As another year of museum retrospectives, historical surveys, thematic group shows, art fairs, biennials, triennials, public and performance art commissions, and good, old-fashioned gallery exhibitions comes to a close, the staff of BLOUIN ARTINFOis looking back, taking stock, and giving thanks for the art that made us laugh, cry, run away screaming, or think really hard — and the few stand-outs that caused us to have all those reactions. Here are our favorite exhibitions, events, and individual artworks of 2013.

5Pointz, Queens, 1993-November 19, 2013

Despite months of public debate and valiant efforts by supporters to have the 5Pointz building declared a landmark, the wildly decorated graffiti arts center in Long Island City was whitewashed overnight in mid-November by building owner Jerry Wolkoff, who plans to demolish the building and put up high-rise towers in its place. Wolkoff had insistened that he “loved” the art and that demolition while the art was still visible would be “agonizing,” and angry artists and admirers were stunned by the move. — Eileen Kinsella

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“The Cat Show” at White Columns, New York, June 14-July 27, 2013

Beyond its great cat-themed works (134 of them) by artists including Elizabeth Peyton, David Shrigley, Frances Stark, and Cory Arcangel, this show, curated by writer Rhonda Lieberman, also had actual living “cats-in-residence” frolicking in an artist-designed cat playground replete with jungle gym, scratching posts, and a “Zen Litter Tray” by Rob Pruitt. The cats were up for adoption — courtesy of Social Tees Animal Rescue — so guests could go home with their very own work of purring art. — Rozalia Jovanovic

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“Come Together: Surviving Sandy” at Industry City, Brooklyn, October 20-December 15, 2013

Destined to go down in local lore as one of those bellwether exhibitions on a par with “The Times Square Show,” Brooklyn Rail publisher Phong Bui’s astounding, warehouse-filling homage to New York’s community of artists brought together blue chip figures like Alex Katz, Deborah Kass, Chuck Close, and Kiki Smith, market-tested youngsters like the Bruce High Quality Foundation, Dustin Yellin, and Wendy White, and rising stars like Carrie Moyer, Diana Cooper, and Cordy Ryman. Staggering rent increases at Industry City earlier this year forced artists out of the very building that hosted this exhibition celebrating the New York art world support networks. That development cast a shadow over the goodwill and gooey feelings fostered by the “Surviving Sandy” theme — but also reinforced the reality that if artists are going to survive the high cost of living and the vagaries of weather afflicting New York, they can count on each other but not on the kindness of benevolent landlords. — Benjamin Sutton

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“A Different Kind of Order: The ICP Triennial” at the International Center of Photography, New York, May 17-September 22, 2013

Slammed in 2010 for mounting an overly analogue triennial, ICP bounced back this year with curators Joanna Lehan, Kristen Lubben, Christopher Phillips, and Carol Squiers’ incredibly rich, varied, poignant, devastating, and yet optimistic survey of not just contemporary photography, but the whole field of video and new media art, plus plenty of hand-crafted sculpture and collage for good measure. Some works immediately burned themselves into your retina — like Thomas Hirschhorn’s bloody iPad-scrolling video "Touching Reality" (2012) — while others drew you in with strange formal experiments — like Aleksandra Domanovic’s stacks of paper with protest imagery printed on their edges. Still others lingered in your mind’s eye for days with their incredible complexity and encyclopedic aspirations, like Sohei Nishino’s psycho-architectural cityscape collages or Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse’s census-like photo-survey of every room in a 54-story building in Johannesburg. — BS

“Edo Pop: The Graphic Impact of Japanese Prints” at Japan Society, New York, March 9-June 9, 2013

What stood out about the Japan Society’s “Edo Pop” exhibition was the striking juxtaposition of classic works and contemporary re-imaginings thereof. Lady Aiko’s site-specific mural welcomed visitors at the entrance, and the show bounced back and forth perfectly between masterworks of ukiyo-e woodblock printmaking and contemporary artists still working in the medium and taking cues from Japan’s golden era of print production. — Alanna Martinez

