In art, like in life, there is a premium put on youth. In creating our second annual young artists list, we wanted to celebrate individuals who are charting their own course, creating work that challenges us—both inside and outside the art market. The 30 artists we include here capture just a slice of a generation that feels more connected than ever with one another. Via screen, canvas or installation, these are the voices of a moment in time that has as much to mourn as to celebrate. We look to the youth to communicate our future.
1. Korakrit Arunanondchai The artist positions his work in terms of a quintessentially postmodern problem: the shifting relationship between bodies and concepts.
2. Sadie Barnette The multimedia artist remains passionately dedicated to taking apart racism and classism.
3. Jordan Casteel The artist’s portraits are intimate records of time and space.
4. Petra Cortright The Los Angeles-based artist believes artwork should be able to stand on its own.
5. Aria Dean The artist addresses complexity by creating works that engage with the paradoxes on which beliefs around identity are built.
6. Hayden Dunham The Los Angeles-based artist brings a background in environmental studies and a lifelong interest in geology to her sculpture practice.
7. John Edmonds Through the process of image-making, the artist builds trust between himself and his subjects.
8. Janiva Ellis The Los Angeles-based artist picked up painting as an outlet for self-expression.
9. Doreen Garner The artist examines the historical and contemporary treatment of black women through sculpture.
10. Cy Gavin The artist’s paintings are more akin to politics of representation than a representation of politics.
11. Micah Hesse The artist’s interest is not in recreating reality, but forcing new conversations through intervention.
12. Sophie Hirsch The artist uses sculpture to contemplate the body’s deliberate agility.
13. Madeline Hollander The New York-based artist sees choreography all around us.
14. Juliana Huxtable The artist’s multi-disciplinary body of work transgresses the lines of poetry, performance, music and fashion.
15. Richard Kennedy The artist creates works that erase the boundary between choreography and environment.
16. Zak Kitnick The artist employs a dry sense of wit as he interrogates sites of exchange to challenge his viewers presuppositions about the utility of our most quotidian objects and the symbolic meanings of our most quotidian occurrences.
17. Ajay Kurian The artist is pointing his attention outwards in order to ask questions about the nature of white supremacy in the digital age.
18. Maggie Lee The New York artist takes her practice new heights with a billboard on the Bowery.
19. Hannah Levy There is an alluring sensibility to the artist’s practice as it traverses the gap between sculpture and design.
20. Calvin Marcus The Los Angeles-based artist invites risks into the art of self-reflection.
21. Sam McKinniss The painter engages the dark and romantic language of pop culture.
22. Jasmine Nyende The digital space provides a fertile ground for the artist's experimentations in performance.
23. Toyin Ojih Odutola Working primarily in ink, charcoal, pencil and ballpoint pen, the artist's drawings engage the materiality of blackness.
24. Borna Sammak Borna Sammak’s restless energy flows into his work. Skipping fluidly from medium to medium, the New York-based artist creates sculptures, paintings and photographs that keep the eye moving.
25. Bailey Scieszka The Detroit-based artist describes her relationship to Old Put, her performance persona, as Jekyll might talk about Hyde.
26. Avery Singer The artist continues to expand and challenge her formal vocabulary.
27. Sable Elyse Smith The interdisciplinary artist grapples with the fallibility of language, the malleability of memory.
28. Cynthia Talmadge The artist’s work is like the best of Douglas Sirk’s films—unabashedly sentimental, romantic and glamorous, yet filled with incisive, wry wit.
29. Torey Thornton The New York artist has created a language in painting and sculpture that is all his own.
30. Kandis Williams With the rigor of the Dadaists or the Surrealists, the artist takes apart myths of representation and the alleged unity of images.
