Who Is the Most Influential Artist Working Right Now That Nobody Talks About

[BradBytheway]

Not the most commercially successful. Not the most critically acclaimed. The artist, in any medium, who you think is doing work that will matter in twenty years but is not getting the mainstream attention they deserve right now.

Could be visual art, music, writing, film, performance, anything. One name, one sentence on why you think they matter.

[Foundry69]

Weyes Blood as a songwriter. Her work on Titanic Rising and And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow captures something about contemporary anxiety and cosmological loneliness that most pop music cannot touch

[Phil]

Imogen Heap as a technologist-musician. The work on wearable music interfaces and fair trade music through blockchain is genuinely visionary and almost entirely unrecognised outside very specific circles

[DiogoCardoso]

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye as a painter. The imaginary people in ordinary moments she paints are some of the most quietly powerful figurative work happening anywhere and she is known to the art world but not beyond it

[DarkMatter24]

Richard Mosse as a documentary photographer using military thermal imaging to document migration and conflict. The work is technically extraordinary and morally serious in ways that mainstream photojournalism is not

[NightHarbour30]

Arca as a producer and performer. The work since Mutant has been mapping entirely new sonic territory that most pop production will catch up with in five years

[QuantumToken57]

Jenny Odell as a thinker-artist-writer. How to Do Nothing was widely read but the broader project of attention and place she is engaged in is more significant than its reception suggests

[Daresh84]

Titus Kaphar in visual art. Painting that directly engages with what is missing from historical representation and who gets left out of the frame. Important work that is in museums but not in the cultural conversation