Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews

South Los Angeles. August 1972. A crowd of 100,000 spectators fills the Los Angeles Coliseum to commemorate the seventh anniversary of the 1965 Watts uprisings. Jesse Jackson delivers a rousing invocation, inciting the crowd to raise their fists in solidarity. The occasion: Wattstax Music Festival, the black analogue to Woodstock. Footage from this event went largely unnoticed until the 2004 re-release of Wattstax, Mel Stuart’s 1973 documentary of the landmark concert. A mash-up of interviews and live concert footage, Wattstax highlights the urgent political climate of the 1960s and 1970s that fostered emerging discourses around identity, resistance, visibility, and… Full Review

Plagued by migraines and seemingly allergic to the sun-dappled environs in which she spent so many of her years, Joan Didion nonetheless wrote into being a host of characters that participated in a dissolute Golden State fantasy. Her stories from the 1960s evoke the siren cupidity of a nostalgic, decidedly prelapsarian California, even as they admit an illusion fraying at the seams. That her essays from the other side of the long decade comprise such topics as Malibu fires, Jerry Brown, and Sharon Tate might not surprise. Still, her 2003 memoir, Where I Was From (New York: Vintage), tenders a… Full Review

At the outset, the recent exhibition Masters of Venice: Renaissance Painters of Passion and Power from the Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna was presented as both a close look at sixteenth-century Venetian painting and as a chapter in the history of collecting. The collection of Europe’s dominant imperial family, the Habsburgs, is now housed in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum; because that museum’s Gemäldegalerie (Picture Gallery) is undergoing renovations, fifty paintings from the permanent collection were made available for exhibition at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. Some of the works on display were acquired by Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Austria… Full Review

Even during the midst of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio’s meteoric Roman career, questions were raised concerning the singularity and originality of his manner and its impact upon young artists of his own generation. In fact, it was Caravaggio himself, Carlo Cesare Malvasia reports, who was the first to ask why artists adopted his manner, pressing to know to what end Guido Reni had transformed himself into the Lombard painter after seeking out Caravaggio’s paintings for purchase (would that we knew which ones). The flagrant theft of his manner and his coloring, Caravaggio made abundantly clear, could cost the Bolognese painter… Full Review

The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art floats between several different visions of itself. Like any museum, how the institution envisions its mission and future will affect the way it builds its collections, installs its exhibitions, and otherwise engages with its publics. The purpose here is not to suggest preferred goals and objectives for Crystal Bridges, but to evaluate its success in achieving the goals it seems to claim in the museum’s inaugural exhibition from its permanent collection, Celebrating the American Spirit: Masterworks from the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. This sprawling exhibition fills five expansive galleries (including… Full Review

So much controversy has surrounded the creation of the Crystal Bridges Museum that it almost inevitably colors the perception of its remarkable new building in Bentonville, Arkansas. One of the causes, of course, is the origin of most of the museum’s enormous endowment: the Walmart fortune. Even a cursory Google search quickly reveals the fault lines of the debate: detractors point out the hypocrisy of financing a philanthropic high-culture celebration of American art from the profits of a corporation known for its poor labor practices, cheap disposable goods, and outsourcing of production to China. Apologists argue that the real reason… Full Review

Among the many pleasures involved in viewing Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series at the Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA) in Newport Beach, California, is the fact that this exhibition has come hard on the heels of State of Mind: New California Art circa 1970, a brainy, spirited exhibition that covered roughly the same time period and featured photographs, films and videos, performance documentation, and installation works representing the Conceptual art movement as it appeared in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay area. Galleries that had been filled with verbally oriented and often witty works that discarded… Full Review

The Art of Disegno: Italian Prints and Drawings from the Georgia Museum of Art, during its stop at the Crocker Art Museum, presented a panoramic display of drawing as an art form from the sixteenth to eighteenth century in Italy. It also included a fine selection of intaglio and woodcut prints. Drawn from the collection of Giuliano Ceseri—who has loaned his collection to the Georgia Museum of Art—and from the collection of the Georgia Museum, the exhibition, curated by Robert Randolf Coleman and Babette Bohn, presented a wide-ranging approach to works on paper from the period, and did so… Full Review

The newly commissioned, site-specific installation, Figura que defina su propio horizonte (Figure Who Defines His Own Horizon), by the Cuban-born artist José Bedia is an apt centerpiece to his career survey, Transcultural Pilgrim: Three Decades of Work by José Bedia. A diminutive figure in dark bronze—a trickster as well as a reference to the artist himself, with a horned head and smoking a cigarette—is chained by the ankle to a tree stump. The chain and stump are a restraint, but in the context of Bedia’s idiosyncratic iconography, they are also an umbilical or tether that links the artist to… Full Review

No Impressionist was more innovative than Edgar Degas. Oblique glimpses of dancers in limelight, candid vignettes of brothel mores, and roughshod runs over respectable standards of finish still provide grist to students of Degas, whether in the library or studio. At the same time, the grounding of his art in expertise at drawing the nude sets him apart as the most traditional of the Impressionist group. Thus, his discomfort with being called an Impressionist, after Degas’s associates adopted the name derisively coined in Louis Leroy’s satirical review of the 1874 exhibition of the Société anonyme des artistes peintres, sculpteurs, graveurs… Full Review