It was a bright and dark year for art. A mold-breaking New York City museum debuted an awesome new home; two others expanded and refreshed themselves. In large and small shows under-the-radar artists surfaced and were hot. At the same time, the arrival of a new political order firing off anti-diversity mandates cast a pall over both the year and the cultural future.

The “New” Studio Museum in Harlem

With the artist David Hammons’s “African American Flag” — Old Glory recolored Pan-African red, black and green — flying on high, the incandescent Studio Museum in Harlem inaugurated its new 125th Street digs in November. The seven-story charcoal-black building is a winner, and even more stirring is the permanent collection on display inside, with objects that date back to the museum’s founding, over a Harlem liquor store, in 1968. All are path-markers on the history of an institution founded as an alternative space for a Black creativity that has been the source of many of the most exciting artists we have.

Redesigned Rockefeller Wing at the Met

Originally conceived to hold Nelson A. Rockefeller’s fabled collection of art from Africa, Oceania and the Americas, the wing opened in 1982, but felt oddly detached from the rest of the museum. With a new design this has wonderfully changed: Now when you pass through the wing’s main entrance from the Greek and Roman galleries, you are in Africa, with sensational objects around you and an archipelago of other worlds and cultures unfurling ahead. The unmistakable sensation of art as a form of embrace — as when the Senegalese pop star Youssou N’Dour gathered us into the sound of his voice at the May opening — is palpable.

An Expanded Frick

New Yorkers can be proprietorial about the Frick Collection, viewing it as a home away from home, where you can kick back as if you were in your living room hung with Rembrandts and Vermeers. When the museum reopened last spring, after a $220 million renovation, it was great to see the collection back and polished to a glow, though startling to find it somewhat rearranged. Several second-floor rooms, once Frick family bedrooms and closets, have been repurposed as galleries, and certain things once downstairs are now up there. No worries. All looks fabulous. And Bellini’s “St. Francis in the Desert,” a No. 1 absolute favorite New York City painting for some, still hangs exactly where Henry Frick placed it, though with a brand-new carpet in front. (Enchanted visitors, including us chronic repeaters, had worn the old one to shreds.)

Jack Whitten at MoMA

“I’m a product of American Apartheid,” the artist Jack Whitten wrote, a blunt fact that led him to project, in his art, a very different reality, one of “infinite diversity in infinite combinations.” It was a vision that buoyed him through a nearly six-decade career. “This is why I get up in the morning,” he wrote, “and go to work!” And how very lucky we were, at a moment when references to difference were being scrubbed from our history, to have had the liberatory tidal wave that was “Jack Whitten: The Messenger”sweeping through the Museum of Modern Art. The retrospective included some 200 paintings, sculptures and works on paper, from a 1963 art-school collage to a picture done just before Whitten died in 2018. He called every piece he made an “experiment,” and a what’s-next? excitement lit up the show.

Coco Fusco at El Museo del Barrio

Political art can set off alarms and promote reflection. “Coco Fusco: Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island” at El Museo del Barrio (through March 1) hits both keys in a career survey of one of our most imaginatively polemical artists. Performance and film are Fusco’s primary mediums. In the post-9/11 “war on terror” years she hired a team of former U.S. military interrogators to demonstrate their persuasion techniques on a group of female subjects, Fusco included. Revolutionary Cuba, her homeland by descent, is the critical target of films focused on the island’s persecuted artists and poets. And in a eulogistic 2021 video, she is seen rowing a small boat around and around Hart Island, New York City’s cemetery for the forsaken populations — among them immigrants, outlaws, Covid victims — who haunt her art.

“All Manner of Experiments: Legacies of the Baghdad Group for Modern Art”

I look to the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., for historical shows of a kind I’ll see nowhere else, and found one again this year. It told of a community of venturesome vanguard artists in post-colonial Iraq who merged Western modernism with older Islamic and Mesopotamian art to invent a radical new hybrid. The show began in the late 1940s with the exhilarated, try-everything paintings of the group’s founders Jewad Selim and Shakir Hassan Al Said, and concluded, post-Saddam, post-U.S.-war-on-Iraq, with a keening 2010 animation by Sadik Kwaish Alfraji about personal and cultural loss.

