TIME Magazine recently announced their list of the 100 most influential people shaping the future of art today. Read here to learn more about how the list was compiled. As TIME says, "they come from all kinds of backgrounds; they are painters, photographers, sculptors, and other artists; they are curators, lawyers, philanthropists, museum leaders, and others who bring this work to the world. These innovators are charting new paths and offering new ways of seeing."
Three NYU Tisch alumni are recognized for their outstanding contributions to their creative landscape on this list:
Hank Willis Thomas '98 (BFA, Photography & Imaging)
In Philadelphia, a massive Afro pick with a handle in the shape of a clenched fist stands as a monument to Black resilience. The sculpture, titled All Power to All People, is emblematic of the work of Hank Willis Thomas, a conceptual artist whose practice often subverts the iconography of pop culture and mass media to, as he likes to say, “re-right” history. With art in prominent public spaces like the Boston Common and downtown Brooklyn, Thomas embodies what civic engagement can look like for an artist looking to express the complexity of American society. For Freedoms, a collective he co-founded in 2016, has installed more than 500 artist-designed billboards around the country, which encourage people to vote and get involved in their communities. In October, Thomas unveiled a sculpture memorializing the enslaved people who built Davidson College in North Carolina. “The road to progress is always under construction.” Thomas told TIME in 2025. “We're trying to not go back.”
Leo Villareal '94 (MPS, ITP)
Some of the brightest lights on the Manhattan skyline this year were designed by Leo Villareal, the architect behind an installation that sends waves of monochromatic flashes across the top of the new 60-story J.P. Morgan Chase headquarters, which opened last October. Villareal, 59, a Mexican American light artist, uses a custom software to program the building’s approximately 1.5 million LED lights nightly for a work he calls Celestial Passage. Around the globe, Villareal is making urban spaces twinkle. His display of 48,000 LEDs lights up the Bay Bridge, which connects Oakland to San Francisco in California, while his 3.2-mile-long Illuminated River in London bills itself as the world’s longest public art commission. The single lighting display connects the nine bridges on London’s Thames. At a time when it’s hard to get people to look up from their phones, Villareal’s projects are united by a desire to inspire awe and invite people to look more closely at the world around them.
Tyler Mitchell '17 (BFA, Kanbar Institute, Film & TV)
Tyler Mitchell was just 23 when he photographed Beyoncé for Vogue in 2018, becoming the first Black artist to shoot the magazine’s cover. The image, now in the collection of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, turned him into a voice of his generation overnight—and he’s only solidified that status since. The 31-year-old’s warm, tender portraits of Black people have endeared him to legendary artists like Carrie Mae Weems, Arthur Jafa, and Amy Sherald, all of whom he considers close friends. “My interest is in people,” he says. Like an increasing number of young photographers, Mitchell moves fluidly through the worlds of fashion, magazines, and art. He has shot campaigns for Ralph Lauren and Loewe, contributed photography to the catalogue of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” and mounted several solo museum shows. “My practice has evolved,” he says, “into something that is deeply flexible and porous and capacious in the way I think photography truly is.” On the horizon is a January show at Gagosian in Los Angeles and a pair of unannounced museum exhibitions, one on each side of the Atlantic.