Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews

A museum exhibition on nineteenth-century chromolithography and the landscape of the American West must negotiate its way through key challenges. When the discipline of art history routinely emphasizes the innovation and novelty of artistic developments, imagery of mountains and natural wonders can strike scholars and museumgoers as familiar territory and therefore unworthy of attention. Moreover, in an era that celebrates globalization, the western landscape might bear a whiff of provincialism, complicated by questions about how the United States, under the spell of Manifest Destiny, invested the terrain with now unfashionable cultural meanings. In these circumstances, prints risk becoming mere images… Full Review

The surfaces of John Zurier’s spare, abstract paintings are breathtaking—thin washes of icy blue, brushy layers of deep aubergine, swathes of opaque electric orange—but the edges are where the action is. Sometimes color runs over the side of the picture plane and is folded around the back of the stretcher bars; other times it stops just short, leaving a sliver of raw jute exposed. In Votilækur (2014), for example, a few strong vertical lines lie beneath a cool aqua pigment washed over a tall canvas. The veil of color seems to cover the entire surface, but it is not a… Full Review

This Is War! Graphic Arts from the Great War, 1914–1918 joins a number of exhibitions taking advantage of the one hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of World War I to explore this conflict and its representations. The Portland Art Museum focuses its contribution on the graphic arts, as the museum’s rich collection of prints, posters, and works on paper, along with a number of recent acquisitions, has enabled it to stage a comprehensive exhibition that demonstrates the great variety of graphic representations of the war. While marquee artists are represented by very good, even excellent examples, their works hang alongside… Full Review

Before even reaching the five main galleries dedicated to Fiber: Sculpture 1960–present at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (ICA), visitors encounter the tangled mass of neon-green and sea-blue crocheted strands of Sheila Pepe’s “site-responsive” sculpture, Put Me Down Gently (2014), cascading down the atrium walls. The work extends to the elevator shaft, where more parachute cords, laces, and yarn become visible through the glass of the car as it ascends the length of the building. Though not covering every surface, the fiber envelopes the space, its inherent materiality challenging the hard, clean architecture of the Diller Scofidio + Renfro-designed… Full Review

On Sunday, November 16, 2014, ambitious Boston museumgoers could have treated themselves to first-viewings of two remarkable achievements: Mark Rothko’s newly restored Harvard Murals, currently installed in the Harvard Art Museums’ impeccable Renzo Piano-designed galleries, and Frederick Wiseman’s National Gallery, a three-hour behind-the-scenes chronicle of the London museum presented by the filmmaker himself at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The coincidence would have delighted Wiseman, whose wry observation of institutions, in both their operational perversities and decorous self-presentation, seems tailor made for the museum’s grand performance before its many audiences. But where National Gallery is rich in quotidian… Full Review

Expressionism in Germany and France: From Van Gogh to Kandinsky examines the connections between the avant-garde art worlds in France and Germany in the years between the last decades of the nineteenth century and the outbreak of World War II, considering the influence of artists like Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, and Henri Matisse on German artists such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Max Pechstein, and Franz Marc. To that end, the network of cultural exchange—exhibitions and their accompanying catalogues, visits by German artists to France and vice versa, dealers and critics who served to link the two art worlds—is a… Full Review

Soundings: A Contemporary Score was the first major exhibition of “sound” at the Museum of Modern art (MoMA), which Christopher Phillips once famously characterized as “the seat of judgment.” But it encompassed far more than the exhibited sixteen artists from ten countries. It was a large and integrated program of exhibition, films, sound performances, workshops, and lectures overseen by Barbara London, associate curator in the Department of Media and Performance Art, and curatorial assistant Leora Morinis. This review can merely outline some of these concerns by reducing the vast array of diverse impulses brought together into a few basic categories… Full Review

Deco Japan is a rambunctious assemblage of objects from the late 1920s and 1930s that evokes the excitement and instability of an era in which urbanization, international communication, global travel, mass-market consumerism, and the expansion of imperial ambitions were transforming the everyday lives and imaginations of millions, while spurring artists and designers in particular to rethink their art in relation to the new world that was taking shape around them. Curated and with an accompanying catalogue edited by Kendall H. Brown, the traveling exhibition had its longest run in Seattle, invited by the Seattle Asian Art Museum’s new curator of… Full Review

Alien She, organized by and exhibited at the Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh before opening at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, examines the influence of the feminist punk rock movement Riot Grrrl on artists working today. Curated by Ceci Moss and Astria Suparak, the exhibition presents archival materials (zines, mixtapes, music playlists, cassettes, fliers, t-shirts, video footage, and other ephemera) from the Riot Grrrl movement as well as work by seven contemporary artists whose “visual art practices were informed by their contact with Riot Grrrl,” according to the exhibition brochure. What… Full Review

In Tim Youd’s recent solo exhibition and performance, The Long Goodbye, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, visitors were able to hear the artist’s work before seeing it. It is a sound that most people will be familiar with, but haven’t encountered in a while. As one approached the museum’s Krichman Gallery, the staccato sound of the clacking keys of an Olivetti Studio 44 typewriter was audible before rounding the corner to take in the sparkling view of La Jolla Cove through the room’s generously sized glass windows. I have always admired the beach location of… Full Review