Concise, critical reviews of books, exhibitions, and projects in all areas and periods of art history and visual studies

Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews

James Meyer, ed.
Exh. cat. Princeton and Washington, DC: Princeton University Press and National Gallery of Art, 2022. 288 pp.; 140 color ills.; 60 b/w ills. Cloth $60.00 (9780691236179)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, July 10–October 31, 2022
In the subtitle of The Double: Identity and Difference in Art since 1900, curated by James Meyer at the National Gallery of Art (NGA), the terms “identity” and “difference” do not signal, as they often do, an exhibition organized around categories of gender, race, ethnicity, or nationality. Identity is instead presented as much more slippery and unstable. Through the figure of the double, Meyer proposes a capacious thematic for understanding twentieth- and twenty-first-century art, as well as how we know and relate to ourselves, others, and the world around us. An extraordinary selection of over 120 works… Full Review
February 1, 2023
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State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, July 7–October 11, 2020
“Usually, we do not exhibit this painting because it frightens the museum’s employees.” Kirill Svetlyakov, Head of the Department of New Tendencies in Art at the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, was leading a tour through Not Forever, a sweeping exploration of Soviet visual culture from 1968 to 1985. Svetlyakov had paused before the 1984 painting Carnival. Its artist, Nikolai Yeryshev (1936–2004), was a prize-winning participant in exhibitions organized by the state-run Soviet Union of Artists. Today, however, he remains known primarily within the Ural city of Orenburg, where he spent most of his career, and as one of… Full Review
January 30, 2023
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Institute of Contemporary Art San Diego: September 30, 2022–February 6, 2023
MIT List Visual Arts Center: October 22, 2021–February 13, 2022
Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati: September 17, 2021–February 27, 2022
The mood in Sreshta Rit Premnath’s exhibition Grave/Grove at the Institute of Contemporary Art San Diego is one of meditative calm. Spare sculptures spread across the gallery’s white and gray expanse, punctuated with reflective silver and tendrils of green. Yet despite this soothing spirit of first encounter, it does not take long for the works to cohere in front of the viewer and assert a wrenching consideration of migration, cruelty, hope, and how we, as a sociopolitical body, value human life. That such spartan aesthetic gestures can raise deeply troubling and urgent questions, while offering a careful optimism, speaks to… Full Review
January 18, 2023
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Michelle Millar Fisher and Amber Winick
Exh. cat. MIT Press, 2021. 344 pp.; 125 color ills. Cloth $44.95 (9780262044899)
Mütter Museum, Philadelphia, PA, May 8, 2021–April 30, 2022; Center for Architecture and Design, Philadelphia, PA, September 10–November 14, 2021; Mass Art Museum (MAAM), Boston, June 11–December 18, 2022
It is by design that many of the artworks in the Designing Motherhood exhibition and the chapters in the accompanying catalog originate from personal experience. After all, the embodied experience of birth, as either birthing or birthed people (or both), is one we all share. Yet the “things that make or break our births” have, thus far, received little attention—sometimes in their public recognition, occasionally in their design. The Designing Motherhood curators, design historians Michelle Millar Fisher and Amber Winick, felt we needed a “public reckoning with the designs that, for better or worse, shape experiences for all of us”… Full Review
December 21, 2022
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Gropius Bau, Berlin, November 26, 2021–March 13, 2022
Zanele Muholi presented the full breadth of the South African artist’s work to date. Muholi’s photographic practice attends to the Black LGBTQIA+ community and addresses sexual politics, racial violence, self-affirmation, and lesser-known histories. Originating at Tate Modern, the exhibition is an international feat, curated by Tate’s Yasufumi Nakamori and Sarah Allen with Gropius Bau’s Natasha Ginwala. In a video interview, Muholi opens with the statement, “What matters most is content—who is in the picture and why are they there?” In Zanele Muholi, the curators echo the artist’s sentiment, as Muholi’s photographic and multimedia series unfold throughout Gropius Bau’s ten… Full Review
