Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews

(Click here to view the online exhibition.) “Modernism was seen as a huge moment historically and culturally—this was the language of the oppressor” (58). Black artist Sanford Biggers made this statement in 2018 while contemplating the role that German art historian Carl Einstein’s book Negerplastik played in introducing him to African sculpture and its transformative potential. When considered alongside Biggers’s 2016 work of the same name—featuring a repurposed quilt with a geometric pattern and an upright, floral-patterned sculptural figure casting a shadow—the statement captures the tug and pull of both African art and European interest in it for Black artists… Full Review

(Click here to view the online gallery guide.) I remember the first time I saw John Singer Sargent’s Thomas McKeller (ca. 1917–20) at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (acquired in 1986), while gathering comparative material for my research on James Richmond Barthé (1901–1989), whose oeuvre is dominated by Black male nudes. The painting and accompanying sketches are the only known true-life depictions of McKeller, and, like in Sargent’s Madame X (1884), the model looked away from the artist, obscuring what could have been a factual portrait. Although for different reasons, both portraits remained in Sargent’s possession (and thus unknown… Full Review

(Click here to view the online exhibition.) Under the direction of Letticia Cosbert Miller, There Are Times and Places appears on Koffler.Digital, the web platform of Toronto’s Koffler Centre of the Arts. Launched in 2019, the show is ideal for the homebound circumstances of 2021. It features original projects by Wuulhu, Mani Mazinani, Coco Guzmán, and collaborators asinnajaq and Dayna Danger, all designed to be rendered on a web browser. This strategy hearkens back to the early days of net art, but it has received renewed attention as the conditions of the pandemic highlight the importance of exhibitions that directly… Full Review

Drawing on sixty artworks, Natural Forces: Winslow Homer and Frederic Remington, presented by the Denver Art Museum (DAM), sought to explore the artists’ visual responses to an era that was simultaneously rife with war, displacement and genocide of Indigenous peoples, racial inequities, and economic downturns while also hopeful for the possibilities of a prosperous future. The exhibit was co-organized by a team of four curators, including the Denver Art Museum’s Thomas Brent Smith, curator and director of the Petrie Institute of Western American Art, and Jennifer R. Henneman, associate curator of Western American art; Diana Greenwold, curator… Full Review

The Serpentine Gallery in London was recently the site of an important solo exhibition dedicated to the American artist and activist Faith Ringgold. The show was a welcome homage to an important figurative painter and craft maker, whose narratives have addressed issues of African American identity and gender inequality for half a century. The exhibition was small but exhaustive, offering examples of Ringgold’s work from the 1960s to the 2010s. By marking the traces of the artist’s commitment through her figurative works, the show enabled viewers to recount the narrative of her experience as a Black American woman in the… Full Review

(Click here to view the exhibition website and related content.) The basis of the exhibition Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) is just a blip in history: six weeks. That is the amount of time that the show’s central figure, Prussian naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), spent in the United States in 1804. But curator Eleanor Jones Harvey wants us to realize that this brief stay planted a seed of influence that was “immediate, sustained, and profound” (26). On the tail end… Full Review

(Click here to view the exhibition in English, or click here to view in Spanish.) To Tame a Wild Tongue: Art after Chicanismo uses the aftermath of the Chicano Art Movement (1960s–70s) as a point of departure to bring together over twenty-five artists active since the 1980s who explore the distinct yet interconnected sociopolitical paradigms of contemporary Chicanidad. This digital, collection-based exhibition invites us into an important conversation about belonging, resistance, and identity through a transborder perspective. To Tame a Wild Tongue explores the idea of cultural hybridity by considering how Chicanx and Latinx artists in the United States… 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. Explore two exhibitions on Detroit's 1960s civil rights rebellions and consider their continuing impact on the social justice movements of today. Read more in Nicholas Miller's review of Art of Rebellion: Black Art of the Civil Rights Movement at Detroit Institute of Arts and Say It Loud: Art, History, Rebellion at the Museum of African American History. 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. 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