Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews

Until recently, extensive thematic exhibitions on the Florentine maniera have been confined to Italian and, more specifically, Tuscan institutions. Elsewhere in Europe, however, the last few years have seen a reanimated interest in Mannerism: the latest, in the spring of 2016, was the large-scale exhibition Maniera: Pontormo, Bronzino and Medici Florence at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt. Organized by Bastian Eclercy—chief curator of Italian, French, and Spanish painting at the museum—the show focused on Florence as epicenter of “European Mannerism” in the pivotal period between the 1510s—when the Medici’s return to power coincided with the emergence of a new generation… Full Review

Enigmatic and engaging, the work of figurative artist Yasuo Kuniyoshi (1889–1953) combines American folk and Surrealist art with dreamlike perspectives (exhibition catalogue; 16). Influenced by early American art, modernism, and Japanese artistic expressions—such as flatness of form—his pictures are simultaneously rooted in tradition and the avant-garde and often underscore his proclivity toward contradictions (33). An artist frequently overlooked, Kuniyoshi immigrated to the United States from Japan in 1906, eventually residing in New York until his death in 1953. While critics considered him less frequently than his contemporaries, when reviewed, his works were positively received. The 2015 exhibition of his work… Full Review

The Court and Cosmos: The Great Age of the Seljuqs exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art set out to elucidate how the orders of this world and the next were conceptualized and represented in the Seljuq Empire and its successor states. To a certain extent, Met curators Sheila R. Canby, Deniz Beyazit, and Martina Rugiadi delivered. With over 270 objects, Court and Cosmos is the first major exhibition on the Seljuqs in the United States, and according to Met Director Thomas P. Campbell’s preface to the exhibition catalogue, it is one of the first exhibitions in the world to… Full Review

Rembrandt’s First Masterpiece offered visitors a rare opportunity to engage with Rembrandt’s painted Judas Returning the Thirty Pieces of Silver (1629) and the three surviving sheets of preparatory drawings associated with it. The exhibition marked the first time that the painting, long held in an English private collection and, as the exhibition’s title suggested, regarded as a decisive work for the artist’s subsequent development, was shown in the United States. For context, the show included alongside the painting and preparatory drawings a wide array of some three dozen prints and drawings, many from the Morgan’s own inimitable collection, as well… Full Review

Puerto Rican Light (Cueva Vientos), a site-specific installation created by Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, is a post-colonial inversion and commentary on the complicated state of U.S.-Puerto Rican relations. This iteration of what appears to be an ongoing project also develops one of their consistent themes: light as illumination, energy, and power. Dan Flavin’s iconic Minimalist, fluorescent-light sculpture Puerto Rican Light (to Jeanie Blake) made in 1965 was originally used by Allora and Calzadilla as part of a 2003 exhibition at the Americas Society. In their earlier version, a solar-energy battery bank charged by the sun in Puerto Rico… Full Review

Anri Sala: Answer Me, organized by the New Museum’s artistic director Massimiliano Gioni and associate curators Margot Norton and Natalie Bell, is the artist’s first comprehensive survey exhibition in the United States. Sala (b. 1974) is an Albanian artist who lives and works in Berlin and uses primarily video to investigate the underlying structure of music and sound. Many of his works deal with emotional histories of architectural spaces as told by live and recorded musical performances. Answer Me fills three floors of the museum and is organized thematically—a minimalistic and technologically sophisticated presentation on the fourth floor;… Full Review

Taking its title from rawiya, the Arabic noun for a storyteller (feminine) and the eponymous name of an all-women photography collective in the Middle East, She Who Tells a Story: Women Photographers from Iran and the Arab World, organized by Kristen Gresh, the Estrellita and Yousuf Karsh Assistant Curator of Photographs at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, exhibits the photographs and, in two cases, the videos of twelve artists. (The title page for the catalogue includes rawiya in Arabic script just below the English She Who Tells a Story, and the exhibition, at least as it… Full Review

[See the multimedia media review on Scalar.] This review of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Work/Travail/Arbeid (2015–17) enlists the interactive, multimedia capabilities of the Scalar platform to evoke the dance exhibition’s ten-day run at the Centre Pompidou, Paris. The exhibition brought together several components of the Belgian choreographer and dancer’s broader project, including investigating choreography as writing movement in time and space, exploring the relationship and overlap between dance and music, and expanding the sites and audiences of dance performances. In her ongoing endeavor to introduce complex dance and music to a broader public and to preserve her… Full Review

Touted in museum press releases as the “first major exhibition in more than twenty-five years to feature the life and works of the renowned American painter Thomas Hart Benton,” American Epics: Thomas Hart Benton and Hollywood explores the complex intersections between the work of one of the United States’ most revered Regionalists and the American feature film industry. In its staging at Fort Worth’s Amon Carter Museum of American Art (the third stop on a four-city tour), American Epics includes some of Benton’s best-known works, such as People of Chilmark (1922) and his mural-form explorations of the colonization, settlement, and… Full Review

We live in a country divided. Americans today are struggling to have frank, productive dialogues about politics, civil liberties, and social issues. Thanks to livestreaming and social media, our impassioned reactions, firsthand accounts, and official statements catalog each day’s debates in real time and on a vast public scale. While it is tempting to attribute our current state of the union to uniquely twenty-first-century problems—terrorism, technology, or globalization, to name a few—it is clear that neither these issues nor our reliance on real-time, real-talk commentary are new. In fact, America is presently grappling with many of the same challenges that… Full Review