Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews

The opening of the new Art of the Americas Wing at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), Boston, was one of the major—if not the major—museum events in the United States in 2010. Accompanied by a tidal wave of publicity at the regional and national levels, the new wing expands the museum’s previous display space by over one-third; it showcases art from both South and North America, offering a more expansive definition of “America” than has been standard in museum collections; and it includes works of art ranging from 500 BCE (an Olmec mask) to the twenty-first century (“By the… Full Review

Copious accolades and impressive numerical figures fed into the hype surrounding the opening, in November 2010, of the Art of the Americas Wing at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), Boston. One can read in the mainstream media sensational descriptions of the elegant four-floor, 121,307-square-foot glass rectangle (designed by the London firm Foster + Partners) that houses the wing and many plaudits of its fifty-three galleries (which showcase over five thousand objects, more than double the number previously on view), nine period rooms, and four “Behind the Scenes” exhibits that explain the wing’s collecting and conservation practices. And one can… Full Review

The European tradition in the graphic arts began in the fifteenth century, and early prints are notable for a bold and rapid exploration of new subjects and themes. Given the much expanded degree of interaction between Christian Europeans and black Africans that developed during the 1400s, one might imagine that printmakers would have been eager to depict persons of color. Yet the first attempts to do so were halting, and for a paradoxical reason: graphic artists had a hard time showing dark skin because light and dark were rigorously employed as chiaroscuro elements to evoke form, rather than the hue… Full Review

Monumental color woodcuts were the most striking feature of the work of Leonard Baskin (1922–2000) displayed in a single large, light-filled room at the Delaware Art Museum. Although Baskin thought of himself primarily as a sculptor, the only freestanding sculpture included was Lazarus (1960), and his legacy will rest on the superb craftsmanship and expressionist power of his relief prints and letterpress books. The solo show was comprised of the seventy-six works created between1952 and 1974 that Alfred Appel, Jr. (1934–2009) collected during the 1960s and gave to the museum in 2009. In her “Director’s Statement” in the catalogue,… Full Review

A brainchild of former Getty Museum Director Michael Brand and scheduled to commemorate the bicentennial of Mexican independence from Spain, The Aztec Pantheon and the Art of Empire was the most ambitious exhibition undertaken by the Getty Villa since its reopening in 2006. A “museum and educational center dedicated to the study of the arts and cultures of ancient Greece, Rome, and Etruria” (according to its website), the Getty’s Roman-style villa proved a provocative and unexpectedly resonant site for the presentation of Aztec culture. One of the goals of the Spanish conquest (1519–21) was to loot this rich… Full Review

The Victoria and Albert Museum’s small but fascinating exhibition Raphael: Cartoons and Tapestries for the Sistine Chapel brought together four tapestries from the Vatican Museum’s famous ten-piece Acts of the Apostles set and seven of Raphael’s original full-scale designs for the weavings, which are housed at the V&A. The show offered an unprecedented opportunity to compare preparatory and final works, each a Renaissance masterpiece in its own right. In addition, a small group of drawings and prints related to the project, on loan from Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, the Louvre, and from the V&A’s own collection, focused attention on… Full Review

Two decades ago, a crowd of Afghanistan’s VIPs gathered at the Koti Bagcha in the Presidential Palace for an exclusive one-day showing of a small collection of the country’s rarest antiquities. The collections had been securely stored in the vaults below the Presidential Palace during the later years of the Soviet occupation (1979–89), owing to a group of concerned Afghan officials who organized their protection under the auspices of then-President Mohammad Najibullah. After the exhibition, the pieces were returned to the bank vaults and a year later the country was amid the throes of the Mujahideen civil war (1992–94). It… Full Review

The Pre-Raphaelite Lens: British Photography and Painting, 1848–1875, on view at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, was a concise and handsome exhibition that addressed an ambitious topic: the dynamic interaction between artistic media from the late 1840s until the 1870s. The artistic movement known as Pre-Raphaelitism provided the lens that focused this investigation. Photography was still in its first decade as public knowledge when the young artists who styled themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood met in London in 1848. Nevertheless, as Diane Waggoner, the associate curator in the Department of Photographs and organizing curator of the exhibition… Full Review

It makes perfect sense. Why wouldn’t George Lucas and Steven Spielberg champion and collect the art of Norman Rockwell? They’ve all shared enviable talents at telling engaging stories about the dreams that make ordinary people heroic. Their stories evoke feelings of nostalgia for an earlier time of innocence—a mythic construction at the heart of many popular narratives of the “American” experience. Indeed, Lucas and Spielberg have developed substantial collections of Rockwell’s paintings and large-scale preparatory drawings, which senior curator Virginia Mecklenburg organized in a stunning display of almost sixty works at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the exhibition’s… Full Review

June Wayne’s exhibition Narrative Tapestries: Tidal Waves, DNA, and the Cosmos symbolized her triumphant return to the city of her youth and marked the re-opening of the Art Institute of Chicago’s (AIC) permanent textile galleries after a five-year renovation. The show featured eleven out of twelve exquisite tapestries Wayne created in collaboration with three different French ateliers from 1970–74 led by the following artists: Pierre Daquin, Camille Legoueix, and Giselle Glaudin-Brivet. An exhibition catalogue accompanied the show with informative essays by Christa C. Mayer Thurman, curator emerita of the Department of Textiles at AIC, and Wayne, as well as high-quality… Full Review