Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews

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

Greeting the visitor to Beyond Hope: Kienholz and the Inland Northwest in a gallery of Washington State University’s Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art is a wall-mounted assemblage featuring a black-and-white photograph of elderly figures in their Sunday best moving into a starkly empty field surrounded by high hills. The sepia-toned stain of liquid resin applied across the image enhances the sense of time past and the idea that it represents a fragile memory of a momentous change in the lives of the people depicted. Titled The Returning (1976), the landscape recalls the open rolling hills of the Palouse region of… Full Review

Beneath the grand staircase at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, a dark and intimate gallery sits tucked away. It would be easy to walk quickly through this space as viewers weave their way through the encyclopedic institution, but it would also be a mistake. Through 2026, a thoughtful and moving transhistorical exhibition is enlivening this interstitial space by centering the subject of death. Afterlives: Contemporary Art in the Byzantine Crypt brings together a selection of thirty collection objects addressing loss, mourning, memory, and the afterlife by contemporary artists alongside jewelry, textiles, vessels, and architectural fragments from… Full Review

In the second installment of the Robert E. Meyerhoff and Rheda Becker Biennial Commission at the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA), artist Raúl de Nieves (b. 1983) bathes the lobby in colored light. The central feature of the public exhibition is a twenty-seven-paned window that spans the length of the building’s east facade. The Mexico-born, Brooklyn-based sculptor hand-crafted the panels from everyday materials like tape and sheets of acetate to recreate the look of stained glass. Monumental in size and dazzling in effect, the installation presents a series of vignettes, each depicting creatures that reappear frequently in de… Full Review

Tai Shani is a conjurer of worlds. Out of the murk and miasma of millennia of forgotten histories and suppressed mythologies, she sets a stage for rituals and revelations, for psychedelic hallucinations and deeply embodied experiences of other potential realities. The 2019 Turner Prize winner’s first show in the United States, MBR: And above the beautiful commune, curated by Amara Antilla, transforms an entire floor of Zaha Hadid’s iconic building for Cincinnati’s Contemporary Art Center (CAC) into a cryptic occult space that evokes contradictory senses of scale and emotion. It is as enveloping as a womb and… Full Review