“Indigenous Identities: Here, Now & Always”

This big exhibition at the Zimmerli Art Museum (Rutgers University through Dec. 21) was organized by the artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, who died in January just days before the opening. She said she had long wanted to start the equivalent of a Whitney Biennial that would gauge the breadth of contemporary Indigenous work. And she did that here, mixing high-profile figures (Edgar Heap of Birds, Nicholas Galanin, Brad Kahlhamer, Cara Romero, Kay WalkingStick) with less visible ones (Frank Big Bear, Linda Lomahaftewa, Mikayla Patton, Roxanne Swentzell), who together define something called “Native American,” but stand, each with their charismas and quirks, on their own.

Three Solo Surveys That Tell the Story

We tend to leave history-telling to museums, but there was evidence this season of how valuable, as chroniclers, galleries can be. A show called “Dearly Loved Friends: Photographs by Sheyla Baykal, 1965-1990” at Soft Network, a space dedicated to preserving artists’ estates, brought forward the work of the underrecognized artist Sheyla Baykal (1944-1997), and the febrile fringe of the New York art world that she documented through the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s.

I’ve encountered the work of the Bogotá-born artist Fanny Sanín many times, but never in a career-spanning solo show like the one at Americas Society last summer, her first institutional survey in New York, where she has lived and worked for more than 50 years. In two compact galleries, we saw her take a bold jump from gestural expressionism to geometric abstraction, and then from rectangular plainness to compositions that hint at architecture, textile patterns and devotional icons, all softened by a plush, dusky palette. The result: visual metaphors, optical joy.

And this fall, in Chelsea, Matthew Marks Gallery presented “Nayland Blake: Sex in the 90s,” a survey of sculptures, drawings and videos by the matchlessly inventive artist and advocate for radical queerness through the years of the AIDS crisis into the present. As a bonus, Blake added a sidebar showcase of artists he admires. And all of this coincided with the release of a collection of 40 years of his writings and interviews. Altogether, a lucent haul.

Two Gallery Group Shows Hit Hard

And there were group shows that still give off sparks in my memory. A three-part exhibition called “Legendary Looks,” shared by City Lore Gallery in Manhattan’s East Village neighborhood; Pioneer Works in Red Hook, Brooklyn; and ArtsWestchester in White Plains, N.Y., surveyed — through photos, posters, videos and costumes — the L.G.B.T.Q.+ performance art phenomenon known as house ballroom, in a vision limned by three of its leaders: Twiggy Pucci Garçon, Jonovia Chase Lanvin and Michael Roberson Maison-Margiela.

And last spring, with the mainstream art world tiptoeing around the subject of national politics, the veteran dealer Mitchell Algus stepped up with a show titled “An America” in his Lower East Side gallery, a full-throttle slap-down to censorship directives emerging from Washington. The work by 40 artists hit hard, just as the powers it targeted were doing.

‘D.E.I.’ in D.C.

On repeat visits to Washington last spring and summer I saw some bold, truth-telling things. At the National Museum of African American History & Culture, there was “In Slavery’s Wake: Making Black Freedom in the World,” a multimedia traveling exhibition — headed to Africa, Europe and South America.And at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, there was “The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture,” a trenchant, tough-textured response to our monument-fixated moment. I caught two fine tribute-style shows at National Portrait Gallery, one devoted to the writer James Baldwin, the other to the Cuban-born American sculptor Felix Gonzalez-Torres. And at the Phillips Collection I savored a high-kilowatt survey of the underknown African American painter Vivian Browne (1929-1993), and an archival snapshot of the Chicago-born poet and gay activist Essex Hemphill (1957-1995).

I wouldn’t have missed any of these eye-openers. All of them, like most ambitious projects, were years — three, four, five — in the planning, meaning they were conceived during a Black Lives Matter decade, when a new civil rights consciousness reached the national level. That era seems, for now, over. So while my heart was lifted and my mind fired by the 2025 shows, they also left me with anticipatory regret for those I may well not be seeing — three, four, five years and more down the line. Because with funding cuts and museums under censure, they are most likely not being planned.