10 Under-Recognized Artists Who Got Their Due in 2025

In 1968 Tom Lloyd became the first artist ever to show at New York’s Studio Museum in Harlem, exhibiting his light sculptures to viewers who were not always accepting of them, with some claiming that they appeared too “downtown” for an “uptown” audience still reckoning with what Black art ought to look like. In 2025, with the Studio Museum having reopened in a new home, Lloyd received his first proper survey in years and posthumously gained a much different reception. Here, Lloyd’s sculptures made of blinking Christmas bulbs and car light covers moved the painterly Op style into the third dimension, offering vibrant abstract patterns that alter both the mind and the eye. The show also shed light on Lloyd’s involvement with groups such as the Arts Workers Coalition, which protested inequities in New York museums during the late 1960s.

Female Old Masters such as Rosalba Carriera and Angelica Kauffmann have received long-overdue attention in recent years and have since entered art history books; Michaelina Wautier, a Dutch painter active during the 17th century, now seems poised to join their ranks. As recently as the mid-2010s, Wautier was so obscure that her paintings were relegated to museum storage facilities. But this year, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna surveyed her art, positioning her 11.5-foot-wide painting The Triumph of Bacchus (1655–59) as a key work of the Baroque movement. Wautier may have painted herself into the work, posing as a woman with one breast bared. “She included a self-portrait in that painting with her boob hanging out,” Kirsten Derks, a Wautier expert, told the New York Times this year. “I don’t know of any other artist who would dare to do that.”

One of José María Velasco’s final works, the 1910 painting The Great Comet of 1882, was based on the artist’s memory of the comet’s appearance during a year in which Mexico was unsettled by revolution. But despite the convulsions of 1882, Velasco’s painting is placid, with his comet blazing through a dusky sky filled with twinkling stars. The landscape below remains undisturbed, suggesting that his homeland was intimately bound up in his nation’s history, even if Mexico’s plains and valleys did not always visibly register it. That much became apparent in a retrospective staged by London’s National Gallery and the Minneapolis Institute of Art, where the show is now on view. The exhibition is a first, since no other major European or American museum has mounted such a presentation, but Velasco was always well known in Mexico, where his fans once included Diego Rivera, whom Velasco personally knew.

Maria Helena Vieira da Silva’s kaleidoscopic abstractions of the 1930s and ’40s offer a feast for the eyes, with warping checkerboard patterns, grids that fold in on each other, and cascades of color. Because of the rough aesthetic of some of her later work, the Portuguese-born modernist has sometimes been associated with the Art Informel movement of the postwar years, but the connection is tenuous at best. Much of the rest of her oeuvre is uncategorizable, resembling no other dominant tendency or style. Nevertheless, in April the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice offered a chance for viewers to fully take stock of her art and helped birth a mini-moment for Vieira da Silva. That moment is likely to continue into 2026 with the current run of the show at the Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain.

Australian Indigenous art was the subject of two large-scale shows this year. One was at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., featuring a host of works on loan from the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne; the other, titled “Yolŋu Power: The Art of Yirrkala” and held at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, focused specifically on a group of Aboriginal peoples who live in the north of Australia. Gulumbu Yunupiŋu, a leader of the Yolŋu people, was a key artist in both exhibitions. She was known for paintings on bark that are dense with crosshatched forms, each with a dot at its center to represent what Yolŋu viewers term “second stars,” or that which cannot be seen with the naked eye. Garak (The Universe), a 2008 painting that appeared in the D.C. show, is Yunupiŋu’s version of a limitless cosmos in which all is interlinked.

One of the leading lights of the Nigerian art scene of the 20th century, Ben Enwonwu has always been a core figure for anyone who cares about the history of African modernism; curator Okwui Enwezor once said that he was “arguably Africa’s first art star.” But Enwonwu has only begun getting his due in the West, and his star posthumously ascended further this year with appearances in a Nigerian modernism survey at Tate Modern in London and a vast exhibition about Black artists in Paris at the Centre Pompidou. In his paintings, Enwonwu often sought to synthesize many different traditions—Igbo styles with European modernism, Muslim rites with postcolonial thinking. The tendency is evident in works such as The Durbar of Eid ul-Fitr, Kano, Nigeria (1955), a painting in the Tate show that depicts a procession held at the end of Ramadan that Enwonwu witnessed firsthand.

Arpita Singh’s paintings are dense with references and people, few more so than My Lollipop City: Gemini Rising (2005), in which two men hover above New Delhi, trying to make sense of a landscape cluttered with buses, roadways, and airplanes. Like other works by Singh, the painting suggests India as a country riven by inequity and filled with tension. This has not stopped her from gaining a following in India, where she was awarded a retrospective in 2019 at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art. Only this year, however, did her work make it beyond South Asia with a Serpentine Galleries survey in London. Hans Ulrich Obrist, the artistic director of that institution, credited Singh with having influenced “five generations of Indian contemporary artists” in an Artsy profile of the exhibition.

Beatriz González has always been a keen observer of art history: Her first solo show, in 1964, featured remade versions of Johannes Vermeer’s The Lacemaker (1669–70), and she has since gone on to reimagine famed paintings by Picasso, Manet, and the like. But until around a decade ago, the Western canon was unkind to the Colombian artist, who had long been a giant for anyone with a passion for Latin American Pop Art but had flown under the radar for just about everyone else. This year, she got a big retrospective at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, where the show remains on view; it heads next to museums in London and Oslo. The exhibition makes clear that González was interested in not only art-historical images but also the media. She has repeatedly pondered how pictures shape the perception of current events—a salient topic within Colombia, a country that has been roiled by political infighting and bloodshed that began in the 1960s and continues today.

Minnie Evans’s mandala drawings of the mid-20th century feature many-eyed creatures encircled by colorful tail-like appendages and blooming flowers. They are beautiful but also haunting—one buyer of an Evans drawing even returned it to her, claiming that he lost sleep because of it. A retrospective on view at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art highlights how darkness informed Evans’s phantasmagoric world. Typically, her art is said to stem from visions she personally experienced, but the show asks whether her work wasn’t also influenced by racism encountered both on and off the job in North Carolina, where she worked for a wealthy white family before spending more than 25 years on the staff of the verdant Airlie Gardens park. The exhibition proposes that her Surrealist art, which memorably appeared in the 2022 Venice Biennale, is rooted in reality, even as it appears to channel alternate worlds.