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

Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews

Mary-Dailey Desmarais, Dieter Buchhart, and Vincent Bessières, eds.
Exh. cat. Editions Gallimard, 2022. 288 pp.; 175 color ills. Hardback $45.00 (9782072985942)
Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, October 15, 2022–February 19, 2023
The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts’ Seeing Loud: Basquiat and Music is “the first exhibition devoted to the role of music in the art of Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988),” and situates his origin story in lockstep with the explosion of cultural creativity that was happening around (and through) him in 1970s and 1980s New York. After an overview of the artist as a music lover, collector, and maker, the curators lay out the exhibition’s framework, stating in a wall text that “the extent to which Basquiat’s use of music reveals his engagement with the legacy of the African diaspora and the… Full Review
July 17, 2023
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Smart Museum of Art, Chicago, September 22, 2022–January 8, 2023
The paradox of Monochrome Multitudes is more than titular: Of multitudes there are many, as all but one of the galleries of the Smart Museum are taken up by this ambitious review of the outsized genre. Indeed, much of the work is not truly singular in color at all but tinted, toned, or shaded within a hue, if not outright multicolored. To account for the coming cacophony, we are made to understand at the outset that the exhibition aims to revisit “this notoriously hermetic art to reveal its creative possibilities and complicate its histories” without attempting a comprehensive survey. In… Full Review
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Carla Acevedo-Yates, ed.
Exh. cat. New York: DelMonico Books, 2022. 288 pp. Cloth $65.00 (978-1636810614)
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, November 19, 2022–April 23, 2023; ICA Boston, October 5, 2023–February 24, 2024
Curated by Carla Acevedo-Yates with Iris Colburn, Isabel Casso, and Nolan Jimbo, Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s–Today at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago presents the Caribbean diaspora not as a given, but as a framework for critiquing the homogenizing consequences of categories imposed upon its makers and their visual practices. As Acevedo-Yates declares in her catalog essay, Forecast Form seeks to “challenge the very legibility of so-called Caribbean art itself—what it is, how it looks, and who makes it” (24). Commencing its reframing of the Caribbean, the exhibition starts in the fourth-floor lobby with two large-scale… Full Review
May 3, 2023
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Stanley Museum of Art, University of Iowa, August 26, 2022–July 28, 2023
Fourteen years after the University of Iowa’s art museum experienced a catastrophic flood, the museum has reopened—relocated in a new building on higher ground. In the summer of 2008, the rising Iowa River threatened not just the basement storage areas of the original building but even the art hanging on its walls, including Jackson Pollock’s Mural (1943) and one of the largest collections of African art in the nation. The museum staff, joined by professional art handlers and volunteers from across the state, had just six days to evacuate the building of 14,000 works of art. Ultimately the building was… Full Review
April 19, 2023
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Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, June 3–August 28, 2022
After a searing year of fire and drought along Colorado’s Front Range, the one-person show, Clarissa Tossin: Falling from Earth, opened in June 2022 at Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) for a three-month run. The Brazil-born artist has built a collaborative research-focused practice from her base in Los Angeles that addresses connective tissue that links place, history, and aesthetics. Employing moving images, installation, and sculpture, she explores their alternative narratives in both built and natural environments of extractive economies. Whether reinserting figurative traditions and ritual practices of Mayan motifs in early twentieth-century Los Angeles architecture, as… Full Review
April 3, 2023
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Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA, August 11, 2022–May 7, 2023
Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA, October 7, 2022–March 26, 2023
Over the last five years, solo exhibitions of leading Indigenous artists have moved into mainstream museums and galleries. In tandem, these artists’ works are finally appearing in permanent collection galleries in this country as recognition of the important dialogues Native American artists continue to raise for the field, particularly about the legacies of settler colonialism, the impacts of climate change, and the continued fight for Indigenous sovereignty. Artist Rose B. Simpson is part of this critical shift. Her sculptures are now on permanent view across the United States, from the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, to the Autry Museum… Full Review
March 29, 2023
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The Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington and Volunteer Park, Seattle, WA, August 2022—August 2023
Inscribed across the top of a shin-high slab of stone in a shady corner of Seattle’s Volunteer Park are the words: “Set against a series of existing monuments built to honor war, purchase, transport, and forms of expansion we might otherwise call control, finally an opportunity not for waiting, but for repose.” Chloë Bass’s Soft Services, a project commissioned by the Henry Art Gallery and organized by Shamim M. Momim for the new Henry OffSite program, consists of fourteen stone “benches” installed throughout the 48.3 acre, Olmstead-designed park and two more located outside the museum’s entrance. The stones are… Full Review
March 22, 2023
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Antoinette Le Normand-Romain
Exh. cat. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2022. 256 pp.; 210 ills. Cloth $60.00 (9780300264067)
Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, June 18–September 18, 2022; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia, October 21, 2022–January 15, 2023
Framed within the elegant glass architecture of Tadao Ando, the towering figure of Balzac (1897) welcomes visitors to the Clark. This first gallery serves as both the introduction and the conclusion to the show which occupies the museum’s dedicated exhibition galleries downstairs. In the background, a cut-out window on a red wall opens onto a large photographic reproduction of the 1954 unveiling of Balzac at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Immersed within MoMA’s posh crowd, visitors are invited to linger in a dedicated reading space and enjoy some historical people watching. The purchase of Rodin’s controversial sculpture… Full Review
March 20, 2023
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Rosario I. Granados, ed.
Exh. cat. Austin: University of Texas Press and Blanton Museum of Art, 2022. 248 pp.; 140 color ills. $45.00 (9781477323977)
Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX, August 14, 2022–January 8, 2023
Setting the stage, deep red curtains mark the entrance to Painted Cloth: Fashion and Ritual in Colonial Latin America. Thoughtfully curated by Rosario I. Granados, the Marilynn Thoma associate curator of the Art of the Spanish Americas, this exhibition highlights the significance of cloth in the Spanish Americas, where it was a marker of social identity and a key facet of religious ritual. The works in the exhibition are predominantly drawn from eighteenth-century Peru and New Spain and span a variety of media, from paintings, sculptures, and prints that include textiles in their subject matter, to material culture related… Full Review
March 17, 2023
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Exh. cat. Columbus, GA, Norfolk, VA, and New Haven, CT: The Columbus Museum and Chrysler Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press, 2021. 336 pp. Cloth $65.00 (9780300258936)
There are enough cities in America named after Christopher Columbus that until I arrived in front of The Columbus Museum and saw the banners for the Alma Thomas exhibition, I was worried that I might have traveled to the wrong one. America’s history of brutality, about which the name Columbus whispers or screams depending on who you are, is so vast that it forever spins off little whorls of cruelty like this—another tributary of brutality passed by, soaked in, so one can get somewhere else. On the walk to the museum in what turned out to be the correct Columbus… Full Review
March 15, 2023
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