Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews

An ambitious exhibition, Matisse/Diebenkorn delivers on its goal to delineate the influence of Henri Matisse (1869–1954) on Richard Diebenkorn (1922–93), showing a remarkably significant number of parallels between two modern, avant-garde artists. However, it does much more, and not only in its review of Diebenkorn: it also provides a nuanced consideration of the concept of influence, thereby making a significant contribution to the field of American art, as well as comparative museum display. Co-organized by the Baltimore Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Matisse/Diebenkorn is accompanied by a beautifully illustrated, scholarly catalogue. Edited by Janet… Full Review

The Off-Staging of William Forsythe’s Dance in the Museum Stellentstellen (2016) and Acquisition (2016) by William Forsythe. Stellentstellen, performed by Rauf (Rubberlegz) Yasit and Riley Watts. Acquisition, presented by students of the University of Southern California Glorya Kaufman School of Dance. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, October 16, 2016. Reviewed by Paola Escobar, Yanting Li, Julia Meyer, Marissa Osato, and Ariel Osterweis Introduction When approached by Juliet Bellow to write this review, I suspected that the multisited yet simultaneously performed Stellentstellen (2016) and Acquisition (2016) would be most appropriately considered by a multiplicity of voices, and I solicited… Full Review

Many unkind words and nasty looks have been exchanged in recent years over the ethnic and sex-and-gender principles of curatorial selection. Some artists declined to be shown in Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and El Museo del Barrio in New York in 2008, refusing to be grouped by their race and ethnicity. The exhibition Our America: Latino Presence in American Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 2013 was criticized for being too general, too all-inclusive, and not edgy or “Latino” enough. Seeking to sidestep the… Full Review

In 1966 Sol LeWitt wrote, “The most interesting characteristic of the cube is that it is relatively uninteresting” (LeWitt, “The Cube,” Art in America, Summer 1966). Rice University Art Gallery (a space that has now been repurposed), like many contemporary art spaces, was a modest white cube, and LeWitt’s installation Glossy and Flat Black Squares purposely played off of its seemingly “uninteresting” architectural container.  When LeWitt repeated the assertion in 1967, he elaborated: “The best that can be said for either the square or the cube is that they are relatively uninteresting in themselves. . . . Released from… Full Review

In 1954, Ellsworth Kelly returned from his years in Paris to live and work in New York. By 1956, he settled on the Coenties Slip, at the very bottom of Manhattan, near his friend from Paris the abstract painter Fred Mitchell. Robert Indiana moved up the street later that year. In 1957, Agnes Martin, Lenore Tawney, and Jack Youngerman arrived there through word of mouth. In the early nineteenth century, the Coenties Slip had been one of many inlets of water just wide and long enough to hold docked trading ships on the active waterfront at the turn of the… Full Review

For her new body of work, almost entirely composed of, or engaging with, durational media, such as video and film, Mickalene Thomas has re-created the same intimate, female domestic spaces of communion and solidarity as she sets up in her studio for her photo shoots. Islands of patterned carpet with ottomans covered by the familiar 1970s textiles invite the viewer to sit and interact with versions of her personal library, comprising books by Toni Morrison, Zadie Smith, Alice Walker, and James Baldwin, among others. Conceived as an immersive and interactive environment—Thomas imagined, for example, that people could take home some… Full Review

Los Angeles to New York: Dwan Gallery, 1959–1971, the first museum exhibition to chronicle the eleven-year run of Virginia Dwan’s bicoastal gallery, anticipates the promised gift of the art dealer’s collection to the National Gallery of Art (NGA) in Washington, DC. During a period of incredible transformation in American and European art, Dwan was at the forefront, mounting exhibitions that helped define trends as diverse as Pop, Minimalism, Conceptualism, and land art. Dwan innovated in other ways as well: she was the first American dealer to operate simultaneously a gallery on each coast, with locations in Los… Full Review

Yoonmi Nam’s Still was a simple, direct exhibition: three lithographs, three sculptures, and three Japanese woodblock prints (mokuhanga) displayed a single white room. While the sculptures rested on white perimeter plinths, Nam’s lithographs and woodblocks held the walls, delivering spare, nearly diagrammatic flora composed swimmingly on creamy paper. The presentation was elegant and normcore basic, except that the sculptures were facsimiles of throwaways, appearing to be bagged takeout food containers on their way to both table and trash. These tableaux were aptly titled Take Out, with parenthetical identifiers that repeated the obsequies printed on the bags: “Thank… Full Review

A series of international flags stripped of their color by Wilfredo Prieto framed the entrance to the Museum of Fine Arts Houston’s presentation of Adiós Utopia: Dreams and Deceptions in Cuban Art Since 1950. Titled Apolítico (Apolitical, 2001), Prieto’s gray-scale flags guarded the balcony of the second-floor gallery where the exhibition was on view, as if demarcating neutral ground for the oft-contested field of Cuban art. Visible just beyond Prieto’s muted palette, a burst of color belonging to over fifty posters dating to the 1960s and early 1970s boldly announced some of the original political and cultural aims of… Full Review

A central (and not uncommon) problem confronts the curator of a white-box gallery who wishes to exhibit the work of Lonnie Holley, an Alabama-born artist and musician typically described as self-taught or vernacular: how to present the work within the conventions established by this type of institution while also acknowledging that the artist’s animating presence is necessary to the artworks’ significance. As Bernard L. Herman argues in a persuasive essay in Something to Take My Place: The Art of Lonnie Holley, the catalogue accompanying a 2015 exhibition at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, “Performance stands at the heart… Full Review