Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews

In her recent career survey organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Boston, Tara Donovan creates ethereal, environmental sculptures out of such banal, everyday objects as toothpicks, Scotch tape, Mylar, and plastic cups. Working with one material at a time, and testing the range of its physical properties, Donovan subverts the utilitarian function of an object through a process of accumulation. In the seventeen works on view from the past decade, she stacks, piles, or otherwise masses her material to explore its latent sculptural capabilities, all the while turning mundane matter into the stuff of high art. When I… Full Review

In almost every sense, the exhibition Art and Love in Renaissance Italy and the accompanying catalogue are retrospective. First, they include many objects that were acquired by collectors at the beginning of the twentieth century, during an earlier period of interest in the history of private life. Second, they draw upon and summarize four recent decades of historical and art-historical scholarship focused on the family life of Renaissance Italians and the material objects that accompanied them through its various stages. Finally, they look back at those Renaissance Italians themselves and try to explain how they understood love (both sacred and… Full Review

Michelangelo: The Man and the Myth provides American audiences with a rare opportunity to intimately view twelve drawings (doubling the number in U.S. collections) and three documents by the hand of one of history’s most revered artists, all on loan from the Casa Buonarroti in Florence and never before exhibited in the United States. These original works are accompanied by six portraits of the artist (my favorite is the enigmatic bronze medal by Leone Leoni, 1561); six posthumous publications of his poetry, including one sonnet set to music by Benjamin Britten (1943); a twentieth-century bronze replica of Michelangelo’s marble Vatican… Full Review

Joseph Beuys famously proposed that, “every human being is an artist” (Joseph Beuys, “I Am Searching for Field Character,” in Art into Society, Society into Art, trans. Caroline Tisdall, London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1974, 48). How, then, do we understand the relationship between artists and audience? The Art of Participation, an extremely ambitious, multifaceted exhibition and catalogue by Rudolf Frieling, curator of media arts at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, provides numerous potential inroads to considering this question, among others. Desiring to determine whether there is an inherent conflict between the institutional goals of the… Full Review

Act/React, the Milwaukee Art Museum’s recent exhibition of interactive installation art, presented work by six contemporary artists: Janet Cardiff, Brian Knep, Liz Phillips, Daniel Rozin, Scott Snibbe, and Camille Utterback. While all employ some combination of customized computer software, surveillance cameras, digital video and projection, electronic photocells and circuits, microcontrollers, synthesizers, and amplifiers, the resulting artworks nonetheless conceal their technological underpinnings. Focusing on “non-technical” interactivity, which guest curator George Fifield specifies in the accompanying catalogue as activities that are “performed with the entire body of the viewer” (31), the exhibition elicited kinetic play, as one body moved toward and… Full Review

Like the proto-ethnographic works of his better-known contemporaries Karl Bodmer and George Catlin, Baltimore-born painter Alfred Jacob Miller’s views of the American West both shaped and reflected the myriad histories and identities that formed the United States during the first half of the nineteenth century. Miller is perhaps most closely associated with such paintings as The Lost Greenhorn (1851) and The Trapper’s Bride (1846), both of which appear in the deftly curated Sentimental Journey: The Art of Alfred Jacob Miller, recently on view at Fort Worth’s Amon Carter Museum. The exhibition brought together for the first time in over… Full Review

The exhibition J. M. W. Turner, recently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was the first large-scale exhibition of the artist's work presented in the United States since the 1960s, and viewers paid the price, with a show that was too big and broad for most appetites. On my visits, the exhibition seemed to be challenging the stamina of all but the most devoted tourists and art historians. The problem was not only one of stamina. Seen in such quantity, Turner’s uniqueness is eclipsed. As is well known, Turner was famous for his performances during… Full Review

Looming before the visitor entering the recent Gustave Courbet exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was an enlargement of the artist’s striking The Desperate Man (1844–45), an image effectively representative of the artist’s intense effort to secure artistic fame without sacrificing his personal vision. Once inside the exhibition, the paintings themselves provided the chief drama in a curatorial endeavor that “sought to relocate Courbet’s work in the context of his time” instead of “attempting to formulate new hypotheses” (15). Organized thematically in roughly chronological order, Gustave Courbet began with the early role-playing self-portraits and ended with works produced during… Full Review

theanyspacewhatever is an exhibition that aims to provide a retrospective view on a range of artistic practices that emerged in the 1990s. What unites these practices, regardless of the different stylistic and aesthetic strategies they employ, is the way they turn the idea of an art exhibition into a dynamic medium of sociability and collaboration. To exemplify this practice, Nancy Spector, the Guggenheim’s chief curator, invited ten contemporary artists to collectively formulate a group exhibition for the museum. The artists—Angela Bulloch, Maurizio Cattelan, Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Douglas Gordon, Carsten Höller, Pierre Huyghe, Jorge Pardo, Philippe Parreno, and Rirkrit Tiravanija—are… Full Review

“Forty years ago there were no Asian Americans,” reads the provocative first sentence of Gordon H. Chang and Mark Dean Johnson’s introduction to the catalogue for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco exhibition Asian/American/Modern Art: Shifting Currents, 1900–1970. It seems that until the first recorded use of “Asian American” at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1968, the terms for Americans of Asian ancestry were either “Orientals” or more ethnic-specific descriptors. As early as 1896—eight years before the birth of Isamu Noguchi in Los Angeles—Asian American artists began clustering into art associations like the Southern California Japanese Art… Full Review