Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews

For far too many scholars the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art, which has since come to be known as the Armory Show, was not simply a watershed event in the story of international modernism; it was rather a pioneering event in American modernism. The exhibition is generally regarded as the moment when contemporary American artists first emerged from under whatever rock they were hiding and made their presence known to a public at large, bolstered and legitimized by a large contingent of European modernism, including some of the most recent work being produced overseas at that time. During the… Full Review

Curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver, senior curator, Contemporary Art Museum Houston (CAMH), Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art was presented in New York over two venues: Grey Art Gallery and Studio Museum in Harlem. Timed to coincide with Performa 13 (the biennial performance art festival held in New York in November), this pioneering exhibition was activated by a number of performance commissions and bridged two legendary neighborhoods long associated with artists: Harlem and Greenwich Village. The exhibition press release stated that it was the first “to survey over fifty years of performance art by visual artists of African… Full Review

Visitors to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art who caught this exhibition with the unassuming title Chinese Paintings from Japanese Collections were treated to the rare opportunity of viewing some of Japan’s most treasured works of art. Thirty-five paintings in handscroll and hanging scroll formats, presented in two rotations, offered diverse examples of the major subjects of Chinese painting. Figures were especially well represented, including an emaciated Confucian scholar with papyrus-like skin preaching the subtleties of an ancient text, the savagely grinning idiot-savants Hanshan (Cold Mountain) and Shide of Zen Buddhist fame, and an oversized King of Hell, swarthy… Full Review

Recognized at the time of its making as a groundbreaking painting in both Jackson Pollock’s development as an abstract artist and the field of advanced American art, Mural of 1943 is a massive work—the largest that Pollock produced, in fact—at a staggering 95 5/8 x 237 3/4 inches. These monumental dimensions were prescribed by the size of the entryway in collector and gallerist Peggy Guggenheim’s Upper East Side townhouse. At just thirty-one years old, Pollock was still an unknown quantity in July 1943 when Guggenheim commissioned Mural (she gave Pollock carte blanche); began paying him a stipend of $150 per… Full Review

Curator Carol Squiers’s overview of photography since the 1970s at the International Center of Photography poses a vexing question in its title. For most of photography’s history before this period, the dilemma was: is photography an art? Finally answered to the satisfaction of most art institutions, the central question in the last few decades has dramatically turned to the very basis of the medium’s identity, particularly given the onslaught of digital media. Rather than answering the question directly, or attempting to surmise the future, Squiers’s exhibition offered a contrast to conceptualist-based theories of recent photographic history. In the opening… Full Review

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition on textiles entitled Interwoven Globe certainly accomplished the goal stated on the show’s website, which was to “explore the international transmittal of design from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century through the medium of textiles.” Its scope was impressive, as was the great variety of textiles on display, whether in terms of geographic and chronological span or category type: fashion, liturgical textiles, marriage quilts, raw fabric, etc. The exhibition could not have come at a better time, perfectly in step with the museum’s declared interest in becoming more global and inclusive (“one Met… Full Review

The 2014 Whitney Biennial, the last in the iconic Marcel Breuer building on New York's Upper East Side, is divided into three floors curated by Anthony Elms, Stuart Comer, and Michelle Grabner, respectively. Each floor has its own more-or-less open thematic, and little attempt is made to connect them aside from the premise that the curators come from outside of New York (Comer only recently took a job at the Museum of Modern Art). Nevertheless, the Whitney’s impending departure for its new Renzo Piano building downtown seems to have inspired artists throughout the exhibition to grapple with the histories, discourses… Full Review

A New Way Forward: Japanese Hanga of the 20th Century is a small exhibition, consisting of sixteen prints and one album, which will be rotated once during the course of the show. The exhibition allows viewers to compare styles and techniques in prints of the shin hanga lineage with those of the sōsaku hanga group. Shin hanga (new prints) as a practice was organized by Watanabe Shōzaburō (1885–1962) in Tokyo, who found artists willing to design prints with a Westernized drawing style, volume, atmosphere, and perspective on traditional themes, especially beauties (bijin), landscapes or cityscapes, and kabuki actors… Full Review

A monumental sculpture made with over two hundred recycled speaker boxes sourced from the Seattle area, William Cordova’s machu picchu after dark (pa’ victoria santa cruz macario sakay y aaron dixon) (2003–14) was shown at the Seattle Art Museum alongside the massive and largely historical exhibition Peru: Kingdoms of the Sun and Moon. Organized by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, this exhibition claimed to survey 3000 years of art and culture from a civilization turned nation. A golden “octopus,” or eight-armed forehead ornament, from the Mochica culture, which had been stolen during the 1980s and repatriated… Full Review

Eva Hesse’s Washer Table (1967), a little-known and rarely exhibited work, stands in the middle of the four open gallery spaces of the Blanton Museum of Art’s exhibition Converging Lines: Eva Hesse and Sol LeWitt. Originally painted white with a gray grid, the squat, four-foot-square coffee table was constructed by LeWitt and given to Hesse as a gift. Hesse subsequently painted the table black and covered its surface in tight rows of rubber washers like those found in a hardware store. Despite the serial, orderly layout of the industrially manufactured circular forms, the pliable rubber material produces subtle ripples… Full Review