Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews

The Art of Disegno: Italian Prints and Drawings from the Georgia Museum of Art, during its stop at the Crocker Art Museum, presented a panoramic display of drawing as an art form from the sixteenth to eighteenth century in Italy. It also included a fine selection of intaglio and woodcut prints. Drawn from the collection of Giuliano Ceseri—who has loaned his collection to the Georgia Museum of Art—and from the collection of the Georgia Museum, the exhibition, curated by Robert Randolf Coleman and Babette Bohn, presented a wide-ranging approach to works on paper from the period, and did so… Full Review

The newly commissioned, site-specific installation, Figura que defina su propio horizonte (Figure Who Defines His Own Horizon), by the Cuban-born artist José Bedia is an apt centerpiece to his career survey, Transcultural Pilgrim: Three Decades of Work by José Bedia. A diminutive figure in dark bronze—a trickster as well as a reference to the artist himself, with a horned head and smoking a cigarette—is chained by the ankle to a tree stump. The chain and stump are a restraint, but in the context of Bedia’s idiosyncratic iconography, they are also an umbilical or tether that links the artist to… Full Review

No Impressionist was more innovative than Edgar Degas. Oblique glimpses of dancers in limelight, candid vignettes of brothel mores, and roughshod runs over respectable standards of finish still provide grist to students of Degas, whether in the library or studio. At the same time, the grounding of his art in expertise at drawing the nude sets him apart as the most traditional of the Impressionist group. Thus, his discomfort with being called an Impressionist, after Degas’s associates adopted the name derisively coined in Louis Leroy’s satirical review of the 1874 exhibition of the Société anonyme des artistes peintres, sculpteurs, graveurs… Full Review

Their story is legendary in Miami. Don and Mera Rubell began collecting art in 1967, when they lived in New York City. Their modest budget came from Mera’s salary as a Head Start teacher, and their acquisitions strategy consisted largely of purchasing work that excited their passions. The untimely passing of Don’s brother, Steve Rubell, in 1989, left them with a considerable inheritance with which to expand their collecting, and in 1996, they opened the Rubell Family Collection to the public in their adopted home, Miami. The Rubell Family Collection pioneered a new institutional model of private art collections… Full Review

The Victoria and Albert Museum’s show Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970–1990 is an attempt to survey postmodernism as a design strategy rather than an epoch or paradigm of contemporary culture. Of course these elements prove difficult to separate, especially with regard to such a loaded term, employed by so many with intentions vast and diverse. The subtitle of the exhibition, Style and Subversion, is therefore important in its signal toward artistic innovation as a platform from which to think through poignant social and cultural transitions undertaken at the hands of architects, artists, and designers in a move away from… Full Review

As I entered the art galleries of the Oakland Museum of California (OMCA), a boy, maybe eight years old, sat leaning into his father. They were watching, intently, Will Rogan's video One Thing I Can Tell You Is You've Got to Be Free (2000). A quirky, deadpan ode to the art spirit, the six-minute loop sets an unpretentious tone for the reinstallation of the museum's permanent collection. In each of a series of eighteen vignettes, an object in motion—a bouncing ball, a paper airplane, a tossed shoe—flies into the frame toward an improbable target and makes a perfect landing. The… Full Review

During the 1920s and 1930s, Charlotte Perriand and Sonia Delaunay both sought to transform the field then known as the decorative arts by applying the formal innovations of modernism and the industrial innovations of capitalist production to the design and manufacture of domestic objects. The two women were roughly contemporaries, formed by the avant-garde milieu of Paris between the wars, and both are now seen most often through the lens of feminist art history, which is in part responsible for recovering their work from obscurity. Two concurrent exhibitions—one in Paris devoted to Perriand and one in New York surveying Delaunay—offered… Full Review

The need for an investigation of Auguste Rodin’s influence on American artists was spawned at the 2002 symposium, “New Studies on Rodin,” held on the occasion of the publication of Albert Elsen’s monumental catalogue of Stanford’s Rodin Collection. How did American artists adopt, adapt, or reject Rodin’s art? What were the attributes in their work that reflected the master’s oeuvre? Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center was the ideal place for this study, with the third largest Rodin collection in the world, including two hundred works—mostly cast bronze, but also works in wax, plaster, and terra cotta--on view in three galleries and… Full Review

The New Museum’s exhibition Ostalgia represents one of the largest North American exhibitions of art from the areas of former Soviet influence, both in regional (countries formerly occupied by the Soviet Union or Soviet satellites, as well as ones that did not fit into either of these categories) and historical breadth (1991 is the key moment, although included works span from the 1960s to the present). Drawing its title from a term adopted in Germany in the 1990s that came to refer to the fetishization of objects from everyday life in East Germany under Soviet influence (the term’s pun derives… Full Review

Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) is a surprisingly varied display of the artist’s exploration in process, the body, objectness, and architecture. Divided among the museum’s two fourth-floor wings, the retrospective flows chronologically. The first wing showcases some of Serra’s early small sculptures, several films, the residue of a sculptural performance, and drawings. The curators have dedicated the second wing solely to his mature drawings. The central staircase that divides the two wings creates a slightly awkward flow, and I initially walked through the exhibition backwards and almost missed the first segment… Full Review