Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews

Taking its title from rawiya, the Arabic noun for a storyteller (feminine) and the eponymous name of an all-women photography collective in the Middle East, She Who Tells a Story: Women Photographers from Iran and the Arab World, organized by Kristen Gresh, the Estrellita and Yousuf Karsh Assistant Curator of Photographs at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, exhibits the photographs and, in two cases, the videos of twelve artists. (The title page for the catalogue includes rawiya in Arabic script just below the English She Who Tells a Story, and the exhibition, at least as it… Full Review

[See the multimedia media review on Scalar.] This review of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Work/Travail/Arbeid (2015–17) enlists the interactive, multimedia capabilities of the Scalar platform to evoke the dance exhibition’s ten-day run at the Centre Pompidou, Paris. The exhibition brought together several components of the Belgian choreographer and dancer’s broader project, including investigating choreography as writing movement in time and space, exploring the relationship and overlap between dance and music, and expanding the sites and audiences of dance performances. In her ongoing endeavor to introduce complex dance and music to a broader public and to preserve her… Full Review

Touted in museum press releases as the “first major exhibition in more than twenty-five years to feature the life and works of the renowned American painter Thomas Hart Benton,” American Epics: Thomas Hart Benton and Hollywood explores the complex intersections between the work of one of the United States’ most revered Regionalists and the American feature film industry. In its staging at Fort Worth’s Amon Carter Museum of American Art (the third stop on a four-city tour), American Epics includes some of Benton’s best-known works, such as People of Chilmark (1922) and his mural-form explorations of the colonization, settlement, and… Full Review

We live in a country divided. Americans today are struggling to have frank, productive dialogues about politics, civil liberties, and social issues. Thanks to livestreaming and social media, our impassioned reactions, firsthand accounts, and official statements catalog each day’s debates in real time and on a vast public scale. While it is tempting to attribute our current state of the union to uniquely twenty-first-century problems—terrorism, technology, or globalization, to name a few—it is clear that neither these issues nor our reliance on real-time, real-talk commentary are new. In fact, America is presently grappling with many of the same challenges that… Full Review

From first glance, it was clear that the exhibition Gods and Mortals at Olympus: Ancient Dion, City of Zeus was more than an impressive collection of ancient sculpture. It was a show with a clear didactic objective: to illuminate the accomplishments of the archaeologists and conservators who had worked for forty-five years to systematically unearth and preserve the rugged ancient city of Dion. The exhibition illustrated the potential of scientific and systematic excavations, with every object identified with a findspot and interpreted within an ancient context. Considering this, it was not surprising that it was archaeologist Dimitrios Pandermalis, director of… Full Review

“How many minutes would you invest in looking at a particularly striking photograph?” I asked this of my History of Photography students last year, and the response came not in minutes but in seconds. They largely used Instagram as their default experience: “six seconds” answered one of the more thoughtful students. “No,” argued another, “maybe three seconds, if it’s attached to text on a blog.” Thus the understandable motivation of undertaking an exhibition like Photo-Poetics: An Anthology, particularly its passionate advocacy of investing time in looking closely at photographs. In the opening wall text of her Guggenheim… Full Review

Architecture of Life, the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive’s (BAMPFA) inaugural exhibition in its new building, opens with something of a self-portrait. A photograph, taken four years before the museum itself would open to the public, shows a hand holding an early architect’s model of the new building. In the black-and-white image, the wood model is a small, abstracted form that has been sanded, blackened, and polished to a fine sheen. The hand holds the tiny wooden “museum” between its thumb and forefinger, gripping the middle of the model at the exact point in… Full Review

In retrospect, I see how my experience of the Sonia Delaunay exhibition at Tate Modern, like that of many other London tourists, was inescapably shaped by other shows on view at the same time. Visiting one after the other in quick succession, I started thinking of them as a whole, each contributing in its own way to the construction of the city’s curatorial “brand.” The Tate’s recent efforts to foreground women artists—Sonia Delaunay; Agnes Martin, also at Tate Modern (June 3–October 11, 2015); and Barbara Helpworth at Tate Britain (June 24–October 25, 2015) (click here for review)—made a… Full Review

Ingesting Electronic Superhighway: From Experiments in Art and Technology to Art After the Internet brought about the familiar experience of an overdose one might have after seeing an art fair or large-scale biennial. This ambitious exhibition, covering fifty years of digital culture and curated by Omar Kholeif, considered how the world’s ceaseless flow of electronic information and unrelenting proliferation of images have come to impact contemporary art. In her introduction to the extensive companion catalogue, Whitechapel Gallery Director Iwona Blazwick describes the nature of the “electronic superhighway” and the exhibition itself as “a place of information and confusion, euphoria and… Full Review

The exhibition Power and Pathos: Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World presented significant examples of monumental bronze sculpture from the Hellenistic period (323 BCE–27 CE). Curated by Jens Daehner and Kenneth Lapatin, both of the Getty Villa, Power and Pathos not only examined the historical context of these Hellenistic bronzes, but also addressed the importance of bronze as a medium for depicting the movement and expression that are characteristic of Hellenistic art. Although monumental bronze sculptures were highly valued in antiquity, they rarely survive today, and the few remaining examples are often displayed individually in museums. As Daehner and Lapatin… Full Review