Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews

FROM THE ARCHIVE: This autumn, caa.reviews is revisiting reviews that relate to the social issues of the present, at a time when the field is taking them up in renewed ways. This week, we revisit a group of exhibitions at the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas, that centered transgender artists and their stories. For more read Martha Scott Burton’s review of Transamerica/n: Gender, Identity, Appearance Today, Andy Warhol: Portraits, and TransSanAntonian: Examining Trans Identities and Gender Fluidity in the Archives. Full Review

FROM THE ARCHIVE: This autumn, caa.reviews is revisiting reviews that relate to the social issues of the present, at a time when the field is taking them up in renewed ways. As museums and galleries undergo seismic change, we look to another critical shape these institutions have taken: solidarity collections and the “museum in exile." Explore this concept and “the politics of historicizing a present in the face of dispossession, state violence, and fascism” through Matthew Bent’s review of the 2015–19 traveling exhibition Past Disquiet: Artists, International Solidarity and Museums in Exile. Full Review

Bauhaus scholars had a wealth of exhibition offerings to choose from in 2019, from major events in Weimar and Dessau, to provincial museums capitalizing on local architects’ ties to the Bauhaus, to, not least of all, three special exhibitions in Berlin. One of these, Original Bauhaus, was based largely on the collection of the Bauhaus-Archiv and, to a lesser extent, the Berlinische Galerie. It sought to highlight the Bauhaus’s current relevance by presenting fourteen case studies. Each case study took an archival object or group of objects as its starting point—its “original”—and used further items and histories to probe… Full Review

FROM THE ARCHIVE: This autumn, caa.reviews is revisiting reviews that relate to the social issues of the present, at a time when the field is taking them up in renewed ways. Today we're spotlighting Liza Oliver's consideration of museums' role in presenting Indigenous stories, through the 2018–19 British Museum exhibition Reimagining Captain Cook: Pacific Perspectives. Full Review

FROM THE ARCHIVE: This autumn, caa.reviews is revisiting reviews that relate to the social issues of the present, at a time when the field is taking them up in renewed ways. Today, explore Chicanx civil rights history through the Autry Museum of the American West exhibition La Raza, reviewed by Mary Thomas. Full Review

When, in 2013, the Oakland, California–based, employee-owned creative firm Design Action Collective was tasked by Black Lives Matter (BLM) organizers Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi to create a visual identity for the incipient movement, the challenge was enormous. How to visually represent a movement that was an outgrowth of historic civil rights and progressive political protest movements? How to capture the energy and rage aimed at a fundamentally broken justice system, as well as instill hope for profound, systemic change? Daunting though the brief may have been, within three days Design Action Collective had produced a… Full Review

Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists celebrates the works of North American Indigenous women throughout history and into the present. In selecting the 117 objects included in the exhibition, the curators, Jill Ahlberg Yohe and Teri Greeves (Kiowa), were determined to provide a comprehensive display that represented all geographical areas and a wide variety of media, from beadwork and basketry to video and performance art. They were guided by a team of native and nonnative artists, scholars, and curators, not only in selecting the works for the exhibition but also in ensuring that the narrative they presented challenged some… Full Review

FROM THE ARCHIVE: This summer, caa.reviews is revisiting reviews that relate to the social issues of the present, at a time when the field is taking them up in renewed ways. Today we highlight Outcasts: Prejudice & Persecution in the Medieval World, a 2018 Getty exhibition reviewed by Patricia Blessing. Full Review

FROM THE ARCHIVE: This summer, caa.reviews is revisiting reviews that relate to the social issues of the present, at a time when the field is taking them up in renewed ways. This week we revisit the exhibition Per(sister): Incarcerated Women of Louisiana with Jillian Hernandez. Full Review

Writing in 1964, the Algerian painter Mohammed Khadda (1930–1991) identified “that day in 1910 when the Russian artist [Wassily] Kandinsky created the first nonrepresentational work” as marking the birth of “nonfigurative (or abstract) painting.” (Note: For the sake of consistency, I have used the exhibition curators’ transliteration of artists’ names.) Published in Révolution africaine, the National Liberation Front’s weekly newspaper, Khadda’s piece was the first of three artists’ statements titled “Éléments pour un art nouveau” (Elements for a new art), in which the authors grappled with the question of the role of the artist in the postindependence state. While… Full Review