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

Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews

Jeffrey Spier
Exh. cat. New Haven: Yale University Press in association with Kimbell Art Museum, 2007. 328 pp.; 251 color ills.; 52 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (9780300116830)
Exhibition schedule: Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, November 18, 2007–March 30, 2008
Guest-curator Jeffrey Spier’s Picturing the Bible at the Kimbell Art Museum is the first major exhibition of early Christian art in the United States since the Metropolitan Museum’s The Age of Spirituality in 1977. Where that was a vast installation, responding to the panoramic sweep of what had then only barely begun to be called Late Antiquity, Picturing the Bible is compact and select, focused specifically upon the modes of Christian visual expression and asking much of each object displayed. It is an exhibition of exceptional visual and intellectual elegance. Its governing insight, conveyed in its title, is most fully… Full Review
March 12, 2008
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Constance Lewallen, ed.
Exh. cat. Berkeley: Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and University of California Press, 2007. 256 pp.; 75 color ills.; 120 b/w ills. Cloth $39.95 (9780520250857)
Exhibition schedule: Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, January 17–April 15, 2007; Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli (Torino), Italy, May 23–September 9, 2007; Menil Collection, Houston, October 12, 2007–January 13, 2008
A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s, though occupying only four rooms at the Menil Collection in Houston, is an intense, richly complex and subtly disturbing exhibition. The curator in Houston, Franklin Sirmans, has helped create a fluid, dynamic exhibition space that highlights the extraordinary diversity of Nauman’s production from 1964–69 and establishes key themes and paths of development, while leaving many connections open-ended and available for viewers to pursue for themselves. Drawings, sculptures, photographs, video/film, and sound installations are all placed within the same spaces, and highly visceral, body pieces mix with the intellectual play… Full Review
March 4, 2008
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Thomas P. Campbell, ed.
Exh. cat. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press, 2007. 592 pp.; 175 color ills.; 169 b/w ills. Cloth $75.00 (9780300124071)
Exhibition schedule: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, October 16, 2007–January 6, 2008; Palacio Real, Madrid, March 6–June 1, 2008
Even for the Metropolitan Museum of Art it was impossible to duplicate the revelatory experience and concomitant visitor record of Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence, the 2002 precursor of the present show and the first major U.S. exhibition on the topic in twenty-five years. Tapestry in the Baroque: Threads of Splendor comes just five years later and simply could not be marketed as the same kind of novelty. Yet the faithful, returning museumgoer is rewarded with experiences of rare beauty, historical insight, and displays of astonishing technical virtuosity that are at least equal to those in the… Full Review
February 27, 2008
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Maura Reilly and Linda Nochlin, eds.
Exh. cat. New York: Brooklyn Museum and Merrell Publishers, 2007. 304 pp.; 250 color ills. Paper $39.95 (087273157X)
Exhibition schedule: Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York, March 23–July 1, 2007; Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA, September 19–December 9, 2007
Shulamit Reinharz, ed.
Waltham, MA: Women’s Studies Research Center, Brandeis University, 2007. 125 pp.; 91 color ills. Paper $35.00 (9780979809408)
Exhibition schedule: Kniznick Gallery, Women’s Studies Research Center; and Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, October 2–December 14, 2007; Mabel Douglass Galleries, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, January 15–July 31, 2008; Arthur Ross Gallery, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, August 23–October 27, 2008; Katzen Arts Center, American University, Washington, DC, January 24–March 29, 2009; Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL, June 27–October 11, 2009
As interventions within contemporary art’s ongoing male and Western hegemonies, two recent, groundbreaking shows of global women artists, Global Feminisms and Tiger by the Tail! Women Artists of India Transforming Culture, were timely. After seeing Global Feminisms at the Brooklyn Museum last spring, I was equally thrilled to see it remixed at the Davis Museum in the fall—thrilled because the show is needed, because it is exciting to discover new artistic responses to age-old problems, and because it is still regrettably rare to see feminist concerns addressed overtly in art. The Davis version of the show was truncated, which… Full Review
February 26, 2008
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Peter Allison, ed.
Exh. cat. London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 2006. 224 pp.; 300 color ills.; 283 b/w ills. Cloth $50.00 (9780500342244)
Exhibition schedule: Whitechapel Gallery, London, January 24–March 26, 2006; Netherlands Architecture Institute, Maastricht, September 2, 2006–April 21, 2007; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, July 18–October 28, 2007; Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, January 11–February 18, 2007; Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, Denver, March 11–May 25, 2008
A certain swath of the collective museum-going, architecture-loving audience must be endlessly fascinated by the success of David Adjaye. Just forty-one years old, his rise to the top echelon of his profession has happened quickly, and has just as suddenly put his name into the minds of a larger group interested in celebrity homes, industrial design, and the perversely compelling cult of genius prodigies. That Adjaye is arguably the most prominent contemporary (if not twentieth-century) architect of African descent might also be deserving of some scrutiny, and yet Adjaye takes pains to suppress that aspect of his work, perhaps as… Full Review
February 12, 2008
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Susan Earle, ed.