Julie Evans, “Mylar Constructions” at Winkleman Gallery, New York, October 24-December 7, 2013

Evans’s “Mylar Constructions” show was impeccably curated, with artworks mounted directly to one wall, mingling its textures with those of the pieces, and beautifully mounted works on paper hung on the other side of the room. Each piece, while seemingly simple at first glance, was a miniature world where it was easy to get lost among the inkblots and dried paint flakes. I really wanted to take one of these home. — AM

“Isa Genzken: A Retrospective” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, November 23, 2013-March 10, 2014

Walking through the Isa Genzken’s retrospective is a bit like walking down Canal Street after a cyclone has struck, transforming the objects, trinkets, cheap clothes, mannequins, and industrial plastic and metal materials from the various shops into lurid, mesmerizing, often off-putting arrangements that form a lexicon that is dark, comic, and at times unsettlingly unfamiliar. — RJ

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“Jack Goldstein x 10,000” at the Jewish Museum, New York, May 10-September 29, 2013

The first American retrospective devoted to this pioneering member of the Pictures generation — whose mythical status seems to only increase with time — was a tightly curated and powerful look at his impressive output, ranging from his short, fascinating film loops to his striking lightning paintings. The well-received show was complemented by the artist’s signature film “The Jump” — a repeating silhouette of a diver in motion — playing nightly through the month of August on jumbo screens in New York’s Times Square, where it drew rapt crowds. — EK

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Sharon Hayes, “Ricerche: three” (2013) from “The Encyclopedic Palace” at the Venice Biennale, Venice, June 1-November 24, 2013

In her video piece “Ricerche: three,” Sharon Hayes interviewed a group of 36 students at an all-women’s college in New England about a broad range of topics pertaining to sexuality and gender. While some questions provoked laughter (“Do you feel like you have the same kind of sex or a different kind of sex than your mother?”), others sparked intense debate about “activism on campus” or nationalism and the female body. Hayes’s piece interrogates the complicated space of an all-female college while drawing poignant portraits of women in the process of forming their own identities. — Ashton Cooper

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“Mike Kelley” at MoMA PS1, Queens, October 13, 2013-February 2, 2014

This exhibition, the largest of the artist’s work to date and the first solo show to take over the entire PS1 building in Long Island City, pays tribute to the L.A. artist, who took his own life last year at the age of 57. The exhibition explores themes Kelley returned to time and time again — religion, repressed memories, and sexuality — in a broad range of media including film, sculpture, and sprawling installation, and with unorthodox materials like dirty stuffed animals. — EK

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Ragnar Kjartansson, “The Visitors” at Luhring Augustine, New York, February 1-March 23, 2013

We hate to give good readers bad news, but if you weren’t moved to tears by this admittedly sentimental yet sublime nine-channel music video — in which Icelandic art star Kjartansson and eight other musicians performed as a divided ensemble in separate rooms of a grand old upstate New York house for nearly an hour before joining forces in a jubilant finale — you are probably a robot. Between this show, his “S.S. Hangover” performance at the Venice Biennale, and a residency at MoMA PS1’s “Expo 1” colony, 2013 was the year of Kjartansson. — BS

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Cutting Through the Noise Surrounding Ragnar Kjartansson's Neo-Romantic Jam Band

Annie Leibovitz, “Pilgrimage” at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, February 15-May 5, 2013

After her partner, Susan Sontag, died in 2004, Annie Leibovitz took to the road to complete a bucket list of sorts that the couple had compiled, featuring places and things they cared about or wanted to visit. The images resulting from this “pilgrimage” — pictures of Virginia Woolf’s writing desk, Emily Dickinson’s only surviving dress, and the white gloves Abraham Lincoln had in his pocket when he died, among many other things — are both surreal and deeply inflected with a sense of sorrow and loss. — AC

“Matisse: In Search of True Painting” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, December 4, 2012-March 17, 2013

