The most recent edition of Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world includes conceptual visual artist Jenny Holzer, curator Thelma Golden, photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier, designer Jonathan Anderson, and ARTnews Top 200 collector Larry Ellison.
Other members of the list include journalist Connie Walker, entertainer Dua Lipa, entrepreneur Mark Cuban, and Prime Minister of Italy Giorgia Meloni.
Jenny Holzer
Artist Kiki Smith recalled encountering Holzer’s “Truisms” photostat prints anonymously posted up in New York’s Lower East Side, where they both lived, in the 1970s.
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“We were members of the artist collective Colab and for a time lived in the same building. Jenny used words as agitprop. They were declarative, inflammatory, and provocative. She claimed no authorship but questioned the authority of language. They were rants that exemplified the predicament we faced in New York City in the late ’70s.”
Smith also highlighted the visual artist’s 1989 show at the Guggenheim Museum and the upcoming solo show “Light Lines” opening on May 17. “Jenny has allowed her art to grow by embracing collaboration and new technologies, but her singularity as an artist has always persevered and her work continues to be radical,” Smith wrote.
LaToya Ruby Frazier
Playwright Lynn Nottage said Frazier’s intimate, collaborative photographs of workers across America “force us to confront how disenfranchisement, corporate greed, and government neglect have impacted the lives of people”.
“Her work captures the anxiety, the beauty, and the reality of people negotiating the complexities of life on the brink,” Nottage wrote.
The two-time Pulitzer Prize winner also highlighted Frazier’s upcoming solo show “Monuments of Solidarity” will open at New York’s Museum of Modern Art on May 12. The exhibition will include 100 works spanning two decades of the artist’s career.
Frazier won a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship in 2015 and a Carnegie International Prize in 2022.
‘Icon’ Thelma Golden
Notably, former First Lady Michelle Obama wrote the TIME essay on Golden, the director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem. Obama called Golden a “paradigm-shifting curator” who often shocks people who underestimate her based on her short appearance.
“As one of the most influential people in art, Thelma knows the power of flipping an assumption on its head,” Obama wrote, noting Golden’s steadfast work bringing much-needed attention to Black artists and curators through exhibitions at the Studio Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Golden is also a board member of the Barack Obama Foundation, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Crystal Bridges Museum.
Her career in the art industry was also featured in a New Yorker profile earlier this year and she wrote an essay in support of artist Faith Ringgold for TIME’s list of influential people in 2022. Ringgold died on April 12 at the age of 93.
Jonathan Anderson
Italian filmmaker Luca Guadagnino described the work of Loewe‘s creative director as “always ahead of the curve.”
“Jonathan is one of the most intelligent, empathetic, and curious people I know, but he also has a wonderful sense of humor, and a capacity not to take himself too seriously,” The director of “Call Me By Your Name” wrote.
Anderson has led high-profile collaborations with artists including Julien Nguyen, Lynda Benglis and Richard Hawkins.
Anderson’s collections often include references to visual art, and the designer’s influence was evident in the brand’s first public exhibition “Crafted World“, currently on display at the Shanghai Exhibition Center until May 5. The exhibition included 150 artworks from the Loewe Art Collection, including items commissioned for fashion shows and an entire room of winning examples from the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize, which awards annual prizes of €50,000.
Larry Ellison
Former Prime Minister Tony Blair praised Ellison’s work co-founding the technology company Oracle, and his vision for managing a significant portion of global data.
“Larry has the mind of an engineer, the curiosity of a thousand cats, and the humility to keep learning—which is the chief characteristic of the true changemaker,” Blair wrote.
Ellison, who is still chairman of Oracle’s board, is the fifth wealthiest person in the world. He is also an avid art collector, specializing in ancient to early 20th-century Japanese art and late 19th- and early 20th-century European art.
In 2013, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco hosted an exhibition of 60 works of Japanese art from Ellison’s collection, some of them more than 1,000 years old. It was the first time items from Ellison’s private collection were available for public viewing, including a wooden Buddhist sculpture from the 13th century depicting Prince Shōtoku, a figure from Japan’s classical Asuka period.