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

Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews

Bernard Herman
Eds Mark Sloan and Lizz Biswell Exh. cat. Charleston: Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, College of Charleston, 2016. 214 pp.; 114 color ills.; 3 b/w ills. Hardcover $39.95 (9781467574488)
Exhibition schedule: Something to Take My Place: The Art of Lonnie Hollie, Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston School of the Arts, South Carolina, August 22–October 10, 2015.

Exhibition schedule: Lonnie Holley: I Snuck Off a Slave Ship, Atlanta Contemporary, January 12–April 2, 2017

A central (and not uncommon) problem confronts the curator of a white-box gallery who wishes to exhibit the work of Lonnie Holley, an Alabama-born artist and musician typically described as self-taught or vernacular: how to present the work within the conventions established by this type of institution while also acknowledging that the artist’s animating presence is necessary to the artworks’ significance. As Bernard L. Herman argues in a persuasive essay in Something to Take My Place: The Art of Lonnie Holley, the catalogue accompanying a 2015 exhibition at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, “Performance stands at the heart… Full Review
March 9, 2018
Thumbnail
Agustín Arteaga
Exh. cat. Dallas: Dallas Museum of Art, 2017. 360 pp.; 209 color ills.; 87 b/w ills. Hardcover $50.00 (9780300229950)
Grand Palais, Paris, October 5, 2016–January 23, 2017; Dallas Museum of Art, March 12–July 16, 2017
“The narrative of this exhibition is a journey that sheds new light and permits new reflections on what has come to be oversimplified in the figures of ‘The Big Three’—Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros—and in the ubiquitous phenomenon of Frida Kahlo” (20), writes Agustín Arteaga, the newly appointed Eugene McDermott Director of the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA). In his introductory essay for the México 1900–1950 catalogue, Arteaga emphasizes how the exhibition—featuring more than two hundred works in a range of media including prints, paintings, drawings, and film—challenges the notion that the artistic repertory… Full Review
March 6, 2018
Thumbnail
Nicole R. Myers, ed.
Exh. cat. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017. 136 pp.; 115 color ills. Paper $35.00 (9780300227055)
Dallas Museum of Art, December 4, 2016–March 19, 2017
The title to the exhibition Art and Nature in the Middle Ages at the Dallas Museum of Art appeared in large gilded letters set upon a forest-green wall and framed by a lush foliate border similar to those gracing late-medieval manuscripts. The glittering composition signaled that something beautiful waited around the corner. A small creature, outlined in gold and similarly lifted from lively Gothic illuminations, playfully peeked from a lower corner of the same wall, imparting a lighthearted sensibility. Both impressions held true for this collection of largely Romanesque and Gothic objects from the Musée de Cluny–Musée National du Moyen… Full Review
February 15, 2018
Thumbnail
The Museum of the City of New York, January 14–May 21, 2017
The lights went out in New York City for two days in the summer of 1977, a summer marred also by more murders by the Son of Sam killer and a continuing fiscal crisis. In that time of crisis, privately funded arts groups stepped forward to enrich the city’s public-school programs with art classes taught by working artists. Forty years later, The City and the Young Imagination at the Museum of the City of New York looked back over the work of children in classes sponsored by one such group, Studio in a School (hereafter “Studio”), founded that fall under… Full Review
February 14, 2018
Thumbnail
Jonathan P. Binstock and Malick Gaines
Exh. cat. Los Angeles: Hammer Museum, 2014. 119 pp. Cloth $92.00 (9780991635696)
UCLA Hammer Museum, June 2–September 2, 2012; Grand Gallery at Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester, NY, February 19–May 7, 2017; Rochester Contemporary Art Center, February 3–March 19, 2017
The exhibition Meleko Mokgosi: Pax Kaffraria consisted of a series of mural-size paintings that interwove historical narratives of postcolonial southern African countries with cinematic contemporary scenes from the daily lives of the individuals who uphold, live within, resist, define, and embody the nation-states. Mokgosi, born in Francistown, Botswana, and living in New York City, presented the project in eight nonlinear chapters, each one composed of three to eight canvases, with the exception of the first chapter, Lekgowa, which consisted of a single circular canvas. Six of the eight chapters of Pax Kaffraria were installed in the Grand Gallery of… Full Review
