Director, Gagosian, New York
With regular by-lines in the New York Times, the New Yorker and many museum and gallery exhibition catalogues, Antwaun Sargent was well-established as a critic when, in early 2021, he took on the role of director at Gagosian New York. Tasked with improving the gallery’s representation of Black artists, Sargent curated the exhibition ‘Social Works’ that year. The exhibition featured works by 12 artists including Lauren Halsey and Carrie Mae Weems, brought together to explore the ways that Black artists use personal, public, institutional and psychic space in order to build community. Sargent is also an expert on the links between art, photography and fashion; in 2019, he published The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion, and this year he curated an exhibition at Hannah Traore Gallery in collaboration with the Austrian fashion house Helmut Lang.