Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews

The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World is the rather ominous title of a sprawling exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). The title alone almost seems to threaten the very existence of any and all future endeavors in painting. Seventeen artists from just three countries (nine women and eight men), all born after 1954, make up the group selected by Laura Hoptman, curator of the Department of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA, to carry the banner of painting into the future and, perhaps, back into the past. The term “atemporality” was coined by science fiction writer… Full Review

On the lawn of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, a series of tipis situated alongside Claes Oldenburg and Coojse van Bruggen’s Shuttlecocks (1994) provides an intriguing glimpse of The Plains Indians: Artists of Earth and Sky, an exhibition curated by Gaylord Torrence, senior curator of American Indian Art at the museum. The juxtaposition between the tents and the sculpture draws attention to their design similarities while also suggesting that tipis have become objects of American kitsch, much like Oldenburg and Van Bruggen’s badminton birdie. Despite such associations, guests are invited to enter the conical structures to observe the unique… Full Review

Chitra Ganesh: Eyes of Time is a site-specific mural installation at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Herstory Gallery, organized by Saisha M. Grayson, Assistant Curator, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. A multimedia artist known for articulating feminist and queer narratives that weave religious, mythological, and popular iconographies, Ganesh (b. 1975) was born and raised in a Hindu Indian family in Brooklyn and Queens. Her wide-ranging practice—which includes drawings, photographic digital collages, text-based works, and collaborations—draws from a vast array of canonical images and historical writings, both worshiped and vernacular, in the pursuit of an expansive and at times… Full Review

The appearance of lush dresses or a cute pair of kitten heels in a museum might strike the contemporary viewer as incongruous. But why is this? By now we have become accustomed to seeing design objects displayed cheek by jowl with the hidebound mediums of painting and sculpture. The intrepid museum visitor once had to seek out the designed object, which was relegated to discrete period rooms or wholly separate sections devoted to the so-called decorative arts. This separation, however, is no more. Indeed, as the recent reinstallation of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection of early twentieth-century modern art… Full Review

The Berthouville Treasure, discovered by a farmer in Normandy, France (ancient Gaul), in 1830, represents one of the largest and best-preserved collections of Roman silver to survive from the ancient world. The objects, most of which date to the second and third centuries CE, were found within the confines of a large sanctuary to the god Mercury, and functioned as votive objects. The treasure, on loan from the Département des Monnaies, médailles et antiques of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, is on display as part of the exhibition Ancient Luxury and the Roman Silver Treasure from Berthouville at the Getty… Full Review

Billed as the “first exhibition in the United States devoted exclusively to contemporary art of the Maghreb and the Maghrebi diaspora,” Memory, Place, Desire: Contemporary Art of the Maghreb and Maghrebi Diaspora is the culmination of a year-long series of events and programs that took place during 2014 at Haverford College. Initiated by Visiting Associate Professor Carol Solomon, the program included an undergraduate curatorial praxis seminar (spring 2014), two Mellon-funded artists’ residencies (March 2014), an exhibition at Haverford’s Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery (fall 2014), and a fully illustrated catalogue. Solomon curated the two-month-long exhibition in collaboration with her seminar students, who… Full Review

In K8 Hardy and Wynne Greenwood’s video installation New Report: Morning Edition (2005), viewers watch two female newscasters, Henry Irigaray (Hardy) and Henry Stein-Acker-Hill (Greenwood), listlessly deliver news of their everyday lives. Dressed in all black, turtlenecks topped by berets, they sport the costume of revolutionaries: the Black Panthers, Patty Hearst, Che Guevara—Audrey Hepburn, in Funny Face. Otherwise covered up, one has exposed her breast, the other her crotch, to live-feed cameras. Monitors on either side of the central projection broadcast these feeds zoomed in and close-up. Neither salacious nor erotic, this full disclosure self-surveillance, this technological intimacy effectively… Full Review

“My name is Talky Tina . . . and I’m going to kill you.” In 1963, Morton Bartlett, a freelance commercial photographer based in Boston, carefully disassembled and packed up the dolls of children he had painstakingly made over the previous twenty-eight years. He wrapped these painted plaster creations in newspaper along with the assorted outfits and undergarments he had designed and tailored for them, interring everything in wooden crates in a locked cabinet in his home. There they remained, consigned to darkness for decades, together with numerous graphite drawings of children and hundreds of photographs of his creations staged… Full Review

Madame Cézanne was an unprecedented, likely once-in-a-lifetime exhibition that spotlighted Paul Cézanne’s portraits of his wife, Hortense Fiquet. Organized by Dita Amory, Acting Associate Curator in Charge and Administrator of the Robert Lehman Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the show sought to revise misconceptions, especially about the artist’s affection, or lack thereof, for his wife, and reinvigorate general and scholarly interest in this group of work. To that end, it presented twenty-four of the twenty-nine known portraits of Hortense and contextualized them with less formal graphite sketches, watercolors, and one of her few extant letters. In addition, an… Full Review

Because the few grand tapestries of the early modern period that survive are frail and rarely exhibited, we forget that they were the most luxurious and prized of art forms among European elite, far costlier than painting or sculpture. So it is rare to encounter not one but four monumental Flemish tapestries in the remarkable exhibition Spectacular Rubens: The Triumph of the Eucharist at the J. Paul Getty Museum. The four belong to a series of twenty tapestries, known as The Triumph of the Eucharist, commissioned in the 1620s by the Infanta Isabel Clara Eugenia, Habsburg princess and Spanish… Full Review