Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews

Visitors facing the entrance to Envisioning Evil: “The Nazi Drawings” by Mauricio Lasansky are offered only one glimpse of what they can expect if they choose to enter: a decorated Nazi officer raises his arm in a Hitler salute while blood-like drops fall from his wrist and smear the page. On his head is a terrifying bestial skull that appears both fixed and projected on the man’s scalp. A close look reveals smudges, partial erasures, hard pencil strokes, and tears to the paper. This work is steeped in rage. Mauricio Lasansky’s (1914–2012) torment is on full display upon entering the… Full Review

Crafting America, an expansive exhibition organized by Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, explored the role of craft within the broader field of post–World War II creative production in the United States. The first room posed the exhibition’s organizing question: “What is Craft?” In the spaces that followed, the curators answered by means of more than a hundred objects by ninety-eight artists that provided a rich understanding of craft as an array of strategies of making. Some of the works remained comfortably within traditional approaches to the category, while others took a more experimental and politically… Full Review

As its title suggests, ReVisión: Art in the Americas seeks to revise traditional approaches to the visual history of the Americas and provide a distinct perspective. Its principal method for doing so is to challenge the separate treatment in scholarship and museum practices of visual production from before and after the arrival of Europeans in Latin America—specifically, by collapsing chronology and showing works of ancient, colonial, modern, and contemporary Latin American art side by side in a thematic presentation. As curators Victoria Lyall and Jorge Rivas Pérez state in the exhibition’s catalog, rather than seeking to present a “comprehensive history… Full Review

What is the value of staging an exhibition on Land art in the 2020s? The Nevada Museum of Art (NMA) in Reno posed this question over a year’s worth of programming on the topic during an acute year of climate crisis. Reno sits at the crossroads of two major ecosystems: the Great Basin and the Sierra Nevada. It is the third-largest city in a state where 80 percent of the land is nominally public while its extractive economy is decidedly privatized. Land art, too, historically embraces such complexity. The 1960s-born genre originally claimed its removal from commercial art… Full Review

Judy Chicago’s smoke-and-fireworks performance Forever de Young, on October 16, 2021, drew thousands of people to Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. This site-specific performance was planned in conjunction with Chicago’s first retrospective exhibition, held at the de Young Museum. The early fall day was beautiful, and the number of new COVID-19 cases had dipped, lending the outdoor gathering an upbeat aura. Expectation built for the crowd as Thomas Campbell, director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Claudia Shmuckli, the museums’ curator of contemporary art; Jordan Schnitzer, sponsor of the exhibition; and Judy Chicago herself each… Full Review

The Cranbrook Art Museum is a fitting home for this retrospective exhibition of the decades-long explorations of material, color, and form by the Colombian artist Olga de Amaral (b. 1932 in Bogotá). The exhibition was organized by Anna Walker, assistant curator of decorative arts, craft, and design at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, where the show originated, and Laura Mott, senior curator of contemporary art and design at Cranbrook Art Museum. It was here, at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1954, that Olga de Amaral first tried her hand at weaving. As she describes in a recent interview… Full Review

Bob Thompson (1937–1966), an artist from Louisville, Kentucky, who participated in the Provincetown and New York art worlds of the late 1950s before embarking on extensive periods spent in London, Paris, Ibiza, and Rome, lived a brief but prolific life as a painter. He died in 1966 at the age of twenty-nine. Thompson’s work, with its distinctive motifs (a hatted man, mysterious birds, figures set in lush and ambiguous chromatic landscapes, and transformed quotations of art historical paintings), flowered in the eight years This House Is Mine covers, from 1958 until 1966. The show takes its title from a small… Full Review

For my first museum visit in the pandemic, I was looking forward to spending an afternoon with this focused exhibition. The work was sparsely hung with the requisite six-foot distance of our current era in mind, giving the viewer a considerable amount of space, although making the paintings themselves appear small on the large and imposing walls. This show was organized around a single painting, the only one by Claude Monet (1840–1926) in the collection of the Seattle Art Museum (SAM): namely, Fishing Boats at Étretat (1885). The exhibition was curated by Chiyo Ishikawa, the museum’s former deputy… Full Review

The year preceding Spring 2021, spent away from museums and most other social spaces, forced a collective recognition of our basic, fallible corporeality, of our relational occupation of space, and of our globally intertwined fates. Our spatial-social sensitivities had perhaps never before been so finely tuned, primed to appreciate the oeuvre of Senga Nengudi, who has engaged with such concerns since the beginning of her career in the late 1960s and early 1970s. At the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA), the recent exhibition of the artist’s work and its accompanying book, both titled Senga Nengudi: Topologies, offer an… Full Review

Throughout the summer of 2021, a white sedan with gold trim, a type affectionately known as a SLAB (acronym for “slow, loud, and banging”), was parked in the main atrium of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) in Richmond. The SLAB, a customized 1990 Cadillac Brougham d’Elegance, designed by the New Orleans rapper Richard “Fiend” Jones and commissioned by the museum, joyfully and flamboyantly announced the long-anticipated opening of The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse. Curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver, The Dirty South brings together over 100 artists from the… Full Review