-born artist Fanny Sanín many times, but never in a career-spanning solo show like the one at Americas Society last summer, her first institutional survey in New York, where she has lived and worked for more than 50 years. In two compact galleries, we saw her take a bold jump from gestural expressionism to geometric abstraction, and then from rectangular plainness to compositions that hint at architecture, textile patterns and devotional icons, all softened by a plush, dusky palette. The result: visual metaphors, optical joy.