Concise, critical reviews of books, exhibitions, and projects in all areas and periods of art history and visual studies

Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews

Roger Gastman, Trina Calderon, and Caleb Neelon
Exh. cat. Berkeley: Gingko Press Inc., 2015. 354 pp.; 800 ills. Hardcover $49.95 (9781584236016)
Nora Burnett Abrams, ed.
Denver: MCA Denver, 2017. 128 pp. Cloth $24.95 (9781616895754)
Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, February 11–May 14, 2017
The stairwell leading down to the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver’s (MCA) first floor simulates the visual experience of a New York City subway. The walls are lined with DIY graffiti, written in a variety of colors and styles, offering the passage as a prologue for its exhibition, Wall Writers: Graffiti in Its Innocence. Graffiti historian, urban anthropologist, and guest curator Robert Gastman exhaustively examines the history of the early graffiti scene in New York and Philadelphia. Beginning in 1967 as youth started to routinely make marks on the streets, the study sets out to illuminate the… Full Review
July 20, 2018
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Massimiliano Gioni and Micola Brambilla, eds.
Exh. cat. Milan: La Triennale di Milano and Electa, 2017. 312 pp.; 100 color ills. Paper €45.00 (9788891814081)
Triennale di Milano Foundation, Milan, Italy, April 28–August 20, 2017
The Restless Earth, curated by Massimiliano Gioni and organized by the Nicola Trussardi Foundation, was an ambitious exhibition that brought together more than sixty artists from over forty countries. It presented an exceptional ensemble of personal and collective works, which describe some of the most critical and debated issues of our society—migration, the current refugee crisis, and the phenomenon of globalization. The exhibition was on display at the Triennale di Milano Foundation, a center that explores the experimental languages of contemporary art, architecture, and design. The Restless Earth was displayed in a series of rooms, galleries, and corridors, which occupied… Full Review
July 2, 2018
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Matthew Affron, Mark A. Castro, Dafne Cruz Porchini, and Renato González Mello, eds.
Exh. cat. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press, 2016. 432 pp.; 350 color ills.; 20 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (9780300215229)
Exhibition schedule: Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, October 25, 2016–January 8, 2017; Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City, February 3–April 30, 2017; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, June 25–October 1, 2017
The third and last iteration of Paint the Revolution: Mexican Modernism, 1910–1950 on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston in 2017, is just one of the several exhibitions over the last five years that has sought to examine and complicate the story about the development of avant-garde movements in Mexico and their impact on the cultural and social life of the country. This latest surge of interest in modern Mexican art started with Vanguardia en México 1915–1930, organized by the Museo Nacional de Arte in Mexico City in 2013, and continued with the exhibition Modern Mexico Avant-Garde… Full Review
June 18, 2018
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What distinguishes the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Calder: Hypermobility exhibition from other recent Calder exhibitions is its presentation of sculpture as performance art. Jay Sanders, the Whitney Museum’s curator of performance art, and his colleagues Greta Hartenstein and Melinda Lang advance the claim that, in order to be adequately apprehended, Calder’s sculptures ought to be seen and heard in motion or, as they would have it, in a state of activation. From the position of art historical argument, this seems so logical as to sound self-evident and therefore unworthy of serious consideration. However, in the museum setting, the implementation… Full Review
June 13, 2018
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Ellsworth Kelly
Blanton Museum of Art, February 18–April 29, 2017
Seldom is an artist offered the opportunity of creating a complete space. Seldom is an artist offered complete control of the architecture, lighting, and contents of a venue, or given complete control of the experience of the spectator. More seldom still does a public museum afford such an occasion to an artist, allowing for the creation of a truly permanent installation. With the realization of Austin, the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin accomplishes this rare feat, enabling Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015) to join an elite list of artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries… Full Review
June 11, 2018
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Anne McCauley
Exh. cat. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. 408 pp.; 364 ills. Cloth $65.00 (9780300229080)
