Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews

Zhang Peili: Record. Repeat. represents a significant scholarly work on Zhang Peili, the multimedia artist often acknowledged as China’s first video artist. The exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) featured twelve video works made between 1988 and 2007, including five large, multichannel installations. It opened with 30 × 30 (1988), considered the first video artwork made in China. The single-channel, thirty-two-minute-long video shows in tight close-up Zhang’s white-gloved hands and sneaker-clad feet as he shatters a mirror and then painstakingly reassembles it piece by piece, before breaking it again. The exhibition’s most recent work was also… Full Review

Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight was a groundbreaking exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and its catalogue—with essays by Dana Miller, Gerardo Mosquera, Serge Lemoine, and Edward J. Sullivan, over one hundred full color plates, and a chronology by Moñica Espinel—is the perfect supplement. Carmen Herrera (b. 1915, Havana, Cuba) is female, Cuban, and an abstract and minimalist painter and sculptor. Her art background is in architecture and painting, and she utilizes both of these disciplines in her work. Before Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight opened at the Whitney Museum in fall 2016, Herrera’s name and her work… Full Review

Visitors to the exhibition Louis Kahn: The Power of Architecture, at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia—the final venue of an international, five-year tour—were greeted by a larger-than-life photographic portrait of the architect, his striking profile and silver hair outlined against the dark background, finger thoughtfully touching his lips and barely concealing a bemused smile. Cocurated by Stanislaus von Moos and Jochen Eisenbrand for the Vitra Design Museum, the exhibition and the lavishly illustrated catalogue with contributions by major scholars probed the many facets of this enigmatic, uncategorizable architect who daringly looked back to the classical past to… Full Review

The exhibition Kul’ttovary: Bringing Culture into the Soviet Home at Florida State University (FSU) was a welcome contribution in the area of Soviet design history. In narratives about this period, familiar tropes about lack of choice and low-quality, reverse-engineered copies are often contrasted with the iconic products of the United States, such as an Eames chair or the ’57 Chevy. However, this juxtaposition often involves thinking about design through certain Western assumptions, and can get in the way of a more thorough exploration of the history of Soviet material culture, a world precisely not driven by the values… Full Review

Rice University’s 300-acre campus is a bucolic enclave situated between the Museum District and the Texas Medical Center, all to the south of downtown Houston. The bulk of its academic buildings are clustered at its axial and planned core. Its north edge and east edge along Main Street are tree lined, well groomed and park-like. Its south and west edges are less tidy, however, and are lined with more functional structures—sports fields and surface parking lots. The Moody Center for the Arts, designed by Michael Maltzan Architecture in Los Angeles and opened in February 2017, is not part of the… Full Review

“This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” This quote from John Ford’s film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) illustrates the blurred line between fact and fiction in the American story of nation building. The exhibition Once Upon a Time . . . The Western: A New Frontier in Art and Film, cocurated by Mary-Dailey Desmarais of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) and Thomas Brent Smith of the Denver Art Museum (DAM), where it was titled The Western: An Epic in Art and Film, carefully… Full Review

Through gestures of collecting and connecting, touch has defined the lifelong project of Chilean-born artist, poet, filmmaker, and activist Cecilia Vicuña. With the exhibition Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen, her deeply compassionate work gains an urgently needed visibility. Vicuña insists on the existence of a world that is interconnected and in which we, humans, are inherently embedded. Experiences of touch evoked by and constitutive of her work rupture the subject’s perceived individuality, isolation, and autonomy. This touch signifies a relationship—one that has already been established or is about to be established. One’s first encounter with Vicuña’s work as installed… Full Review

The Transported Man, curated by Marc-Olivier Wahler, director of the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, posited metaphorically that art is magic. He did not mean that art is supernatural but that the process of making art—as the transfiguration of the common place—is like an act of stage magic. Through its analogy with magic, the show placed a curious spin on such established art-historical notions as illusionism, dematerialization, the ready-made, art as process, and art as participation. The Transported Man echoed the well-founded idea that the contemporary is anchored in the ever-changing intertwinement of the artistic legacies of American… Full Review

An exhibition devoted to tracing an artist’s cross-cultural influence often bears the risk of trying to do too much. Featuring sixty-five works, Matisse and American Art at the Montclair Art Museum juxtaposed nineteen paintings and works on paper by Matisse with a vast selection of objects by thirty-four American artists. With works by artists as diverse as Arthur Dove, Andy Warhol, and Faith Ringgold, exhibition organizers aimed to explore the French master’s impact on American modernism from 1905 to today—a tall order, to say the least. Yet cocurators Gail Stavitsky and John Cauman ultimately succeeded in revealing the extraordinary breadth… Full Review

Given that in recent decades many scholars have called for attention to the diverse traditions and overlooked contributions of a global art history, it is fair to ask, do we need another major exhibition devoted to Impressionism? There have been French Impressionist studies penned by a coterie of distinguished scholars across the globe that should satisfy most any methodological perspective or preference for a certain theme or stylistic practice. Recent shows have explored subthemes ranging from the movement’s key dealers and the ongoing recuperation of various “unheralded” Impressionists to the obvious subjects of blossoms and snowfields. And the work of… Full Review