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Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews
Michelle Millar Fisher and Amber Winick
Exh. cat.
MIT Press, 2021.
344 pp.;
125 color ills.
Cloth
$44.95
(9780262044899)
It is by design that many of the artworks in the Designing Motherhood exhibition and the chapters in the accompanying catalog originate from personal experience. After all, the embodied experience of birth, as either birthing or birthed people (or both), is one we all share. Yet the “things that make or break our births” have, thus far, received little attention—sometimes in their public recognition, occasionally in their design. The Designing Motherhood curators, design historians Michelle Millar Fisher and Amber Winick, felt we needed a “public reckoning with the designs that, for better or worse, shape experiences for all of us”…
Full Review
December 21, 2022
Gropius Bau, Berlin, November 26, 2021–March 13, 2022
Zanele Muholi presented the full breadth of the South African artist’s work to date. Muholi’s photographic practice attends to the Black LGBTQIA+ community and addresses sexual politics, racial violence, self-affirmation, and lesser-known histories. Originating at Tate Modern, the exhibition is an international feat, curated by Tate’s Yasufumi Nakamori and Sarah Allen with Gropius Bau’s Natasha Ginwala. In a video interview, Muholi opens with the statement, “What matters most is content—who is in the picture and why are they there?” In Zanele Muholi, the curators echo the artist’s sentiment, as Muholi’s photographic and multimedia series unfold throughout Gropius Bau’s ten…
Full Review
November 18, 2022
Shigeko Kubota, Mayumi Hamada, Mihoko Nishikawa, Azusa Hashimoto, and Midori Yoshimoto
Tokyo:
Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 2021.
256 pp.;
131 color ills.;
65 b/w ills.
Paper
¥3410.00
(9784309291413)
Niigata Prefectural Museum of Modern Art, March 20–June 6, 2021;
National Museum of Art, Osaka, June 29–September 23, 2021; Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, November 13, 2021–February 23, 2022
The exhibition Viva Video! The Art and Life of Shigeko Kubota was the first large-scale survey exhibition since Kubota’s career survey at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York, in 1991, and this catalog—recipient of the 2021 Ringa Art Encouragement Prize—attests to the extent that interest and research on her work has progressed. The reevaluation of women artists has been proceeding apace throughout the world. Designated the “mother of video art,” Shigeko Kubota has been a particular subject of reconsideration and was recently honored with an important focused exhibition Shigeko Kubota: Liquid Reality at the Museum of Modern…
Full Review
November 9, 2022
The Print Center, Philadelphia, PA,
April 15–July 16, 2022
How do we tell the stories of domestic violence? Most domestic violence happens behind closed doors, as does most advocacy to assist survivors. Artist Carmen Winant’s installation brings documentation of abuse and advocacy together through a reconsideration of photographs, newspaper clippings, guidebooks, and other ephemera culled from the archives of Philadelphia-based organization Women in Transition and the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence. On the first floor of the installation are several collages. In one, Moon faces Demons (2022), Winant presents a group of sixteen photographs, each centered on a faded piece of construction paper then adhered together with blue tape…
Full Review
October 12, 2022
Melissa Chiu, Miwako Tezuka, and Drew Kahu‘āina Broderick, eds.
Exh. cat.
Honolulu:
University of Hawai‘i Press, 2022.
284 pp.;
111 color ills.;
15 b/w ills.
Cloth
$55.00
(9783775752145)
Various sites, Honolulu, Hawai‘i, February 18–May 8, 2022
Author’s note: I do not italicize words in ‘ōlelo Hawai‘i (the Hawaiian language) for two reasons: doing so perpetuates the “otherness” of Indigenous languages that were nearly rendered extinct as a result of colonialism—including ‘ōlelo Hawai‘i, which was effectively banned in 1896—but also because Hawaiian and English are both official languages in the State of Hawai‘i. Hardly innocuous nomenclature, “Pacific Century” suggests a multifocal battle waged across overlapping fronts, from geopolitics to economics, ideology to culture. The phrase evokes competing sentiments, some celebratory and others apprehensive, themselves indicative of the tension between place-based exhibition making and global art spectacle. Such…
Full Review
August 19, 2022
Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, Russia, February 6–April 8, 2018
In the introduction to The Pencil of Nature (1844), British inventor William Henry Fox Talbot tells the origin story of “photogenic drawing.” While honeymooning, he attempted to sketch Lake Como with the aid of a camera lucida. But his “faithless pencil” left only traces of the refracted landscape; the marks were “melancholy to behold.” As if updating Pliny’s tale of art originating with the tracing of a lover’s shadow, Talbot resolved to fix nature’s phantasmagoric images. In 1841, he patented the calotype, the first paper-based chemical photographic process. Unlike its popular French competitor, the metal-based daguerreotype, the calotype process…
Full Review
August 12, 2022
Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA, January 28–August 7, 2022
In The Power of Maps (1992), cartographer Denis Wood writes, “The world we take for granted—the real world—is made like this, out of the accumulated thought and labor of the past. It is presented to us on the platter of the map, presented, that is, made present, so that whatever invisible, unattainable, erasable past or future can become part of our living . . . now . . . here” (7). This accumulation of the past made relevant to those in the present is examined in Maya Lin’s current exhibition at Smith College Museum of Art (SCMA). …
Full Review
August 8, 2022
Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, December 10, 2021–March 20, 2022
Defining the art of a region in the twenty-first century is a thorny and onerous task. Like many professionals in the age of telecommuting, gig work, and academic precarity, artists relocate often. Similarly, influences stem from far and wide, making the old art historical distinctions of style as defined by geographical proximity difficult to apply in this day and age. The Regional, an exhibition jointly organized by Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) and Kansas City’s Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, attempts to provide a snapshot of the art of today in the American Midwest. The museum directors’…
Full Review
June 28, 2022
Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, La Jolla, CA, April 9, 2022–July 17, 2022
One might expect an exhibition focused on ten years of an artist’s practice to present a narrow slice of work, a partial—unsatisfying, even—picture of a lifelong creative evolution. Such a focus may seem best presented in book form. Yet Niki de Saint Phalle in the 1960s at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (co-organized by the Menil Collection in Houston) exemplifies how a focused art historical examination of a particular portion of an artist’s career can make a successful exhibition. Saint Phalle is perhaps an especially noteworthy subject for such a presentation—over the course of a decade, changes in…
Full Review
June 17, 2022
Exh. cat.
New York:
Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2021.
352 pp.;
435 ills.
Cloth
(9781633451070)
November 21, 2021–March 12, 2022
Kunstmuseum Basel, March 20–June 20, 2021; Tate Modern, London, July 15–October 17, 2021; Museum of Modern Art, New York, November 21, 2021–March 12, 2022
Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Living Abstraction was an exhilarating and expansive exhibition (and accompanying catalog) of the artist’s uniquely syncretic practice. Organized by Anne Umland (Museum of Modern Art), Walburga Krupp (independent curator), Eva Reifert (Kunstmuseum Basel), and Natalia Sidlina (Tate Modern), the project covers Taeuber-Arp’s nearly thirty-year career between World War I and World War II. As installed at MoMA, the exhibition was a knockout. It offered a thrilling vision of the artist’s work at every stage of her career—a presentation strikingly emancipated from hierarchies of patriarchy and media. The most surprising decision was the almost total exclusion of works by…
Full Review
May 19, 2022
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