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

Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews

Exhibition schedule: Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City, March 10–July 3, 2011
Robert Smithson (1938–1973) once remarked, “I’m not a reductive artist, I’m a generative artist” (Moira Roth, “An Interview with Robert Smithson (1973),” in Eugenie Tsai, ed., Robert Smithson, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004, 88). The Smithson Effect, an exhibition at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts exploring Smithson’s afterlife in the work of other artists since the 1990s, proves that his generative quality exceeded even his own lifetime. With The Smithson Effect, curator Jill Dawsey brings together twenty-two contemporary artists whose work either appropriates Smithson’s or explores his central concepts in new directions. This visually arresting… Full Review
March 8, 2012
Exhibition schedule: Freer Gallery of Art, April 9, 2011–Spring 2013
The Peacock Room at the Freer Gallery of Art has been many things to many people. Designed by Thomas Jeckyll as a dining room with leather walls and intricate shelving, and radically redecorated by James McNeill Whistler in 1876–77, it originally grew around Whistler’s Princesse du pays de la porcelaine (1863–64) and showcased the blue-and-white Chinese porcelain of Whistler’s London patron Frederick Leyland. In 1904 it was purchased by Charles Lang Freer and installed in a special wing of his Detroit home. By that point, Freer had already begun to envision the room in his future museum, and it has… Full Review
February 2, 2012
Katherine R. Tsiang
Exh. cat. Chicago: Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, 2010. 257 pp.; 160 color ills. Paper $45.00 (9780935573503)
Exhibition schedule: Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, Chicago, September 30, 2010–January 16, 2011; Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, February 26–July 31, 2011; Meadows Museum, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, September 11, 2011–January 8, 2012; San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego, February 18–May 27, 2012
The exhibition Echoes of the Past: The Buddhist Cave Temples of Xiangtangshan focuses on sculptural fragments from, and the subsequent digital reconstruction of, the Buddhist cave temple site of Xiangtangshan, located in Hebei Province in northern China. The inception of the site dates to the short-lived yet prolific Northern Qi Dynasty (550–577), the subject of the accompanying international conference held at the Freer Gallery on June 3–5, 2011. The name Xiangtangshan may be translated as “Mountain of Echoing Halls.” The name seems fitting, as the exhibition and accompanying illustrated catalogue examine the site as it reverberated during three distinct historical… Full Review
January 27, 2012
Thumbnail
Donald Albrecht and Thomas Mellins
Exh. cat. New York: Monacelli Press, 2011. 224 pp.; 180 ills. Cloth $50.00 (9791580932851)
Exhibition schedule: Museum of the City of New York, June 14–October 30, 2011
Curated by Donald Albrecht and Thomas Mellins, The American Style: The Colonial Revival and the Modern Metropolis was a delightful and instructive exhibition. In one ample room, divided by projecting vitrines and one partial transverse wall, they displayed paintings, drawings, prints, furniture, ceramics, glass, photographs, and even current wallpaper. Various forms of classical revival became widely acknowledged from the late 1870s onward as the best and truest American expression in architecture and domestic design. Albrecht and Mellins suggested that the catalyst was the Centennial exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876, but they demonstrated that later expositions reinforced and developed ideas… Full Review
January 27, 2012
Thumbnail
Jeffrey Deitch, Roger Gastman, and Aaron Rose
Exh. cat. New York and Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2011. 320 pp.; 275 color ills. Paper $39.95 (9780847836482)
Exhibition schedule: Museum of Contemporary Art, Geffen Contemporary, April 17–August 8, 2011
Issues of high and low—fine art versus popular culture—ran rampant through Art in the Streets, organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA). The first major U.S. museum exhibition devoted to exploring the history of graffiti and street art, it took any number of risks with regard to the challenges it posed to conventional notions of museum art. The exhibition succeeded in large measure and was at once raucous, thought provoking, and illuminating. Not surprisingly, it drew impressive crowds. At its best, the exhibition expanded definitions of art, revealing meaning and beauty in the most humble circumstances… Full Review
January 11, 2012
Thumbnail
Edmund Carpenter, ed.
