THEIR FAVORITE EXHIBITIONS OF THE YEAR

To take stock of the past year, Artforum contacted an international group of artists to find out which exhibitions and events were, in their eyes, the very best of 2011.

ERICKA BECKMAN

Mary Reid Kelley, Sadie the Saddest Sadist (Armory Show, New York) Tucked away in the back of the Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects booth at the 2011 Armory Show was a monitor showing a costumed figure with exaggerated face paint, pacing in front of a hand-drawn black-and-white background. The piece was Mary Reid Kelley’s Sadie the Saddest Sadist, 2009, and the mixed metaphors, narrative snippets, and repurposed

print January 1994

Harvest

MIRÓ HAS BEEN AND always will be a great inspiration to me. Miró, when he planted his paint and palette, harvested a purple-green abstract landscape with iridescent forms drawn from his collective unconscious memory and projected future memories. What he did with Prades, the Village, in 1917 was more futuristic in its own time than his late work, which was less of its own time and perhaps more of a presence in an interrelated time frame of past and future.

Participating in the harvest was the picture itself, thus giving Miró’s art the quality of being organic. In viewing the MoMA show, I was