Exh. cat. New Haven and Lawrence: Yale University Press in association with Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, 2007. 272 pp.; 139 color ills.; 50 b/w ills. Cloth $60.00 (9780300121803)
Exhibition schedule: Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, Lawrence, September 8–December 2, 2007; Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville, January 19–April 13, 2008; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, May 9–August 3, 2008; Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York, August 30–November 30, 2008
While many scholars celebrate Aaron Douglas as the foremost visual artist of the Harlem Renaissance, there remains a widespread unfamiliarity with the diversity of his artistic production and his manifold contributions to the New Negro Movement. Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist, the first nationally touring retrospective of his work, attends to this disparity. Organized by Susan Earle and coordinated by Stephanie Fox Nappe for the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas, the exhibition showcases Douglas’s output in a variety of media, displaying oil paintings, woodcuts, pen-and-ink drawings, book and record jackets, magazine covers, illustrations, and murals… Full Review
February 5, 2008
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Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, ed.
Exh. cat. Austin: Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin, 2007. 344 pp.; 70 color ills.; 30 b/w ills. Paper $29.95 (9780977145362)
Exhibition schedule: Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin, February 20–April 22, 2007; Grey Art Gallery, New York University, New York, September 12–December 8, 2007
Originating at the Blanton Museum of Art and organized by its Latin American curator, Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, The Geometry of Hope features over 125 works produced by artists from Venezuela, Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina between 1930 and 1970. A respected scholar in the field, specializing in Argentinian Madi art (one of the movements represented in the exhibition), Pérez-Barreiro has assembled the most comprehensive presentation to date of the alternative modernity that due to a wide array of factors—chief among them the influx of avant-garde European ideas, works, and people between and in the wake of the two World Wars—flourished in the… Full Review
January 22, 2008
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Walter Liedtke
New York and New Haven: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2007. 1083 pp.; 230 color ills.; 250 b/w ills. Cloth $175.00 (9780300120288)
Exhibition schedule: Metropolitan Museum of Art, September 18, 2007–January 6, 2008
The Age of Rembrandt: Dutch Paintings, organized by Walter Liedtke, Curator of European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum, provides unparalleled opportunities for the enjoyment and study of Dutch art on a vast scale. Timed to coincide with Rembrandt’s four-hundredth birthday (2006) and the publication of Liedtke’s masterful two-volume catalogue, Dutch Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this impressive exhibition puts on display every one of the museum’s 228 Dutch paintings produced from 1600 to 1800. Since normally only about a third of the collection can fit in the galleries at any one time, many of the Met’s… Full Review
January 3, 2008
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Eik Kahng, ed.
Baltimore: The Walters Art Museum, 2007. 200 pp.; 164 color ills.; 36 b/w ills. Paper $24.95 (9780911886689)
Exhibition schedule: Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, October 7, 2007–January 1, 2008; Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, January 20–May 4, 2008
The exhibition Déjà Vu? Revealing Repetition in French Masterpieces at the Walters Art Museum challenges many of the assumptions that both scholars and the general public have about the importance of the original in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French art. Beginning with Jacques-Louis David and ending with Henri Matisse, the exhibition investigates the variety of ways that artists engaged in the act of replicating their works of art. From studio copies, to prints for commercial distribution, to variations on a theme, numerous types of repetition are brought to the fore in order to unsettle convictions about originality. In so doing… Full Review
December 19, 2007
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Doryun Chong and Yasmil Raymond, eds.
Exh. cat. Minneapolis, Minn.: Walker Art Center, 2007. 272 pp.; 429 color ills.; 466 b/w ills. Paper $39.95 (9780935640892)
Exhibition schedule: Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, October 4, 2007–February 17, 2008
Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1932 as a frightening vision of a consumerist future; thirty years later he concluded that the world was approximating Brave New World much faster than he anticipated. In his satirical and sinister novel, warfare and poverty have been eliminated, but also family, culture, art, literature, science, religion, and philosophy. In their place, Soma, a powerful drug provided by the “World State,” is taken to escape reality through hallucinatory fantasies. Decades later, in the context of a new century, Doryun Chong and Yasmil Raymond, two assistant curators at the Walker Art Center, titled… Full Review
December 12, 2007
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