Merry Christmas From Hyperallergic
From Christo's billowing flags to forgotten oral histories, this year reminded me why art matters: it gives voice, refuses erasure, and makes something beautiful from the wreckage.
From Christo's billowing flags to forgotten oral histories, this year reminded me why art matters: it gives voice, refuses erasure, and makes something beautiful from the wreckage.
Film still of Patty Chang, "Melons (at a loss)" (1998), on view in Monstrous Beauty (2025) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (image courtesy the artist)
This Christmas, I’m grateful — it’s a sentimental time of year, OK? I’m about to hit my two-year mark as an associate editor here at Hyperallergic, where my bread and butter is New York City: a weekly newsletter (my baby), and exhibition reviews — dispatches from the center of the art world (I may be biased). And it’s certainly been an eventful year, from museum reopenings to blockbuster exhibitions to a brand-new mayor, who brought a groundswell of hope and a bounty of memes. To me, though, it's been a year of deepening my relationship to the city — not getting caught up in that never-ending tide that is New York, but finding the stillness beneath the current.
“Anchoring” to me means grounding myself in the true, the felt, the tangible. The art world prizes in-person communion — the irreplaceable experience of seeing a work in person — yet increasingly trades in digital surrogates: press releases, Instagram posts, installation views. Coupled with the rise of AI, we’re in danger of losing touch with what's embodied, what's real. The city’s the exact kind of place that interrupts that — you're scrolling peacefully on your phone on the train platform, for instance, and then someone's elbow is in your ribs.
The real — if buried and bygone — New York surfaced more pleasantly for me when I got to work with Lower East Side stalwart Arthur Nersesian, whose book The Fuck-Up (1997), a hilarious jaunt through the degenerate ’90s, was one of my favorites of the year. His review of an oral history of the Pyramid Club, now known as Nightclub 101, is steeped in memory and drawn from a deep wellspring of lived history. Meanwhile, I never thought I'd get my heart broken at The Shed, but the Christo show there undid me for similar reasons — I was suddenly seven years old again, looking upon the billowing neon-orange flags reflected in the snow in Central Park.
But as far as deepening my relationship with our community goes, meeting so many of you at our Halloween party at Francis Kite Club — particularly in costume — was a highlight of the year. So was our coverage of MFA thesis shows — which most art publications completely ignore, even though students are integral to our community, and its future. But just as important as looking forward is remembering: It is my deepest honor to write the weekly In Memoriam column, in which we memorialize those we lost.
Working with our writers is by far the best part of a great gig. I look forward to corresponding with Taliesin Thomas for the Upstate guide every month — both her presence and her emails are just as ebullient as her writing, and it’s infectious enough to melt even my cynical heart. Working with the colossus that is John Yau has sharpened the way that I look at painting and abstraction, and editing the brilliant, broad-minded, and astonishingly erudite Ed Simon on the radical egalitarianism of nativity scenes, the visual history of No Kings, the tackiness and historical backing of Trump’s aesthetic, and so much else has informed my own writing.
Our writers enrich my understanding of the world even from afar: Claudia Ross on the way history reverberates surprisingly, painfully, and generatively into the present in her review of the Monuments exhibition in Los Angeles. Noah Angell on the artist who’s been giving voice to the musical instruments languishing in museum storage, dying to be heard. Cristiana Grigore’s deeply personal and moving piece on the Roma artists all of us should know. Anne Anlin Cheng on a show spanning half a millennium of chinoiserie that transforms objectification into something stranger, more insurgent, almost human. And Jad Salfiti on the little Berlin institute that dares to speak up in a country where Palestinian solidarity is nearly verboten.
This is what art can do: give voice, refuse erasure, make something beautiful from the wreckage. That’s our work here, too. Thank you for reading, for subscribing, for being part of our community. If you’re not already, please consider supporting our work as a paying Hyperallergic Member — it’d make a great very-last-minute gift, if you’re a procrastinator like me. Happy holidays — and here’s to another year!
—Lisa Yin Zhang, associate editor
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My 2025 Picks
John Sex, Tabboo!, and friends in the Pyramid basement (undated) (photo by Jim Syme, courtesy Damiani Books)
The Wild, Inclusive Brilliance of New York’s Pyramid Club
A book of oral histories about the now-shuttered venue takes us through those who came before, made it big, and died too soon. | Arthur Nersesian
The Algorithmic Presidency
Just as 20th-century fascists deployed radio and film, today’s ideological descendants use memes, social media, and above all, artificial intelligence. | Ed Simon
The Trump Administration Looks Even Worse Up Close
Photographs by Chris Anderson for Vanity Fair reveal the cost of remaking yourself in Trump’s image. | Lisa Yin Zhang
Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Gift to New York
“The Gates” was an artwork within an artwork, inscribing the populist impulse of Central Park into 7,500+ neon orange armatures with billowing fabric. | Lisa Yin Zhang
Monuments Collapses American History on Itself
An exhibition in Los Angeles pairing decommissioned public Confederate statues with contemporary art captures America’s shifting political terrain. | Claudia Ross
In a Culture of Silence, a Berlin Initiative Speaks Up for Palestine
The Spore Initiative views the Palestinian struggle as part of a pattern of global extraction. | Jad Salfiti
The Met Finally Meets Asian Femininity on Its Own Terms
After an exploitative 2015 show, I was wary about being an academic “beard” for another exhibition in the guise of “revision.” Monstrous Beauty is a different beast. | Anne Cheng