The Most Important Visual Artists of 2014 (So Far)

Oscar Murillo is often unfairly characterized by his rapid art market success, which many have associated with the "flip art" collecting trend (buying and "flipping" hyped young artists' work for quick profits). The over-heated market made it possible for Murillo to become a star quicker than most, but it doesn't mean that his art is only valuable in a market sense.

Notably this year, he had a solo exhibition at David Zwirner Gallery in April titled "A Mercantile Novel," which brought 13 workers from Colombia's Colombina chocolate factory to work during the day packaging Chocmelos candies (which were given away for free). His mother worked at the factory, which was clevely re-created in the space of a gallery. Out of many interpretations about what Murillo was going here, one sticks—as he said, "Colombina becomes a catalyst for a conversation about my experience as a human being."

"A Mercantile Novel" positioned Murillo as an artist who, at 28 years old, can fetch high prices while knowing the politics of the art market machine he benefits from. It showed his focus on making work that isn't as easy to sell or communicate with as a painting to prove that he's not simply of and for the market.

Alison Jackson's fake paparazzi photos are so real that news outlets have printed them as celebrity gossip. At least one set of her photos this year, however, was too outrageous to be believable. Following the hype surrounding the Kanye West and Kim Kardashian's wedding, Jackson, who often creates topical work, imagined what it would've been like if Kim and Kanye spend their honeymoon in a campervan. Jackson's staged shot of her Kimye lookalikes kayaking was enough to make the Internet go wild.

In January, we spoke to Jackson about her images and how they capture the "cult of celebrity." In an age that's so celebrity obsessed, a phenomenon helped by the rise of social media and the increasing lack of privacy, Jackson's work never seemed more appropriate. "We're used to seeing celebrities as two-dimensional images on the Internet, in magazines, or on television, so when the public sees the photograph, it doesn't really matter whether it's the real person or not. The celebrity can be replaced," Jackson told us of her work.

Olafur Eliasson's "Little Sun" project, which he co-founded with Frederick Ottesen, has hit new strides this year. Always inspired by light, Eliasson has used his interest in luminosity to bring good to the world. By purchasing one of his Little Suns, a wearable solar-powered light, you make the product available to off-grid areas at prices affordable in their regions.

In April, Bloomberg Philanthropies invested $5 million in the project, which will bring many more people the power of light. We hope to see more impactful projects like this from Eliasson in the future.

2014 has already been a big year for Marina Abramovic. Continually in the limelight, the grandmother of performance art made TIME's list of the "100 Most Influential People of 2014" in April. She spent much of her energy the past few months gearing up for a show at London's Serpentine Gallery, titled "Nothing," where she is doing just that. For the show, she asks visitors to abandon their electronics and come share space with her for 512 hours while she simply just exists. She's called the ongoing exhibition her most "radical" piece yet.

While the public has been watching her do nothing, behind the scenes, Abramovic has devoted time this year to working on the Marina Abramovic Institute, which recently launched "IMMATERIAL," a digital platform and online journal. In May, the MAI announced a partnership with Mana Contemporary, which will involve an Ambramovic-hosted workshop at the New Jersey museum in October. Also in October, Abramovic will finally hug all of the backers of her Kickstarter project for the MAI, something promised to those who funded the project.

Parker Ito, like other artists on this list, has been benefitting off of the "flip art" trend that has younger artists getting early hype and quick art market success. But Ito isn't complacement enough to just accept the success and continued exhibitions; instead, he boldly held an art show in his apartment and gave everything away for free.

Titled "I Can't Fuck You Tonight I'm Reading Proust," the show had paintings, posters, and other works by Ito and artist Liv Barrett. It was a humorous, defiant statement that echoed an interview he did in 2012, where he said, "Most conceptual artists claim to be intellectuals. I am either a super anti-intellectual or a fake pseudo-intellectual. Just in the same way that my life is more conceptual than any art, therefore I do not need to make conceptual art." He gets all the layers of his actions, and he continues to succeed while being himself.

Per usual, Ai Weiwei has been working relentlessly in 2014. Following an incident where a protestor smashed one of his painted Han Dynasty vases during the Miami leg of "Ai Weiwei: According to What?, Ai brought the exhibition to New York's Brooklyn Museum, his final stop on the show's tour. In addition, Ai also held his biggest show yet at Berlin's Martin-Gropius-Bau, titled "Evidence." Soon after, he created a melancholy installation for the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, and he displayed personal items at Lisson Gallery, all without being able to leave China.

Amid confrontations with Chinese authorities, who will not give Ai back his passport, supporters of the artist across the world have come out with sympathy for his plight. At the same time, Ai's momentum seems only to be building, with an upcoming show in Poland, the release of his monograph through Taschen, and a highly anticipated exhibition at Alcatraz Island in September, titled "@Large."

Ai always seems to be surrounded by controversy, and this year has been no exception. His name was pulled from a Chinese exhibition following his outspoken comments against the government. Also, Ai himself denounced a Kickstarter-backed film that he allegedly starred in, something he claims was false marketing. In 2014, Ai also turned to Instagram to get his message out, creating a viral photo trend that replaced guns with peoples' legs. We can only expect to hear more from the Chinese dissident artist as he takes over Alcatraz.