November 18, 2022
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Shigeko Kubota, Mayumi Hamada, Mihoko Nishikawa, Azusa Hashimoto, and Midori Yoshimoto
Tokyo: Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 2021. 256 pp.; 131 color ills.; 65 b/w ills. Paper ¥3410.00 (9784309291413)
Niigata Prefectural Museum of Modern Art, March 20–June 6, 2021; National Museum of Art, Osaka, June 29–September 23, 2021; Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, November 13, 2021–February 23, 2022
The exhibition Viva Video! The Art and Life of Shigeko Kubota was the first large-scale survey exhibition since Kubota’s career survey at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York, in 1991, and this catalog—recipient of the 2021 Ringa Art Encouragement Prize—attests to the extent that interest and research on her work has progressed. The reevaluation of women artists has been proceeding apace throughout the world. Designated the “mother of video art,” Shigeko Kubota has been a particular subject of reconsideration and was recently honored with an important focused exhibition Shigeko Kubota: Liquid Reality at the Museum of Modern… Full Review
November 9, 2022
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The Print Center, Philadelphia, PA, April 15–July 16, 2022
How do we tell the stories of domestic violence? Most domestic violence happens behind closed doors, as does most advocacy to assist survivors. Artist Carmen Winant’s installation brings documentation of abuse and advocacy together through a reconsideration of photographs, newspaper clippings, guidebooks, and other ephemera culled from the archives of Philadelphia-based organization Women in Transition and the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence. On the first floor of the installation are several collages. In one, Moon faces Demons (2022), Winant presents a group of sixteen photographs, each centered on a faded piece of construction paper then adhered together with blue tape… Full Review
October 12, 2022
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Melissa Chiu, Miwako Tezuka, and Drew Kahu‘āina Broderick, eds.
Exh. cat. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2022. 284 pp.; 111 color ills.; 15 b/w ills. Cloth $55.00 (9783775752145)
Various sites, Honolulu, Hawai‘i, February 18–May 8, 2022
Author’s note: I do not italicize words in ‘ōlelo Hawai‘i (the Hawaiian language) for two reasons: doing so perpetuates the “otherness” of Indigenous languages that were nearly rendered extinct as a result of colonialism—including ‘ōlelo Hawai‘i, which was effectively banned in 1896—but also because Hawaiian and English are both official languages in the State of Hawai‘i. Hardly innocuous nomenclature, “Pacific Century” suggests a multifocal battle waged across overlapping fronts, from geopolitics to economics, ideology to culture. The phrase evokes competing sentiments, some celebratory and others apprehensive, themselves indicative of the tension between place-based exhibition making and global art spectacle. Such… Full Review
August 19, 2022
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Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, Russia, February 6–April 8, 2018
In the introduction to The Pencil of Nature (1844), British inventor William Henry Fox Talbot tells the origin story of “photogenic drawing.” While honeymooning, he attempted to sketch Lake Como with the aid of a camera lucida. But his “faithless pencil” left only traces of the refracted landscape; the marks were “melancholy to behold.” As if updating Pliny’s tale of art originating with the tracing of a lover’s shadow, Talbot resolved to fix nature’s phantasmagoric images. In 1841, he patented the calotype, the first paper-based chemical photographic process. Unlike its popular French competitor, the metal-based daguerreotype, the calotype process… Full Review
August 12, 2022
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Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA, January 28–August 7, 2022
In The Power of Maps (1992), cartographer Denis Wood writes, “The world we take for granted—the real world—is made like this, out of the accumulated thought and labor of the past. It is presented to us on the platter of the map, presented, that is, made present, so that whatever invisible, unattainable, erasable past or future can become part of our living . . . now . . . here” (7). This accumulation of the past made relevant to those in the present is examined in Maya Lin’s current exhibition at Smith College Museum of Art (SCMA).  … Full Review
August 8, 2022
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