Candice Hopkins (courtesy Toronto Biennial of Art)
Candice Hopkins has been named to this year's Power 100 list of the "most influential people in art" by the London-based magazine ArtReview.
Hopkins, a citizen of the Carcross/Tagish First Nation in Yukon, occupies the Number 55 spot on the list, which was announced earlier this month.
ArtReview cited her curation of the Toronto Biennial in 2019 and 2022, as well as her work at the Forge Project, an Indigenous-led organization on the unceded homelands of the Muh-he-con-ne-ok in Upstate New York that is dedicated to art, decolonial education, land justice and food security.
"Hopkins and her team are currently working on a publication that can be used as a 'rematriation guide' by Native communities who are campaigning for the return of cultural belongings that are kept in museum collections," ArtReview said. "It's no surprise then that she was the co-recipient of Independent Curators International’s Leo Award for her ongoing work in promoting Indigenous art and ideas."
The second spot on the list will not surprise anyone – Cecilia Alemani, the curator and artistic director of this year's Venice Biennale.
But the top spot is more controversial. It went to the Jakarta-based artist collective ruangrupa, which served as the curator of documenta 15. Last summer's influential exhibition, held every five years in the German city of Kassel, was marred by anti-semitic imagery in some works.
The resulting controversy led to resignations, media criticism and questions in the German parliament that, according to ArtReview, obscured ruangrupa’s "vast, polyphonic, chaotic and convivial assembly of artistic voices from the Global South."
The magazine defended its choice of ruangrupa by citing the group's "distributed way of working" – inviting hundreds of collaborators from around the world to join them in Germany, with those people then inviting others, thereby disrupting established hierarchies.
"But replacing curators with artists doesn't itself change the structure of power, only the individual who sits at the top," said ArtReview. "ruangrupa's power has been in letting that structure unravel. Now everyone else has to work out what happens next."
The top 10:
1) ruangrupa – artist collective – Jakarta-based artist collective and artistic directors of Documenta 15
2) Cecilia Alemani – curator and artistic director of this year's Venice Biennale
3) Unions – activist movement – collective action among artists and museum workers
4) Hito Steyerl – artist – political statement-making and formal experimentation
5) Fred Moten – thinker – American poet, critic and theorist inspiring a generation of artists
6) Wolfgang Tillmans – artist – celebrated photographer assuming the mantle of an art elder-statesman
7) Simone Leigh – artist – Golden Lion recipient at this year's Venice Biennale
8) Nan Goldin – artist – legendary photographer, activist and subject of a feature documentary
9) David Zwirner – gallerist – head of expanding New York, London, Paris and Hong Kong gallery empire
10) Darren Walker – philanthropist – president of the Ford Foundation