Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews

Opening in time for Epiphany 2020, the exhibition Balthazar: A Black African King in Medieval and Renaissance Art at the Getty Center in Los Angeles was the first exhibition at a major museum to examine the portrayal of the youngest of the Three Magi, Balthazar, as a black African king. (The exhibition adopted the phrase “black African” in acknowledgment of racial diversity across Africa. Medieval European terms were in contrast often vague, inaccurate, or pejorative.) Balthazar begins with a question: why, if early medieval legends describe Balthazar as a black African man, does it take nearly a millennium for him… Full Review

After closing for two years to undergo extensive renovations, the Seattle Asian Art Museum reopened in early February with Boundless: Stories of Asian Art—an exhibition that reimagines its existing collection and presents a timely intervention into the field of Asian art. Boundless foregoes curation based on linear histories, geography, and national borders, turning instead to a thematic approach that makes space for a more expansive conception of Asia. Criticisms of curating based on national, regional, or civilizational designations have often been lodged in art historical discourse on Asia; however, alternative approaches have been rarely realized. Historically, museums and exhibitions… Full Review

Three recent exhibitions at the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) reflected an important shift in priorities for that institution. The first and largest, Generations: A History of Black Abstract Art, presented a selection of over seventy works from the Pamela J. Joyner and Alfred J. Giuffrida Collection as well as the BMA’s permanent collection. The exhibition was curated by Katy Siegel, the BMA’s senior research curator and Eugene V. and Clare E. Thaw Endowed Chair at Stony Brook University, and Christopher Bedford, Dorothy Wagner Wallis Director at the BMA. Generations stands out as a significant contribution… Full Review

The initial sensation on entering Nick Cave’s installation Until is one of beguilement. Thousands of brightly colored wind spinners—metal discs cut with concentric designs that generate a holographic effect when in motion—hang on wire strands from ceiling to floor in a glittering thicket. The walls are netted with pony beads threaded into vivid designs: the word “power,” a hashtag, a red World AIDS Day ribbon, a rainbow. Skirting the wind-spinner forest, a pony-bead curtain cascades over the floor, leaving a bejeweled tideline. At the exhibition’s heart sits a gigantic structure that seems to float celestially, its underside shimmering with illuminated… Full Review

“Slave rebellions were a continuous source of fear in the American South, especially since black slaves accounted for more than one-third of the region’s population in the 18th century.” So begins the most current article on slave rebellions on the History network website. The writers can imagine a fear of rebellion but not the hopes embodied therein; they traffic in an actuarial metaphor, “accounting,” that subtly affirms that “black slaves” were indeed commodities; and they proffer a unit, “the American South,” that includes the slavers and their enablers but not the enslaved, whose resistance to slavery is just as… Full Review

In 2017, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art received a trove of 9,200 Polaroids taken by unknown artist April Dawn Alison (1941–2008). To use curator Erin O’Toole’s words, Alison was “the private feminine persona” of Alan Schaefer, a reclusive Oakland-based commercial photographer with a proclivity for short dresses, high heels, wigs, and jewelry, whose gender identity was known only to a few relatives and friends. The voluminous archive consists mostly of self-portraits taken in the artist’s two-bedroom apartment over the course of four decades. The photographs were discovered by artist Andrew Masullo, who purchased the archive from the liquidator… Full Review

The images from Venice that traveled around the world after the Biennale in November 2019 seemed almost tailor-made for the Instagram age: tourists wheeling their suitcases through a flooded Piazza San Marco, residents in hip waders made of trash bags slogging through the flood alongside wooden gangways that offered a labyrinthine refuge for dry feet. These photos were not created with art in mind, but rather as documentation of the impact of the annual acqua alta reaching a miserable new record of nearly two meters in depth. Unlike elsewhere, the cause of the flooding here was less climate change than… Full Review

The recent exhibition Through a Glass, Darkly at Emory University’s Michael C. Carlos Museum seeks, against the odds, to replicate the pleasure that the learned early modern viewer found in decoding complex religious allegorical prints. Cocurators James Clifton and Walter S. Melion admit that these joys can seem distant to us now. Clifton’s preface to the exhibition catalog opens with a quote from the BBC’s beloved art critic Sister Wendy Beckett, who conceded in one of her programs that “we don’t really like allegories” (6). Allegory can be challenging, as it inherently points away from its intended meaning, always signifying… Full Review

After describing Luca della Robbia’s achievements in marble and bronze, Giorgio Vasari goes on to note how much time he spent in making them, [and upon recognizing] that he had gained very little and that the labour had been very great, he resolved to abandon marble and bronze and to see whether he could gather better fruits from another method. Wherefore, reflecting that clay could be worked easily and with little labour, and that it was only necessary to find a method whereby works made with it might be preserved for a long time . . . after having made… Full Review

The Harwood Museum of Art of the University of New Mexico is the second oldest museum in the state, as reflected by its architecture. The entrance feels ecclesiastical, as you wind your way along the adobe walls and open the massive wooden blue doors, then you suddenly find yourself in a crowded gift shop, followed by a narrow corridor gallery. In 2019, Judy Chicago’s serigraphs lined those walls, with highly stylized images of a woman/earth mother giving birth to the cosmos. She is shown frontally, her legs splayed, her vagina stretched into an open wound with radiating lines flowing out… Full Review