Wade Guyton nearly played one of the biggest pranks on an auction house in art history simply by posting pictures on Instagram. Right before Christie's much-hyped contemporary art auction in May, called "If I Live I'll See You Tuesday," a 2005 Guyton print, Untitled (Fire, Red/Black U), was expected to sell upwards of $2.5 million. The print, made on a photocopier, was listed so high because it is supposedly one of a kind.

Right before the auction, however, Guyton re-printed a series of his 2005 work and posted images of the many copies on Instagram, perhaps in an attempt to disrupt the Christie's auction. Whatever his intention, and however nervous Christie's may have been, the work in question ended up selling for $3.525 million. The rebellious gesture would've meant more had Guyton's price actually plummeted.

Banksy made headlines in October 2013 with his "Better Out Than In" residency in New York, and even if he couldn't top the buzz surrounding his month-long unauthorized street art show, he came pretty close this year. In March, the anonymous artist got behind the #WithSyria campaign by creating a new stencil and video updating his Girl With Balloon piece for the cause. That same month, Banksy exhibited work in Hang-Up Gallery's "Wall to Wall" exhibition along with other big names in street art.

By April, Banksy was back on the streets with two pieces in the U.K. One stencil in London featured spies in trenchcoats listening in on a phone booth—an obvious attack on government surveillance. But the piece that caused even more controversy was Banksy's Mobile Lovers, a stencil on a wall in Bristol that showed a couple embracing in the glow of their cellphones. After Mobile Lovers was pulled off the wall by a local Boys Club, the Club received death threats and soon turned it over to authorities. In the end, Banksy donated the piece to the Boys Club, which was suffering financially. Then, in a hilarious turn, it popped up on the Antiques Roadshow for appraisal.

In addition to Banksy's usual mischief, many trying to ride off his fame invoked the artist's name without his permission in 2014. Graffiti writer BNE sold T-shirts as an alleged collaboration with Banksy, which turned out to be fake. Both Sotheby's and the Sincura Group are hosting unauthorized Banksy exhibitions, something the artist has spoken out against and called "disgusting." Possibly hoping to divert the world from all this false publicity, Banksy most recently teased a potential movie based on "Better Out Than In." That's one big year, and we're only half way through 2014.

Swoon turned the Brooklyn Museum's rotunda into a fantastical forest with a magical installation called "Swoon: Submerged Motherlands," which is on view until Aug. 24. For the show, the street art queen created a 60-foot tree with cut paper leaves and shredded fabric for bark. She also dragged her Swimming Cities into the museum—large rafts cobbled together from trash that Swoon and 50 friends lived on for months in the Hudson River and the Adriatic Sea. The exhibition also included a film screening and ensemble performance, which were collaborative projects centered around the raft community that inhabited Swoon's Swimming Cities.

In addition to her impressive production at the Brooklyn Museum, Swoon also wrapped up a solo show at Galerie LJ in Paris this year and exhibited work at Jonathan LeVine Gallery for "Art Truancy: Celebrating 100 Years of Juxtapoz Magazine" in New York. In January, she auctioned off pieces along with other artists to support her own "Braddock Tiles" project, a "community based artisanal micro-factory" inside an old 19th century church in North Braddock, Pennsylvania.

JR is one of many artists on this list who are constantly in "go mode," as in, it seems like they are always working (and maybe never sleeping). When you've had as incredible of a response to your work as JR has, it makes sense to keep going and building all over the world. After turning over his "Inside Out" Project to whoever wanted to participate in 2011, he released a documentary about the project with HBO last year, and surprised everyone with a fascinating new venue for his work—the New York City Ballet.

In addition to pasting work on the outside of the theater and transforming the lobby floor, JR got the opportunity to choreograph the stage with his friends, composer Woodkid and dancer Lil Buck. Beyond that, he released a collaborative print with David Lynch and announced a major upcoming film project with Hans Zimmer, Pharrell, and Woodkid. Oh yeah, he just put portraits all over the Pantheon in Paris, too. It seems that JR won't be put in a box and will create with any platform he's given.

Photographer Carrie Mae Weems brought her powerful black-and-white images to the Guggenheim Museum this year for a show titled "Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video." The exhibition explored race, gender, and social issues through history and identity, tracing Weems' prolific career as an artist.

In addition, Weems contributed striking images to the Studio Museum in Harlem for "Carrie Mae Weems: The Museum Series," an ongoing project where Weems staged photos of herself in front of major museums and cultural institutions, standing with her back to the camera. The images highlight the artist's relationship with institutions as well as a black woman's place in the canon of art history.

Kara Walker's massive installation inside Brooklyn's decommissioned Domino Sugar Factory was one of the most anticipated art events of the year, and it continues to have lines around the block. For her first large-scale installation, Walker built a "mammy sphinx" covered in 160,000 pounds of sugar. The exhibition, with a mouthful of a title A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby: an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant, touched on themes of slavery, gentrification, and black identity in America.

In addition to her blazing white sphinx, Walker also installed resin and molasses sculptures of boys carrying baskets of sugar, referencing the young slaves who were once the backbone of the sugar industry. Collapsing time, space, and culture, Walker's scope for this project remains boundless. Even the exhibition's setting felt monumental: staged in a crumbling factory soon to be replaced by stylish condos. Walker's presence in 2014 so far has been anything but subtle or sweet.