Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews

Younès Rahmoun: Here, Now, currently on view at the Smith College Museum of Art (SCMA), is the Moroccan artist’s first retrospective exhibition held in North America. True to Rahmoun’s multidisciplinary and expansive practice, Here, Now is comprised of four different installations on Smith College’s campus. Younès Rahmoun: Here, Now begins on the first-floor gallery of Smith College Museum of Art (SCMA), where visitors are introduced to Rahmoun’s artistic career and biography. One of the first sections in the gallery presents archival materials, such as sketches and notes in both Arabic and French, documenting Rahmoun’s artistic… Full Review

“Why in Seattle?” a reporter asked Ai Weiwei at the press conference. “Why not?!” he answered. This brief interaction stayed with me no less profoundly than the aura of the actual works representing Ai’s decades-long activism. A few weeks later, I began to demystify that “why not?!”: it could be only a matter of time before the sociopolitical climate changes dramatically even in the most liberal corners of the world, such as Seattle. In that sense, refreshing our collective memory through projects that expose the many forms of power abuse is, at the very least, something we should do. This… Full Review

The subtitle of Vincent Valdez’s mid-career retrospective at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Just a Dream . . . , summons a disenchanting fall to reality. It is a phrase one may invoke to create emotional distance from potential disappointment—“It’s just a dream”—or to downplay such disappointment after the fact—“It was just a dream.” But devoid of a preceding subject and verb, the phrase remains referentially and temporally enigmatic. Like Valdez’s art, it looks simultaneously to the past, present, and future. Moreover, the would-be trivializing finality of the fragmentary statement is deferred by an ellipsis. These three dots deny the comfort… Full Review

The shifting soil, the receding water, and the chirping birds—echoes of a landscape etched by the relentless passage of time—guide us through the small gallery where fragility becomes perceptible, taking up a sensory presence. This first work in the exhibition, Points of Confluence: In Between the Island and the Desert, is a sound collaboration between the artists in the two-person exhibition Muddy Terrains: Mariana Ramos Ortiz + Estephania González, featuring San Juan-based Mariana Ramos Ortiz and Phoenix-based Estephania González. In this show at the Arizona State University Art Museum, the transient and delicate nature of our environment is… Full Review

Up close, glass bead, wire, and thread intermesh through squiggles and circles; at times, their translucency invites nearby light and shadows, and moments of the bare wall underneath to peek through. Step back, however, and you’ll notice figures. Towards the tapestry’s top are two seated figures, one in yellow, another in maroon. Towards the middle is a larger yellow figure, with facial features outlined in black thread next to another smaller mostly forest-green colored figure, encircled in gold. Seen at various vantages, Untitled Fairy Tale (from the Graphic Novel Series), 2019–20 invites the viewer to ask: who are these figures… Full Review

The United States Geological Survey (USGS) defines landscapes as areas critical to economic development, as they supply natural resources and other goods and services essential to human needs. Similarly, traditional geographical studies have regarded landscapes as physical and objective entities, perceiving them as an external world that can be empirically accessed and analyzed. From the perspective of extractive industries, landscapes are transformed into territories—defined areas to be utilized and exploited. Fazal Sheikh’s exhibition, Fazal Sheikh: Thirst | Exposure | In Place, emphasizes viewing and understanding landscapes through a different lens. Sheikh’s work invites us to consider landscapes… Full Review

One of the challenges with performance art is the exhibition and presentation of it. How do you capture the “liveness” of the live event in a stationary museum setting? Jeffrey De Bois, with Max Gruber, curators of Charles Atlas: About Time at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Boston, managed to do just that. Viewers are confronted with movement and the concept of time from the start of the exhibition to the very end. Meandering through a succession of rooms, viewers encounter a series of screens and labyrinths, and only pause near the end for a respite… Full Review

Meot: Korean Art from the Frank Bayley Collection at the Seattle Asian Art Museum, curated by Hyonjeong “HJ” Kim Han, celebrates Frank Bayley’s sustained admiration for Korean ceramics by framing his collection through the concept of meot—an aesthetic of balanced elegance that embraces imperfection. Presenting over sixty works spanning the Goryeo (918–1392) and Joseon (1392–1897) dynasties as well as contemporary reinterpretations, the exhibition reflects Bayley’s vision to capture Korean art’s evolution. While the exhibition gestures toward the layered complexities within Korean art, a more robust historical framework might better illuminate how shifting cultural values and aesthetic sensibilities influenced Korean… Full Review

Keith Haring’s journals (Penguin Books, 2010) open with the nineteen-year-old burgeoning artist hitchhiking across the Midwest. Before he moved to New York and enrolled in the School of Visual Arts, the kid from Kutztown, Pennsylvania followed the Grateful Dead, selling t-shirts, getting high, and seeing the country. In Minnesota he found a tree by the St. Croix River that he was “gonna come back to, someday” (2). After the Dead show in Minneapolis, he and his companion hitched a ride and ate in a bar on the North Dakota border surrounded by farmers who commented on Haring’s hair when he… Full Review

If any single person is responsible for the momentum that contemporary Native American art is having at this moment it is Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (1940–2025, enrolled Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes). This is, at least, one of the central takeaways of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map, which traces five decades of Smith’s career as both one of the leading artists and influential curators of Contemporary Native American art. The retrospective is an exciting, nearly dizzying, display of Smith’s artistic oeuvre that provides a textural depth to the artist’s career for those familiar with her work while still being a… Full Review