Exh. cat. Houston: Menil Collection, 2011. 232 pp.; 132 color ills.; 62 b/w ills. Cloth $50.00 (9780300169386)
Exhibition schedule: Musée du quai Branly, Paris, September 30, 2008–January 11, 2009; Menil Collection, Houston, April 15—July 17, 2011
When describing the carved artworks of the Aboriginal people of the Arctic regions, the anthropologist Edmund Snow Carpenter once observed: “A distinctive mark of the traditional art is that many of the ivory carvings, generally of sea mammals, won’t stand up, but roll clumsily about. Each lacks a single, favored point of view, hence, a base. Indeed, they aren’t intended to be set in place and viewed, but rather to be worn or handled, turned this way and that. The carver himself explains his effort as a token of thanks for food or services received from the animal’s spirit” (16)… Full Review
January 4, 2012
Thumbnail
Claire Perry
Exh. cat. Washington, DC: Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2011. 256 pp.; 74 color ills.; 53 b/w ills. Paper $45.00 (9780979067891)
Exhibition schedule: Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, July 15, 2011—January 8, 2012
Organized in collaboration with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, The Great American Hall of Wonders at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) celebrated the United States as an exceptional nation. Spanning the entire nineteenth century, but primarily the transcontinental, expansionist period of 1826–1876, the exhibition represented the nation’s citizens in possession of unparalleled democratic liberties and socio-economic opportunities, as they utilized their technological and scientific ingenuity to harness an abundance of natural resources. Echoing Philadelphia’s diverse Centennial Exhibition of 1876, SAAM’s thematically arranged rooms, formerly home to the Patent Office, displayed portraits, landscapes, and genre paintings… Full Review
January 4, 2012
Thumbnail
Lynne Warren
Exh. cat. Chicago and New Haven: Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago in association with Yale University Press, 2011. 136 pp.; 75 color ills. Cloth $35.00 (9780300172386)
Exhibition schedule: Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, January 29–May 29, 2011
Exhibition schedule: Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, January 29–May 29, 2011
In an era when attention is fractured into multiple platforms and diffused by multiple media, the singularity of Jim Nutt’s artistic vision stands out: for twenty-plus years—as was made evident in a recent exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Chicago—Nutt has been deliberately and meticulously absorbed with painting the female face. Jim Nutt: Coming Into Character, as curator Lynne Warren clarified both in her selections and in the accompanying text, was not a traditional retrospective. Though the exhibition included works from over forty-five years of Nutt’s painting career, providing viewers with an overview of the more diversely… Full Review
December 22, 2011
Thumbnail
Caroline Hancock, Franck Gautherot, and Seung-Duk Kim, eds.
Exh. cat. Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2009. 480 pp.; 356 ills. Cloth $60.00 (9782840663584)
Exhibition schedule: Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands, June 20–October 4, 2009; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland, November 4, 2009–January 24, 2010; Le Consortium, Dijon, France, April 2–June 20, 2010; Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, October 1, 2010–January 9, 2011; New Museum, New York, February 9, 2011–June 19, 2011
The opening of Lynda Benglis at the New Museum marked a surprising milestone in the artist’s career: despite having been a fixture of the New York art world since her arrival from New Orleans in 1964, it was her first solo museum exhibition in New York. What took so long? The story behind Contraband (1968), installed in the New Museum’s glassed-in lobby gallery and the first piece encountered by visitors to the show, hints at reasons for Benglis’s absence. It is a prime example of her “fallen paintings,” the vast “spills” of pigmented latex for which Benglis is best known… Full Review
December 1, 2011
Thumbnail
Martina Bagnoli, Holger A. Klein, C. Griffith Mann, and James Robinson, eds.
Exh. cat. Baltimore: Walters Art Museum, 2010. 278 pp.; 300 color ills. Cloth $65.00 (9780300168273)
Exhibition schedule: Cleveland Museum of Art, October 17, 2010–January 27, 2011; Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, February 13–May 15, 2011; British Museum, London, June 23–October 9, 2011
A golden man clad in church vestments faced visitors as they entered Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics, and Devotion in Medieval Europe at the Walters Art Museum this spring. Refulgent against the deep blue walls of the entry room, the metallic statue extended his hands in a communicative gesture. His eyes of polished ivory and horn appeared to be alert, seeing. This was not an art installation so much as an interpersonal encounter. A text panel on his pedestal introduced him as the reliquary bust of St. Baudime, who, according to legend, was sent to Gaul by St. Peter… Full Review
November 23, 2011
Thumbnail