February 13, 2018
Thumbnail
Veronica Roberts, ed.
Exh. cat. Austin: Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin, 2017. 144 pp.; 138 ills. Hardcover $34.95 (9781477311516)
Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas, March 12–June 11, 2017; Stanford University Cantor Arts Center, September 15, 2017–January 7, 2018
Nina Katchadourian: Curiouser is the first mid-career survey of the work of California-born New York–based Conceptual artist Nina Katchadourian (b. 1968). The exhibition explores ten major bodies of her work that include video, photography, sculpture, and sound art, addressing themes such as language, translation and interpretation, mapping and classificatory systems, sound and silence, awkwardness and the absurd, with a serious playfulness that has become the artist’s trademark. Organized by Veronica Roberts, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin, the exhibition is both intellectually stimulating and aesthetically powerful, displaying… Full Review
February 8, 2018
Thumbnail
Jeffrey Weiss, Daniel Buren, and Whitney Davis
Exh. cat. New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2015. 264 pp.; 436 color ills. Cloth $45.00 (9780892075195)
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, February 6–May 3, 2015
I first saw On Kawara’s work in person in 1998 at the retrospective exhibition Whole and Parts 1964–1995 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo. At the time I was a graduate student in that city, and my memory of the show is marked by the architecture of the museum, with its rectangular spaces and high ceilings, where each of his bodies of work was assigned a separate space, objectivizing them and creating a sense of preciousness. Overall, the symmetric configuration of the spaces gave the impression that his work had arrived at a final destination, where it was… Full Review
February 1, 2018
Thumbnail
Exhibition schedule: Queens Museum, March 8, 2015—September 13, 2015
Queens Museum, March 8–September 13, 2015
After Midnight: Indian Modernism to Contemporary India, 1947/1997 looks at Indian and diasporic art from the last seventy years. Occupying much of the Queens Museum’s capacious ground floor, the exhibition, curated by art historian Arshiya Lokhandwala, is spatially as well as thematically organized along two now-axiomatic fault lines of recent Indian history: India’s independence in 1947 and the opening of India’s markets to international commercial interests under former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in the 1990s. The year 1997 marked the fiftieth anniversary of India’s independence, which has spurred critical inquiry into the state of the nation and figures as one… Full Review
January 23, 2018
Thumbnail
Miranda Wallace, Robert Leonard, and Betsy Berne
Brisbane: Gallery of Modern Art, 2016. 144 pp. Cloth AU$39.95 (9781921503801)
Exhibition schedule: Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, May 28–October 3, 2016
In the decades since Cindy Sherman established her photographic practice as part of the Pictures Generation of the 1970s and early 1980s, her work has provoked polarized opinions. Her relationship with feminism in particular has been hotly debated, with some insisting that her work reveals and subverts the patriarchal nature of the gaze, and others suggesting that Sherman’s use of masquerade merely reinforces the visual dynamics of fetishism. As Jui-Ch’i Liu has suggested, Sherman’s own ambiguous position regarding feminism has only added fuel to these debates (Jui-Ch’i Liu, “Female Spectatorship and the Masquerade: Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills,” History… Full Review
December 15, 2017
Thumbnail
The Institute of Classical Architecture & Art
New York: The Institute of Classical Architecture & Art, 2016.
The Institute of Classical Architecture and Art (ICAA), a nonprofit institution located in midtown Manhattan that is devoted to “advancing the practice and appreciation of the classical tradition in architecture, urbanism, and the allied arts,” has recently opened a plaster-cast gallery. A selection of highlights from 120 plaster casts donated by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as casts and wood moldings from the ICAA’s Dick Reid Teaching Collection, are on display in a single room on the building’s top floor. The casts re-create freestanding sculptures, reliefs, and architectural elements that date from the fifth century BCE… Full Review
December 14, 2017
Thumbnail