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

Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews

Matthias Mühling and Stephanie Weber, eds.
Exh. cat. Munich: Hirmer, 2021. 336 pp.; 245 color ills. Cloth $45.00 (9783777433684)
Lenbachhaus, Munich, September 17, 2019–January 19, 2020; Museu de Arte de São Paulo, October 13–November 15, 2020; Denver Art Museum, December 13, 2020–April 11, 2021; Philadelphia Museum of Art, May 2–July 25, 2021
The year preceding Spring 2021, spent away from museums and most other social spaces, forced a collective recognition of our basic, fallible corporeality, of our relational occupation of space, and of our globally intertwined fates. Our spatial-social sensitivities had perhaps never before been so finely tuned, primed to appreciate the oeuvre of Senga Nengudi, who has engaged with such concerns since the beginning of her career in the late 1960s and early 1970s. At the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA), the recent exhibition of the artist’s work and its accompanying book, both titled Senga Nengudi: Topologies, offer an… Full Review
December 9, 2021
Thumbnail
Valerie Cassel Oliver
Exh. cat. Richmond, VA and Durham, NC: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in association with Duke University Press, 2021. 288 pp.; 140 color ills.; 35 b/w ills. Cloth (9781934351192)
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, May 22–September 6, 2021; Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, October 28, 2021–February 6, 2022; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR, March 12–July 25, 2022; Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, September 2022–February 2023
Throughout the summer of 2021, a white sedan with gold trim, a type affectionately known as a SLAB (acronym for “slow, loud, and banging”), was parked in the main atrium of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) in Richmond. The SLAB, a customized 1990 Cadillac Brougham d’Elegance, designed by the New Orleans rapper Richard “Fiend” Jones and commissioned by the museum, joyfully and flamboyantly announced the long-anticipated opening of The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse. Curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver, The Dirty South brings together over 100 artists from the… Full Review
November 17, 2021
Thumbnail
Andrea Nelson, ed.
Exh. cat. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2020. 288 pp.; 8 color ills.; 269 b/w ills. Cloth $60.00 (9781942884743)
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, July 2–October 3, 2021; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, October 31, 2021–January 30, 2022
In May 1914 Wilson’s Photographic Magazine devoted thirteen pages to a celebration of “how women have won fame in photography.” Apparently this triumph was short-lived, because, in the wake of the #MeToo movement, major museums have once again opened their galleries to photographs whose defining criterion for inclusion was the gender of their creators. Building on the ambitious Qui a peur des femmes photographes? 1839–1945 (Musée d’Orsay, 2015) and the Museum of Modern Art’s Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography (2010–11), the National Gallery’s The New Woman behind the Camera (first shown at the Metropolitan Museum… Full Review
November 2, 2021
Thumbnail
Connie H. Choi, Thelma Golden, and Kellie Jones
Exh. cat. New York: Rizzoli Electa, 2019. 232 pp. Cloth $45.00 (9780847866380)
Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, January 16–April 14, 2019; Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, SC, May 24–August 18, 2019; Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Kalamazoo, MI, September 13–December 8, 2019; Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA, January 17–April 12, 2020; Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City, January 23–April 10, 2021; Frye Art Museum, Seattle, May 22–August 15, 2021
Coming upon Kevin the Kiteman, Jordan Casteel’s big 2016 painting in the galleries of Seattle’s Frye Art Museum, viewers might have been reminded of how the pandemic has utterly transformed urban experience. The piece opened a section of Black Refractions: Highlights from the Studio Museum in Harlem focused on work by former artists-in-residence, the signature studio program of the famed New York institution. As Frye Art Museum curator Amanda Donnan describes in the catalog, the work was the result of a serendipitous encounter between painter and subject. When observing the busy plaza across the street from her studio at… Full Review
October 13, 2021
Thumbnail
Legion of Honor Museum, San Francisco, May 7–November 7, 2021
Up on a hill on San Francisco’s northwestern end, flanked by fluorescent green golf courts, stands the Legion of Honor, deep in perennial ocean fog. En français, the words Honneur et Patrie welcome tourists and the odd city resident to this neoclassical pavilion’s rigid symmetry, rhythmically marked by an Ionic colonnade. A larger-than-life-size man in bronze, Rodin’s Thinker, governs the courtyard. Caught in internal struggle, he famously cogitates on a pedestal. Installed throughout the museum’s permanent collection galleries is I Am Speaking, Are You Listening?, a solo exhibition of work by the acclaimed Kenyan American artist Wangechi Mutu… Full Review
September 21, 2021
Thumbnail
Shawnya L. Harris, ed.
