Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews

In his beloved book Invisible Cities (1972), fable writer Italo Calvino invents short conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan and descriptions of cities recounted by the Italian from his travels. Ten artists from across the globe have loosely translated this charming conceit in an exhibition at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), curated by the museum’s Susan Cross. As with Calvino, the artists that Cross selected have reimagined cities of various scales and materials as places of growth, death, pleasure, desire, decay, and memory. To cite Calvino: “The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains… Full Review

Upon first entering the exhibition William Wegman: Hello Nature, a viewer’s eye is drawn to the title wall, which features a large-scale reproduction of a family gathered around a campfire beside a lake. The addition of paint enhances the scene so that the feet of a boy appear to grow roots, and foliage stretches the treetops toward the ceiling. For those most familiar with Wegman’s photographs of his beloved Weimaraner dogs, the introductory image is a revelation. While best known as a video artist and photographer, Wegman is also a prolific painter and draftsman, and the title wall anticipates… Full Review

The exhibition Feminist and . . . has a provocatively short title, whose first word has been defined many ways since it was adopted from France in the late nineteenth century. How might six women artists of different generations, national origins, and ethnicities interpret the term now? The curator was Hilary Robinson, who was a professor of art theory and criticism at Carnegie Mellon University until January of this year, when she became Dean of Art and Design at Middlesex University. She has frequently written about gender issues in the visual arts. There is no catalogue. What is “feminism”… Full Review

In 2008, the Denver Art Museum (DAM) commissioned El Anatsui’s large-scale metal wall hanging titled Rain Has No Father? The sculpture utilizes the artist’s signature bottle cap method that has recently helped him attract international attention. Anatsui’s wall hangings are constructed from thousands of used liquor bottle caps, flattened and woven together to create luminous tapestries as magnificent in their formal appeal as they are rich in cultural and historical allusion, and since its acquisition, Rain Has No Father? has become a well-publicized highlight of DAM’s permanent collection. However, somewhat controversially, the work hangs in the museum’s African gallery alongside… Full Review

It is tempting to consider this expansive and stunning retrospective as a two-artist exhibition. The first major examination of Jay DeFeo’s career since Constance Lewallen organized an extensive survey of the artist’s work for the Moore College of Art in 1996, Jay DeFeo: A Retrospective contains over 170 paintings, drawings, collages, photographs, and examples of jewelry and sculpture, all made by the artist over the span of almost four decades. But the DeFeo of 1952 to 1966 was one person and one kind of artist, and the DeFeo from 1970 to the time of her death at the age of… Full Review

Halfway through the J. Paul Getty Museum’s exhibition Gustav Klimt: The Magic of Line, viewers craned their necks back to take in Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze (1901–02). The monumental painting was reproduced some twenty feet off the ground in the museum’s lofty galleries. The installation approximated the original 1902 display in the Viennese Secession Building where Klimt and his collaborators paid homage to the composer. As one scans the work, gaunt, floating genii on the first wall give way to severe, cowering gorgons on the center panel and an enormous primate glowering dumbly out of a pile of auburn hair… Full Review

Asa Berger’s book An Anatomy of Humor divides comedy into four general functional categories: language, logic, identity, and action (Asa Berger, An Anatomy of Humor, New Brunswick: Transaction, 1993, 6). He then further breaks the collective identity into fourteen individual types of humor that deal with character: before/after, burlesque, caricature, eccentricity, embarrassment, exposure, grotesque, imitation, impersonation, mimicry, parody, scale, stereotype, and unmasking (7). To walk through the Cindy Sherman retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), curated by the Museum… Full Review

Jason Cytacki’s visually compelling cowboy paintings, on view at the Rockwell Museum of Western Art in Corning, New York, have appeal for diverse audiences: lovers of art of the American West, classic Western movie buffs, and those fascinated with Americana. The exhibition, Enduring Legend, Fragile Myth: Cowboy Paintings by Jason Cytacki, is comprised of twenty-two paintings in three related series, which are intermingled in one gallery. The first series—the toy series—is from Cytacki’s MFA thesis, and consists of six large paintings, which are based on photographs of dioramas that feature toy cowboys placed in suburban neighborhoods. The… Full Review

Two recent exhibitions, Mapping Another L.A.: The Chicano Art Movement at the University of California, Los Angeles, Fowler Museum, and Asco: Elite of the Obscure, A Retrospective, 1972–1987 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), complicate and extend previous scholarship on the Chicano art movement, focusing in particular on the theme of artistic collectives. While previous analyses of the group Asco (such as C. Ondine Chavoya’s essay “Internal Exiles: The Interventionist Public and Performance Art of Asco,” in Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art, Erika Suderberg, ed., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000, 189–208) emphasize the fact… Full Review

Anyone who approaches Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974 at the Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), expecting to encounter the familiar collection of lush, awe-inspiring photographs of monumental Earthworks remotely situated in the American Southwest (concomitant with the usual array of drawings, models, and videos documenting these iconic projects) finds instead a hugely informative and compelling exhibition that considerably broadens her or his conception of this tendency that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Organized by Phillip Kaiser, MOCA's senior curator, who has since left Los Angeles to become director… Full Review