Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews

This international loan exhibition presents a nuanced understanding of Franciscan missionary Junípero Serra's life and work in California, contextualizing it within a broader discussion of the Spanish colonial enterprise in New Spain (the formal name of Spanish colonial North America, the Caribbean, and the Philippines, including parts of what is today California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, and Florida until Mexican independence in 1821). Born in Petra, Mallorca, in 1713, Serra took vows as a Franciscan priest as a young man. Adept at scholarly teaching and writing, he became a professor of philosophy and religion prior to his calling to… Full Review

It is appropriate that State of Mind: New California Art Circa 1970, the wonderful, timely, necessary exhibition curated by Constance Lewallen and Karen Moss, was at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, which in the context of the New York art world is as far away psychologically from the gallery districts of Chelsea and the Lower East Side and the museums of Midtown and the Upper East Side as Los Angeles and San Francisco and other hotbeds of California art are geographically. The parochialism of New York—Manhattan, really—is well known, and in the late 1960s and early 1970s, just… Full Review

During its time at the Musée d’Orsay L’impressionnisme et la mode elicited a flurry of anxious reviews from French critics and journalists, who sketched connections between the museum’s approximately twenty-eight-million-dollar facelift, the decline of public funding for museums, the institution’s increasingly liberal loan policy, and the need to generate revenue through ticket sales and private sponsorships—which, in the case of L’impressionnisme et la mode, was fittingly provided by Christian Dior and the French multinational luxury goods conglomerate LVMH Moët Hennessy-Louis Vuitton. (LVMH is Dior’s parent company; the financial interests of the two companies are intimately intertwined.) Indeed, from the… Full Review

Chris Burden: Extreme Measures at the New Museum, the Los Angeles-based artist’s first major museum exhibition in the United States in twenty-five years and his first solo museum show in New York, is a boy’s dream come true. Organized by Lisa Phillips with Massimiliano Gioni and Jenny Moore, the show presents a grown-up man playing with toys. The difference is that, this time around, Burden’s adolescent universe gets a big injection of money, engineering, and industriousness. Even if the exhibition does not directly address issues of gender, the male-oriented sensibility is felt all over. Everything is presented in a large-scale… Full Review

What to do with Paolo Soleri (1919–2013)? For the last half-century, the work of the Italian-born architect has seemingly refused to conform to the stylistic and theoretical concerns of the times. That is, until recently, when Cosanti, the foundation he established, began making efforts to transform the general perception of his work from one of an arts-and-crafts practice to that of visionary sustainable design. For the discipline of art history, however, Soleri’s legacy is important, not for his attempts to create efficient urban structures, but for his refusal to deny the significance of the aesthetic component of any human environment… Full Review

Organized by Koenraad Jonckheere in collaboration with Peter Carpreau, senior curator at M – Museum Leuven, this important, thoughtful, and beautiful exhibition aims to enshrine Michiel Coxcie among the select group of northern masters—Jan Gossaert, Jan van Scorel, Maarten van Heemskerck, and Frans Floris—who visited Rome during the first half of the sixteenth century and engaged inventively with the art of Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo, as with their ancient sources, both sculptural and architectural. The exhibition and its Dutch- and English-language catalogues (which slightly vary in content) constitute a robust response, four hundred years after the fact, to the ambivalent… Full Review

It is a long way from the Tuscan town of Borgo San Sepolcro to the sumptuous interior of the Frick Collection, where six of the panel paintings by the famously enigmatic Piero della Francesca for the high altar of Sant’Agostino were reunited. Yet the preciosity of these mid-quattrocento works in oil and tempera, some resplendent with gold leaf and fictive jewel-encrusted fabrics, was deceptively compatible with the luxurious neo-classical setting. That the secular venue and Piero’s religious images share a monumental imperturbability belies, however, the radically different ways in which the paintings would have been seen and understood by their… Full Review

The 1970s is a decade whose image has not yet crystallized. As Rosalind Krauss reported at the time in “Notes on the Index,” seventies art in America was “diversified, split, factionalized” (October 3 [Spring 1977]: 68). Despite art history’s attempts to trace a clear picture that would bring this “willful eclecticism” into some explanatory order, the decade that followed the Minimalist and Conceptualist reductions of the 1960s and preceded the excesses of the 1980s continues to pose challenges to viewers and students of contemporary art. The Whitney Museum’s ambitious exhibition Rituals of Rented Island: Object Theater, Loft Performance, and… Full Review

A compelling mid-career survey for the Shanghai-based artist and filmmaker, Yang Fudong: Estranged Paradise, Works 1993–2013 showcased several key works by the artist who is perhaps best known for his stylistically noir films that focus upon the ongoing social complexities facing a generation of Chinese born after the Cultural Revolution. The second iteration of a traveling retrospective that first opened at the Kunsthalle Zürich in April 2013, works exhibited at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive included several films by Yang as well as photographs, multi-channel video installations, and a selection of archival materials documenting the artist’s prodigious… Full Review

The fourth exhibition dedicated to the work of Marc Chagall and mounted by the Jewish Museum since 1965 (with the three most recent—in 1996, 2001, and 2008—also organized by senior curator Susan Tumarkin Goodman), Chagall: Love, War, and Exile trained a specific focus on the artist’s work in France during the run-up to World War II and the difficult war years he spent in New York. The show was organized into four sections, “Time is a River,” “War and Exile,” “The Jewish Jesus,” and “The Colors of Love,” and consisted of thirty-one oil paintings and twenty-two works on paper, as… Full Review