Exh. cat. Athens: Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia, 2021. 192 pp. Cloth $40.00 (9780915977468)
Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia, Athens, January 30–April 25, 2021; Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute, Utica, NY, June 19–September 12, 2021; Philadelphia Museum of Art, October 11, 2021–January 2, 2022
A week before Emma Amos: Color Odyssey was set to close and four days before Derek Chauvin’s guilty verdict for the murder of George Floyd, I invited my sister and niece to accompany me to Emma Amos’s retrospective at the Georgia Museum of Art, the first of three sites for the traveling exhibition. As we made the hour drive from Atlanta to Athens, news reports of Black bodies being killed by police lingered in the car, like unwelcome chaperones. Along with the current backlash against teaching the systemic racism that is the warp thread of the United States, these events… Full Review
September 16, 2021
Thumbnail
Joe Houston, Frances Follin, Michael J. Anderson, Rosie May, Roja Najafi, Beau R. Ott, and Catherine Shotick
Exh. cat. Oklahoma City: Oklahoma City Museum of Art, 2021. 132 pp. Paper $25.99 (9780911919189)
Oklahoma City Museum of Art, February 20–May 16, 2021
Focusing on art forms often seen as mechanical and austere, the exhibition Moving Vision: Op and Kinetic Art from the Sixties and Seventies at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art (OKCMOA) offered a surprisingly humanistic and sensual take on those two closely related movements. The time is ripe for reevaluation of Op and Kinetic art, which were frequently dismissed by critics of their day due to the perception of the art’s easy consumption, coziness with industry and popular culture, and superficiality (one critic derided Op art as “empty spectacle,” for example). The OKCMOA exhibition countered that assessment by… Full Review
September 3, 2021
Thumbnail
Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, February 1–December 31, 2021
After Hope is a groundbreaking exhibition that rethinks not only the importance of contemporary video art in Asia but also the premises and goals of its exhibition site, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, whose main focus is traditional Asian art. The physical installation of the show comprises a six-and-a-half-hour loop of fifty-four videos and an “ephemera wall” of texts and images contributed by the artists. While the physical installation of the exhibit runs through December 31, 2021, a thought-provoking program of working groups, workshops and events, and a continually updated digital platform, afterhope.com, have been organized since… Full Review
August 16, 2021
Thumbnail
Exh. cat. Atlanta and New York: High Museum of Art and Rizzoli Electa, 2021. 224 pp. Cloth $50.00 (9780847869923)
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, February 6–May 9, 2021; Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME, June 19–September 12, 2021; Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, October 16, 2021–January 9, 2022
Co-organized by Maine’s Portland Museum of Art and Atlanta’s High Museum of Art, David Driskell: Icons of Nature and History surveys almost seven decades of Driskell’s art practice across painting, printmaking, and collage. Curator Julie L. McGee gathered lesser- and well-known works created between 1953 and 2011 with a keen interest in highlighting David Driskell (1934–2020) as an artist, a lifelong occupation eclipsed at times by his outsize influence as a scholar of American and African American art. The inimitable Driskell inhabited a colorful life as a groundbreaking art historian, curator, professor, and collector dedicated to chronicling artists of African… Full Review
July 30, 2021
Thumbnail
Myriam Ben Salah and Lauren Mackler
Exh. cat. Los Angeles: Hammer Museum, 2020. 308 pp.; 343 color ills. Paper $50.00 (9783791359106)
Hammer Museum in partnership with the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, Los Angeles, April 17–August 1, 2021
Context always matters in the perception and reception of art, but in the case of annual or biennial exhibitions designed to take the pulse of a particular place at a particular time, context is crucial. Made in L.A. 2020: a version was, through no fault of its own, vexed in this regard. Between the show’s organization and its opening to the public, delayed by nearly a year, the political and social landscape of Los Angeles and the nation as a whole shifted radically with the killing of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and too many others, the rise of the Black… Full Review
July 28, 2021
Thumbnail