The Defining Atworks of 2023
By Harrison Jacobs
December 18, 2023
Nicholas Galanin and Merritt Johnson, Creation with her Children, 2017
The 2017 sculpture Creation with her Children shows a child whose 17th-century dress is cut away to reveal animals’ mouths being pried open—a metaphor for a figure who has “endured hundreds of years of colonization, corporatization, commodification, and subjugation,” according to artists Nicholas Galanin (Lingít/Unangax) and Merritt Johnson (who is not affiliated with a tribal nation). While the work was a showstopper in the National Gallery of Art’s first show devoted to Indigenous art in 30 years, Galanin and Johnson thrust it into the national conversation when the artists announced in November that they had asked the NGA to remove the piece “due to US government funding of Israel’s military assault and genocide against the Palestinian people,” as they wrote on Instagram. In an autumn full of fallout over various artists, dealers, and curators’ responses to the Israel-Hamas war, Galanin and Johnson made an unequivocal statement of where they stand. —Harrison Jacobs