Amy Sherald, David Zwirner and Alicia Keys Among Time’s First-Ever Art 100

A portrait of painter Amy Sherald, captured by photographer Tyler Mitchell, graces the cover of Time magazine’s freshly published, first-ever list of the 100 most influential people in art. She is one of 50 artists to make the list, alongside a host of curators, directors, gallerists, collectors and other commercial and institutional figures.

Sherald’s cover feature follows an intense period for the 53-year-old. Her touring exhibition, Amy Sherald: American Sublime, broke all-time attendance records at the Baltimore Museum of Art in April, after she pulled the same show from the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery last year, citing censorship concerns.

In her cover interview, she told Time: “American Sublime has its own narrative. Deviating from that narrative would be deviating from the core person of who I am and why the work exists in the world, and I just wasn’t willing to do that.”

Such a show of backbone also served the Austrian choreographer and performance artist Florentina Holziner, who appears on Time’s list in the “Icons” category. Holzinger’s Sea World Venice performance at the Austrian Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale achieved virality thanks to a combination of naked women climbing, jet ski driving and scuba diving in a urine-filled water tank, and the artist’s use of her own spine as the clapper of a gigantic bell.

Contemporary art’s increasing proximity to digital media and artificial intelligence is widely represented by names such as Cao Fei, Refik Anadol, Trevor Paglen and Lawrence Abu Hamdan—all of whom, to varying degrees of criticality, interrogate art’s intersections with emerging technologies. Anadol’s Dataland, the first purpose-built museum for AI art which opened earlier this year, has garnered varied responses from within the artistic community.

Yet, as Time’s editor-in-chief Sam Jacobs rightly pointed out when announcing the new list: “Artists don’t work in a vacuum. They are supported by a massive ecosystem, from philanthropists and nonprofits who fund work, to gallerists and advisers who shape careers, to curators, museum leaders, and beyond.” Presumably this is why half of the magazine’s list, assembled by lead editors Merrill Fabry, Julia Halperin, and Belinda Luscombe, features precisely such figures. 

Among the familiar art market names are David Zwirner, Larry Gagosian, Philomene Magers and Monika Sprüth, as well as Art Basel chief executive, Noah Horowitz. They are joined by their collector counterparts, including LVMH’s Bernard Arnault and Ronald Lauder, who in May announced plans to merge his Neue Gallery with the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Alicia Keys and Swizz Beatz’s Dean Collection also makes the cut. 

Egyptian artist Wael Shawky is recognised both for his curatorial gig at the inaugural edition of Art Basel Qatar last year and for his own artistic practice—most notably his presentation at the Egyptian Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale. Despite the mixed reviews it received, Adriano Pedrosa, the curator of that same edition, is also featured and praised for “rewriting the curator’s playbook”. Other notable institutional figures include funding force Susan Freedman, Jessica Morgan—soon to take the reins at Tate—and Naomi Beckwith, whose work on next year’s documenta 16 is bound to make headlines. 

Amy Sherald’s cover marks the first time in 50 years that a living painter has appeared alone on the magazine’s cover; Robert Rauschenberg was the last in November 1976. However, with Time’s homage to the great and the good of the art world now expected to appear annually, we won’t have to wait nearly as long to discover who’s next in line to receive the honour.