New Talent Artists Turn Mutability Into a Visual Language
The most compelling work in Art in America’s New Talent selection is united by a single idea: nothing stays fixed for long. Across painting, photography, drawing, and sculpture, the 20 artists chosen by the editors return again and again to transformation — of bodies, materials, meanings, and memory.
Elizabeth Glaessner’s paintings, for instance, imagine human figures in the midst of becoming something else, hovering between the human and the animal, or even the hybrid. Isaiah Davis and Jenny Calivas approach change from another angle, each taking a hard medium and pressing it toward softness or instability. Juliana Halpert’s photographs shift depending on how they are read, as either acts of memorialization or records of wrongdoing.
That instability is not limited to subject matter. Joeun Kim Aatchim’s drawings alter one another when layered, so that meaning emerges through accumulation rather than isolation. Kiah Celeste gives discarded or ordinary materials a new charge, turning compact discs into the facets of a shimmering snake and a bowling ball into a giant pearl. Terran Last Gun, meanwhile, transforms the writing on historical accounting ledgers into abstraction, folding archival language into a complex geometry.
The essay also places these artists in a broader critical conversation. Hilton Als recently argued that some younger artists in the Whitney Biennial seemed too detached from the work of their predecessors. The New Talent artists, by contrast, are presented as acutely aware of what came before them. Their work does not reject art history; it works through it.
That sensibility is captured neatly by Koyoltzintli, who said of the clay instruments she makes, “I feel like I am in constant conversation with the past and we are discussing what we’re going to do with the future.” It is a useful frame for the entire selection. In these works, change is not a threat to meaning. It is the condition that keeps meaning alive.