There was so much to be learned from this show, one of the tightest and most refined exhibitions of the year, from personal details that spoke to the nuances of Matisse’s career trajectory to the fundamentals of oil painting. Historical photos of some of his most famous paintings at various stages of completion brought the artist’s meticulous studio process to life for the first time since the works were originally shown in Paris in 1945. — AM

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Ryan McNamara, “MEƎM: A Story Ballet about the Internet” at Performa 13, New York, November 8-12

Ryan McNamara’s work for Performa 13, “ME3M: A Story Ballet About the Internet,” started off as a traditional dance performance, but within moments — as audience members began getting carted off in individual, chauffeured dollies to see snippets of 10 or so dances happening around the space — the ballet was transformed into an unforgettable event infused with McNamara’s irreverent aesthetic and feeling unlike any theater we had ever experienced. It left us delighted for hours afterwards. — RJ

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“Photography and the American Civil War” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, April 2-September 2, 2013

The Civil War came to radiant life in this standout exhibition of photographs that included a portrait of Abraham Lincoln three months before his nomination as the Republican candidate (when he stopped in at Matthew Brady’s gallery); a mourning corsage from his funeral; a room lined with medical photographs taken by the surgeon Dr. Reed Brockway Bontecou; and “The Scourged Back” — a tiny yet powerful image on a carte-de-visite of a runaway slave with whipping scars that became one the most widely disseminated abolitionist photographs. The show, with its attention to the evolution of the role of the camera, offered something for both Civil-War junkies and photography fanatics. — RJ

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“Ad Reinhardt” at David Zwirner, New York, November 7-December 18, 2013

This museum-quality mini-retrospective, curated by Yale University School of Art dean Robert Storr, started with an expansive display of Reinhardt’s sharp-witted satirical cartoons — a revelation in itself — and continued with a slideshow of his personal photographs taken during his extensive travels around the world. The exhibition ended with a room full of his mesmerizing black paintings — 13 in all, the largest number seen together since his show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1991. — EK

Kathy Ruttenberg, “Nature of the Beast” at Stux Gallery, New York, April 11-May 18, 2013

A welcome respite from the overwhelming amount of abstract painting that has filled Chelsea gallery walls this year, Ruttenberg's fantastical ceramic forest not only featured some of the finest ceramic works I've ever seen on this scale, but also some outstanding sculptural concepts. She managed to infuse dark elements with fairy-tale imagery, engaging viewers with sculptures installed everywhere from the gallery floor to the ceiling. — AM

Hank Willis Thomas, “Question Bridge: Black Males,” a collaboration with Hank Willis Thomas, Chris Johnson, Bayeté Ross Smith and Kamal Sinclair at Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, July 11-August 23, 2013

Hank Willis Thomas’s multimedia project “Question Bridge: Black Males” is the product of four years of work and trips to 11 cities to gather video footage of self-identified black men answering and asking questions posed to one another. The resulting five-channel video installation was at times comic and moving, but above all it got at the important point that there is neither one truth nor one singular definition of black male identity. — AC

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Mickalene Thomas, “Origin of the Universe” at the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, September 28, 2012-January 20, 2013

The full range of Mickalene Thomas’s artistic output — her well-known portraits of women, new interiors, photographs, and her first film — was on view in this comprehensive exhibition that gave insight into both her multi-step working process and the Lacanian underpinnings of her work. Thomas’s two glittering reinterpretations of Courbet’s classic painting “Origin of the World,” one featuring the body of her partner, artist Carmen McLeod, and the other her own, are brilliant interrogations of art historical representations of the female body. — AC

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Letha Wilson, “Landmarks and Monuments” at Art in General, New York, April 20-June 30, 2013

Wilson’s works, which are either sculpture-mounted photographs or photo-curious sculptures, depending on which medium you favor — and seem to follow in Robert Smithson’s spiraling footsteps in either case — achieved new levels of richness and formal complexity in her solo show at the Tribeca non-profit. She continued to stage collisions between coarse construction materials, landscape photographs, and the archetypal American wilderness they depict, while also incorporating the unique architectural features of Art in General’s loft space, from its bricked-up windows to its upcycled ship mast columns. — BS