Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews

A black, square Sony Trinitron TV. Headphones. On stage, a woman in her thirties holds a mic. Three men watch from a table. “The only smile in the history of art that we know is the Mona Lisa’s,” she says, “and we all know what kind of smile is that: it’s the smile that you put on when you wake up and your parents have shaved your eyebrows” (my transcription). Kasia Fudakowski’s Smile (2011) occupies a central space in the first gallery of Laugh-in: Art, Comedy, Performance at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD). This video documentation of… Full Review

Upon entering the Los Angeles iteration of French artist Pierre Huyghe’s touring mid-career retrospective, curated for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) by Jarrett Gregory, viewers were given two things. The first was an introduction in the form of a performative artwork titled Name Announcer (2011). A bow-tied gentleman (at least it was a man every time I visited) asked your name and then would repeat whatever you said in a booming, officious tone as you crossed the threshold into the exhibition, whether or not there was anyone else around to hear. The second was an… Full Review

Northern Italian courts served as vital incubators for Renaissance artists, yet they are often overshadowed by larger cities such as Rome and Florence. Powerful rulers, discerning collectors, and taste-making humanists resided in these autonomous principalities. Renaissance Splendors of the Northern Italian Courts provides some much needed attention for these important artistic centers. Curated by Bryan Keene and Christopher Platts, the exhibition focuses on fifteenth-century manuscripts produced in Ferrara, Mantua, Urbino, and other Italian court cities. Despite being limited to a single gallery, it features works of art commissioned and produced by some of the most influential patrons and artists of… Full Review

At the entrance to the Seattle Art Museum’s (SAM) exhibition City Dwellers: Contemporary Art from India, visitors found themselves standing face to face with the father of the Indian nation and one of history’s most fervent critics of Western material culture. But in Debanjan Roy’s India Shining V (2008), the earphone-wearing Mahatma was covered from head to toe in shiny red automotive paint and had his eyes fixed firmly on an iPod screen. The title of the piece makes direct reference to the eponymous slogan used by India’s right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) during the 2004 general elections to… Full Review

As I walked through the Wadsworth Atheneum’s recent large-scale exhibition Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861–2008, I could not help but ask: Did we really need a show on Coney Island? What does it bring to the intellectual and aesthetic table, so to speak, that would be important or crucial now? In theory, there are a number of compelling reasons to mount this show: a Coney Island exhibition would span a broad historical period; pull from a diversity of objects and media, thus expanding museum dialogues; and provide a platform for confronting race, class, gender, sexuality, and… Full Review

When the artist Jack Whitten (b. 1939) refers to his studio as a laboratory, he is speaking literally, not metaphorically. Fridges and industrial freezers are stocked with muffin tins, pans, and molds of all kinds filled with acrylic paint. Covering the walls are tools of every shape and size—many of which are homemade concoctions. Whitten even looks the part of a scientist; his studio uniform consists of a paint-splattered white lab coat and sneakers he spray-painted silver. Although Whitten frequently acknowledges his debt to Abstract Expressionist painters such as Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Barnett Newman, and Norman Lewis—artists he… Full Review

In her recently published Other Planes of There: Selected Writings, artist Renée Green describes her 1999 exhibition Partially Buried in Three Parts as an exploration “of genealogical traces,” where overlapping investigations examine the ways people reinterpret their past to their “contemporary relations to a natal patria” (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014, 275–276). The exhibition, for Green, was also a meditation on what site-specificity might mean when the concept of location is increasingly “affected for many by circuit relations, meaning that a sense of place and time can depend largely on where one’s computer screen is and when memory is… Full Review

Fred Tomaselli’s solo exhibition The Times at the Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA) is the New York-based artist’s first West Coast show. The exhibition is also a homecoming for the artist, who grew up in the neighboring city of Santa Ana. Before traveling to Orange County, The Times spent four months at the University of Michigan Museum of Art. The idea for these two exhibitions came from James Cohan Gallery’s debut spring 2014 show, entitled Fred Tomaselli: Current Events. As the artist’s gallery representation, James Cohan dedicated Current Events to exploratory artworks that Tomaselli colloquially calls capriccetti… Full Review

Allora and Calzadilla: Intervals brings together new and recent work by the Puerto Rico-based artists whose interdisciplinary practice addresses the ethical and affective dimensions of political resistance. Working collaboratively since meeting as art students in 1995, the Philadelphia-born Jennifer Allora and Havana-born Guillermo Calzadilla are perhaps most widely known for their exhibition Gloria at the American Pavilion during the 2011 Venice Biennale. That exhibition’s memorably monumental pieces—an ATM machine built into a pipe organ or a treadmill on top of an inverted army tank—packed a spectacular visual punch, mordantly satirizing capitalism, religion, the military-industrial complex and U.S. imperialism without necessarily… Full Review

Henri Matisse’s cut-outs, executed during the last twenty years of the artist’s life, have been taken to exemplify the concept of “late style”—the culmination of a career achieved through intensified abstraction, luminosity, and spiritual expression. Yet, as the recent exhibition Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) reveals, the series might be better understood as a continuation of the artist’s lifelong interest in the emotional appeal of color; simplified, synthetic line; and the interplay of decorative surfaces, borders, and frames. Despite repeated references to Matisse’s illness and old age in the exhibition catalogue, documentary photographs, and… Full Review