Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews

Keith Haring’s journals (Penguin Books, 2010) open with the nineteen-year-old burgeoning artist hitchhiking across the Midwest. Before he moved to New York and enrolled in the School of Visual Arts, the kid from Kutztown, Pennsylvania followed the Grateful Dead, selling t-shirts, getting high, and seeing the country. In Minnesota he found a tree by the St. Croix River that he was “gonna come back to, someday” (2). After the Dead show in Minneapolis, he and his companion hitched a ride and ate in a bar on the North Dakota border surrounded by farmers who commented on Haring’s hair when he… Full Review

If any single person is responsible for the momentum that contemporary Native American art is having at this moment it is Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (b. 1940, enrolled Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes). This is, at least, one of the central takeaways of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map, which traces five decades of Smith’s career as both one of the leading artists and influential curators of Contemporary Native American art. The retrospective is an exciting, nearly dizzying, display of Smith’s artistic oeuvre that provides a textural depth to the artist’s career for those familiar with her work while still being… Full Review

Greeting the visitor to Beyond Hope: Kienholz and the Inland Northwest in a gallery of Washington State University’s Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art is a wall-mounted assemblage featuring a black-and-white photograph of elderly figures in their Sunday best moving into a starkly empty field surrounded by high hills. The sepia-toned stain of liquid resin applied across the image enhances the sense of time past and the idea that it represents a fragile memory of a momentous change in the lives of the people depicted. Titled The Returning (1976), the landscape recalls the open rolling hills of the Palouse region of… Full Review

Beneath the grand staircase at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, a dark and intimate gallery sits tucked away. It would be easy to walk quickly through this space as viewers weave their way through the encyclopedic institution, but it would also be a mistake. Through 2026, a thoughtful and moving transhistorical exhibition is enlivening this interstitial space by centering the subject of death. Afterlives: Contemporary Art in the Byzantine Crypt brings together a selection of thirty collection objects addressing loss, mourning, memory, and the afterlife by contemporary artists alongside jewelry, textiles, vessels, and architectural fragments from… Full Review

In the second installment of the Robert E. Meyerhoff and Rheda Becker Biennial Commission at the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA), artist Raúl de Nieves (b. 1983) bathes the lobby in colored light. The central feature of the public exhibition is a twenty-seven-paned window that spans the length of the building’s east facade. The Mexico-born, Brooklyn-based sculptor hand-crafted the panels from everyday materials like tape and sheets of acetate to recreate the look of stained glass. Monumental in size and dazzling in effect, the installation presents a series of vignettes, each depicting creatures that reappear frequently in de… Full Review

Tai Shani is a conjurer of worlds. Out of the murk and miasma of millennia of forgotten histories and suppressed mythologies, she sets a stage for rituals and revelations, for psychedelic hallucinations and deeply embodied experiences of other potential realities. The 2019 Turner Prize winner’s first show in the United States, MBR: And above the beautiful commune, curated by Amara Antilla, transforms an entire floor of Zaha Hadid’s iconic building for Cincinnati’s Contemporary Art Center (CAC) into a cryptic occult space that evokes contradictory senses of scale and emotion. It is as enveloping as a womb and… Full Review

When the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) reopened in October 2023 following a two-year renovation, visitors encountered not only a reimagined space—and roughly fifteen percent more of it—but also fresh takes on the institution’s collection and mission of promoting art by women. The most sweeping manifestation of the latter is Remix, a reinstallation of works in the NMWA’s permanent collection that stretches across six centuries (and much of the building), eschewing chronology in favor of thematic groupings like “Seeing Red” or “Elemental.”  While the historical specificity of particular works is lost in these clusters… Full Review

For four decades, María Magdalena Campos-Pons has created works that deftly interweave the particular and the expansive, utilizing her body, memory, and familial history as conduits to attend to transatlantic histories of diaspora and racial violence. Campos-Pons was born in 1959 in the Afro-Cuban province of Matanzas, Cuba as the descendant of enslaved African individuals and indentured Chinese laborers brought forcefully to the island. Since 1991, she has resided primarily in the United States, initially unable to return to Cuba for over a decade due to the US embargo. Her practice has centered on the journeys––both forced and forbidden—that are… Full Review

The South American Dream at the Pérez Art Museum in Miami (PAMM) is a dynamic and colorful exhibition that explores history, memory, and the South American identity through the lens of Brazilian artist Marcela Cantuária’s work. Through five immersive, multimedia artworks, which seamlessly blend painting, textiles, and ceramics, Cantuária examines the multifaceted concept of the South American dream, including environmental consciousness, political struggle, and faith. This installation curated by Jennifer Inacio, was commissioned by PAMM, challenging Cantuária to adapt her work to the high ceilings of the exhibition space and to consider her work in relation to… Full Review

Oser La Liberté, translated as “Dare Freedom,” is an extraordinary exhibition on the centuries-long fight against slavery in France and its colonies. Sponsored by the Centre des monuments nationaux (CMN) and the Fondation pour la mémoire de l’esclavage, and organized by Florence Alexis, a curator, activist, and daughter of Haitian novelist Jacques Stephen Alexis, it is installed in the crypt of Paris’s Panthéon, a building that was conceived as a church but transformed during the Revolution into a “temple of liberty” and a burial ground for “great men.” The most extraordinary thing about Oser La Liberté may… Full Review