Time Magazine Publishes its First Art 100 List, Featuring Artists, Museum Leaders, Dealers and More—See Who Made the Cut

It’s been half a century since Time magazine has splashed a living painter on its cover, and Amy Sherald’s face, photographed by Tyler Mitchell, graces that coveted spot on the issue that hits newsstands Thursday and includes the inaugural Time 100 Art list, including artists, museum directors and curators, art lawyers, dealers, and more art world professionals.

“We have been seeking out the leaders who shape art, with an eye to find those who are writing the field’s most important headlines,” writes editor in chief Sam Jacobs in press materials (but don’t get too excited, art journalists and critics: none of you is featured, so apparently they mean making headlines, not actually writing them).

“And artists don’t work in a vacuum,” Jacobs adds. “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. Half of the people on this list are not artists themselves. They make art possible.”

Who appears on the half devoted to artists? Plenty of names globally familiar to and, in many cases, beloved by art-world insiders, including, along with Sherald, Maurizio Cattelan, whose duct-taped banana made him a global superstar; Jeffrey Gibson, the first Native artist to represent the US solo at the Venice Biennale, in 2024; Kerry James Marshall, whose traveling retrospective drew adoring crowds with its sympathetic and art-historically informed portrayals of Black people; and Gerhard Richter, whose works sell for tens of millions of dollars and are endlessly parsed by art historians and critics.

Also included are deeply respected artists with far less name recognition among the broad public, like Josh Kline, whose recent essay on the decline of the gentrified New York art scene had everyone talking; Hito Steyerl, whose essays regularly do the same; Cameron Rowland, who makes difficult, highly conceptual work about the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow; Amalia Mesa-Bains, whose installation-based altars and groundbreaking scholarship have inspired generations of Latinx artists and curators; and Christine Sun Kim, who performed the national anthem in American Sign Language at the 2020 Super Bowl and whose works exploring her experience of deafness moved visitors to her recent Whitney Museum retrospective.

The list also includes some crowd-pleasers who are less well thought of among insiders, like AI artist and Dataland founder Refik Anadol; British street artist Bansky; KAWS (born Brian Donnelly), who has made a mint on collectibles as well as his fine art and is also a serious collector; and France’s JR, known for splashy projects that engage the public, including an installation to celebrate Pope Leo XIV’s birthday this month.

One inclusion is straight-up bizarre: self-described Christian worship artist Vanessa Horabuenal. The less said about her work the better, except to note that she performatively painted the face of Christ for a fundraiser for Donald Trump.

It’s unclear what metrics Time used to determine which artists merited a spot as countless others—like Marina Abramović, Ai Weiwei, Jeff Koons, or Julie Mehretu, to name a few—could have also reasonably been included.

Among the 11 collectors featured are those known for the vast amounts they spend as well as some whose collecting aims at greater social impact: Ken Griffin and Ronald Lauder as well as Komal Shah and the collecting duo Alicia Keys and Swizz Beatz. (For what it’s worth, nine of them have ranked on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list for several years.)

Museum leaders also make the cut, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Max Hollein, the Studio Museum of Harlem’s Thelma Golden, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Michael Govan appearing alongside respected curators like Cecilia Alemani, director and chief curator of High Line Art and curator of the 2022 Venice Biennale, and Naomi Beckwith, deputy director and chief curator of the Guggenheim Museum and artistic director of Documenta 16.

From the business side of the art world, four art advisers appear, two from Art Intelligence Global: Amy Cappellazzo and Yuki Terase, while Larry Gagosian and David Zwirner are among the six dealers on the roster, as is New York’s Maxwell Graham, known for his challenging and far less commercially easy presentations. Art Basel’s chief executive Noah Horowitz and Fair Warning founder Loïc Gouzer are also recognized.

Rounding out the list, finally, are some who are alone in their category, such as architect Annabelle Selldorf, who has renovated several museums like the Frick Collection and designed galleries for Gagosian, Zwirner and Hauser & Wirth; Christopher Marinello, a lawyer who works to recover stolen, looted, and missing works of art; and Diya Vij, cultural affairs commissioner for the City of New York.

Amy Sherald fans will have plenty to study in the magazine’s interview, including where she re-asserts her position on the dustup with officials at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery, who, she says, hesitated to show her painting Trans Forming Liberty, which includes a transgender Black woman as the Statue of Liberty, in her retrospective. (The museum, for its part, said there was a misunderstanding, and that the organizers were only considering contextualizing the piece.)

“‘American Sublime’ has its own narrative,” Sherald told Time. “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.”