Over the course of a year, Artnet’s writers and journalists speak to hundreds of artists. Sometimes, those conversations linger in our minds for months, even years, after our articles have been published. Our weekly column “Up Next” spotlights emerging artists and allows us to highlight fresh perspectives and intriguing practices that we think you should know.

Looking back over the dozens of emerging artist profiles we published this year, we’ve homed in on five that for one reason or another, we keep returning to.

Melissa Joseph Has Captivated the Art World With an Unlikely Medium—Felting
by Annikka Olsen, March 13, 2024

Melissa Joseph. Photo: Mary Kang. Courtesy of the artist and Margot Samel.

Melissa Joseph is a much buzzed-about figure working in fiber and textile arts. The emerging artist is known for her redolent works made in an unlikely medium—felting. Joseph sometimes integrates her felt works with found objects and furniture  (a vanity in one case). Varyingly figurative and abstract, these works are drawn from memory, familial history, and autobiography. Earlier this year, Joseph was the subject of a somewhat unorthodox exhibition—spanning several buildings in Rockefeller Plaza—as part of the inaugural 2024 “Art in Focus” exhibition presented by Rockefeller Center and Art Production Fund. This exhibition followed on the heels of her much-talked-about show with Margot Samel late last year, “Irish Exit.”

What might be surprising to know is that Joseph has only been working with felt since 2020 and only began working as an artist full-time in 2022. “In retrospect now, everything seems sort of accelerated, it’s crazy. I can’t explain that.” Joseph shared in a profile with Annikka Olsen. But finding felt was a true click-in moment for the artist, whose career had previously taken a circuitous route, including time working in arts education. “I love needle felting because it’s painterly, and I have more control over the needles. You can be very precise…I had been amassing this body of work and I was so excited by this magical language that I felt, more than with any other material, I was able to bring everything I’ve learned together,” she shared.

Artist Jean-Pierre Villafañe’s Dynamic Canvases Bring to Life a Corporate Carnival
by Katie White, July 23, 2024

Portrait of Jean-Pierre Villafañe. Courtesy of Charles Moffett.

New York emerging artist Jean-Pierre Villafañe merges the boundaries of corporate and after-hours selves in irreverent paintings that have a captivating Mad Men-meets-Chicago energy. In one recent painting, Clocking-In (2024), office workers file into a hallway cinematically, but here, button-downs are paired with black stiletto pumps, red rouge, or a fitted black pinafore. At times his scenes can even feel a bit sinister, bringing to mind the work of New Objectivity artists like Otto Dix.

Villafañe, who was born in Puerto Rico and studied (and briefly practiced) architecture, fully committed himself to painting during the isolation of 2020, when private and the public selves were forced to inhabit the same space. This summer, Villafañe made his New York solo debut with “Playtime” at Charles Moffett. Carnival, dance, and Puerto Rican festivals also obliquely inspire Villafañe’s imagery. The artist’s mother was a salsa dancer, and he grew up attending professional dance competitions, giving him a particular sensitivity to arrangements of limbs in space. “I am very conscientious of the edges of paintings. Everyone is choreographed around these boundaries,” he told us.

Piper Bangs Just Graduated From College. Now Her Fantastical Fruit Paintings Are Captivating the Art World
by Annikka Olsen, September 12, 2024

Piper Bangs. Photo: Reid Calvert. Courtesy of the artist and Megan Mulrooney Gallery, Los Angeles.

Emerging artist Piper Bangs only recently (very recently, just this past May) graduated from the Laguna College of Art and Design where she studied painting and drawing, but her career is already hitting its stride. In 2022, she opened her first solo show at the Watermill Center in New York, “Flora,” which was followed early last year by another solo, “Flora II,” in a collaboration between the Watermill Center and Estia’s Little Kitchen in Sag Harbor. This fall, the Los Angeles-based artist made her hometown debut with “Piper Bangs: Fruiting Body,” a solo show at the newly established Megan Mulrooney Gallery.  Ahead of that debut, Annikka Olsen spoke with Bangs about her paintings, in which fruits (often pears) are rendered with a sentient agency.

“They are at times, frankly, a bit gross to look at, but at others rather cute,” Olsen said. These paintings are fleshy and organic and fantastical, a vision of life that is both alien and familiar. These paintings have also captivated audiences.  “It’s important to me that the paintings are also open-ended enough, that people can come to them and imagine what’s going on in different ways,” said Bangs, in conversation.

A Decade Ago, Artist Jenny Morgan Discovered Her Doppelgänger. Now She’s Her Model
by Katie White, October 31, 2024

The Movement, left, and Jenny Morgan in her studio, right. Photo: Courtesy of the artist and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles / New York

Brooklyn emerging artist Jenny Morgan’s recent works are spectral, beautiful paintings of women who appear both hyperreal and incorporeal at once. Her figures are cast in unnatural hues of blues and greens. At times, their likenesses are subsumed by psychedelic patterns or animal furs. “In my work, I’m thinking about the traditions within portraiture and where that leaves us,” said Morgan in a recent conversation. Morgan, who was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, recently debuted these hallucinatory odalisques in “No Endings for the Wild” her debut solo exhibition at Anat Ebgi in New York. Morgan has worked with most of her models for over a decade and she sees her works as in some ways tied to the Jungian concept of “shadow work” in which one acknowledges both the most developed and most animalistic sides of ourselves.

If one model in her work looks particularly like the artist herself, Morgan agrees. A friend of the artist’s noticed the woman in Salt Lake City and texted Morgan a photo of her. “I thought that he was sending me an old photograph of myself,” she recalled. Morgan ultimately tracked the woman and asked if she would like to model. The woman has appeared in her works for nearly a decade. In the recent painting The Movement she appears seated in a chair, one leg tucked under the other, her pet snake wrapped around her neck. The entire painting reverberates with green and maroon patterning, somewhere between snakeskin and tie-dye, that radiates from the center of the painting. The woman’s face is obscured by a green haze that seems to emanate from her like an aura. Her face isn’t legible. “Sometimes it’s easy for me to address her face, but sometimes it’s deeply triggering.” Morgan admitted, “I needed to destroy her in some way.”

Why Rising Artist Tabita Rezaire Is Saying Goodbye to the Art World
by Katie White, December 12, 2024

Tabita Rezaire by Ange Nieux

French-born  artist Tabita Rezaire has called her newest museum exhibition—“Calabash Nebula” presented by TBA21 at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid—the “death of her career.” The powerful words hint at the pivotal change of purpose Rezaire, an artist of French Guianese and Danish descent. Dubbed an “Afro-cyber-feminist” the emerging artist is known for her dizzying and daring new media installations that explore the connections between the technological, the spiritual, and the terrestrial. Often her works are filled with bright, millennial colors and cosmic imagery while addressing topics of decolonization, African forms of feminism, and the cosmos.

Now, however, Rezaire considers herself a farmer—a cocoa farmer to be exact. Over the past several years, the artist, who is now based in Cayenne, French Guiana, has worked to build an ethical and sustainable cocoa farming community in her ancestral land. The farm is part of AMAKABA, a larger center she founded with an intersectional mission combining the study of art, science, and astronomy alongside spiritual and ancestral philosophy. The center also includes a yoga center.

Her exhibition in Madrid, therefore, is a poignant goodbye to her career and features three new installations, that the artist regards as a triptych. These immersive installations invite visitors to learn about the indigenous knowledge tradition in French Guyana, the nation’s pivotal place in the exploration of space, as well as rich mythic traditions, with two installations celebrating Orisha Yemoja, the mother spirit of rivers.