Princeton University Art Museum, October 7, 2017–January 7, 2018; Davis Museum, Wellesley College, February 7–June 3, 2018; Portland Museum of Art, Maine, June 22–September 16, 2018; Cleveland Museum of Art, October 21, 2018–January 21, 2019
Clarence H. White and His World: The Art and Craft of Photography, 1895–1925 boldly rethinks the established histories of fine art photography’s development in America, a topic foundational to the history of photography’s origins as a discipline. Clarence H. White (1871–1925) was one of the leading photographers of the American Pictorialist movement, which advocated the practice of photography as a fine art medium. His life and work were conducted in surroundings as varied as the parlors and backyards of Newark, Ohio, a gracious urban townhouse in Harlem, shore cabins in Maine, and the modest farm buildings and open vistas of… Full Review
June 7, 2018
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Iveta Manasherova and Elena Kamenskaya
Moscow: ABC Design and the State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, 2016. 376 pp.; 315 color ills.; 29 b/w ills. Hardcover $59.01 (9785433000810)
Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, Russia, December 8, 2016–March 12, 2017
Georgia is a country in the Caucasus with a strong tradition of Eastern Christian art. Secular visual art developed here in the early twentieth century. Although it had been part of the Russian Empire since the early nineteenth century, Georgia enjoyed a brief period of independence as a democratic republic from 1918 to 1921. The capital, Tbilisi—or Tiflis, as it was then widely known—became an important destination for intellectuals fleeing the Bolshevik Revolution and the Russian Civil War. The city also quickly became a center for the international avant-garde. This overlooked chapter from the history of European modernism recently received… Full Review
May 16, 2018
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Keely Orgeman
Exh. cat. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017. 172 pp.; 161 color ills.; 8 b/w ills. Paper over board $45.00 (9780300215182)
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT, February 17–July 23, 2017; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, October 6, 2017–January 7, 2018.
The Danish-born immigrant, inventor, performer, and artist Thomas Wilfred (1889–1968) made art on his own terms, literally. He dubbed his brand of work Lumia, a neologism designed to break with the past and establish a new artistic genre consisting solely of moving electric-light displays. Fifteen of Wilfred’s works, dating from the 1920s to the 1960s, were painstakingly restored for this luminous, and illuminating, exhibition. Accompanied by a beautifully produced and informative catalogue, Lumia: Thomas Wilfred and the Art of Light offered a unique opportunity to be immersed in the work and ideas of an artist whose last retrospective was held… Full Review
May 3, 2018
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Michelle White, ed.
Exh. cat. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. 192 pp.; 289 ills. Paper $50.00 (9780300233148)
The Menil Collection, Houston, October 13, 2017–February 25, 2018; Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis, April 6–August 11, 2018
Mona Hatoum: Terra Infirma at the Menil Collection, the artist’s first major solo exhibition in the United States in about two decades, presents an overview of Hatoum’s career in a nuanced yet direct manner. Hatoum’s work benefits from its quick metaphorical wit; however, this initial, deceptively easy clarity lingers and transforms into something else entirely, an experience underscored by the work’s placement throughout various rooms of the Menil Collection. Both artist and space offered the works for the viewer’s own interpretation, although attention to their specific historical and political context is frequently warranted by Hatoum. The majority of the exhibition… Full Review
May 2, 2018
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Donald Albrecht and Thomas Mellins, eds.
Exh. cat. Munich: Hirmer Publishers, 2017. 160 pp.; 200 color ills. Hardcover $39.95 (9783777428567)
Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, September 11, 2017–January 1, 2018; Museum of the City of New York, New York, June 22–October 28, 2018
On the occasion of the milestone exhibition Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art, organized by MoMA in 1940, critic, anthropologist, and cultural promoter Anita Brenner stated that the brilliant artistic scene that arose in Mexico in the early 1920s had reached its eclipse. For Brenner, as well as other influential voices from the arts field, the show at MoMA did not embody the true richness and complexity of two decades of intense artistic exploration in Mexico. Instead, it demonstrated how a series of avant-garde movements had become part of an institutional discourse. Other voices were less critical. Painter and anthropologist… Full Review
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