Concise, critical reviews of books, exhibitions, and projects in all areas and periods of art history and visual studies

Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews

Margaret C. Adler, Jennifer R. Henneman, Diana Jocelyn Greenwold, and Claire M. Barry
Exh. cat. Denver and New Haven, CT: Denver Art Museum in association with Yale University Press, 2020. 224 pp.; 179 color ills. Cloth $50.00 (9780300246100)
Natural Forces: Winslow Homer and Fredric Remington, Denver Art Museum, June 26–September 7, 2020; (as Mythmakers: The Art of Winslow Homer and Frederic Remington) Portland Museum of Art, Maine, September 25–November 29, 2020; Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, TX, December 22, 2020–February 28, 2021
Drawing on sixty artworks, Natural Forces: Winslow Homer and Frederic Remington, presented by the Denver Art Museum (DAM), sought to explore the artists’ visual responses to an era that was simultaneously rife with war, displacement and genocide of Indigenous peoples, racial inequities, and economic downturns while also hopeful for the possibilities of a prosperous future. The exhibit was co-organized by a team of four curators, including the Denver Art Museum’s Thomas Brent Smith, curator and director of the Petrie Institute of Western American Art, and Jennifer R. Henneman, associate curator of Western American art; Diana Greenwold, curator… Full Review
February 2, 2021
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Melissa Blanchflower, Natalia Grabowska, and Melissa Larner, eds.
Exh. cat. Serpentine Gallery, London, United Kingdom. Cologne: Walther König, 2019. 160 pp.; 60 color ills.; 2 b/w ills. Paper £18.00 (9781908617576)
Serpentine Gallery, London, June 6–September 8, 2019
The Serpentine Gallery in London was recently the site of an important solo exhibition dedicated to the American artist and activist Faith Ringgold. The show was a welcome homage to an important figurative painter and craft maker, whose narratives have addressed issues of African American identity and gender inequality for half a century. The exhibition was small but exhaustive, offering examples of Ringgold’s work from the 1960s to the 2010s. By marking the traces of the artist’s commitment through her figurative works, the show enabled viewers to recount the narrative of her experience as a Black American woman in the… Full Review
January 26, 2021
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Eleanor Jones Harvey
Exh. cat. Washington, DC and Princeton, NJ: Smithsonian American Art Museum in association with Princeton University Press, 2020. 448 pp.; 215 color ills.; 22 b/w ills. Cloth $75.00 (9780691200804)
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, September 18, 2020–January 3, 2021 (reopening 2021)
(Click here to view the exhibition website and related content.) The basis of the exhibition Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) is just a blip in history: six weeks. That is the amount of time that the show’s central figure, Prussian naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), spent in the United States in 1804. But curator Eleanor Jones Harvey wants us to realize that this brief stay planted a seed of influence that was “immediate, sustained, and profound” (26). On the tail end… Full Review
January 19, 2021
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Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, in person (May 21–August 23, 2020) and online (ongoing)
(Click here to view the exhibition in English, or click here to view in Spanish.) To Tame a Wild Tongue: Art after Chicanismo uses the aftermath of the Chicano Art Movement (1960s–70s) as a point of departure to bring together over twenty-five artists active since the 1980s who explore the distinct yet interconnected sociopolitical paradigms of contemporary Chicanidad. This digital, collection-based exhibition invites us into an important conversation about belonging, resistance, and identity through a transborder perspective. To Tame a Wild Tongue explores the idea of cultural hybridity by considering how Chicanx and Latinx artists in the United States… Full Review
December 1, 2020
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FROM THE ARCHIVE: This autumn, caa.reviews is revisiting reviews that relate to the social issues of the present, at a time when the field is taking them up in renewed ways. Explore two exhibitions on Detroit's 1960s civil rights rebellions and consider their continuing impact on the social justice movements of today. Read more in Nicholas Miller's review of Art of Rebellion: Black Art of the Civil Rights Movement at Detroit Institute of Arts and Say It Loud: Art, History, Rebellion at the Museum of African American History. Full Review
November 9, 2020
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FROM THE ARCHIVE: This autumn, caa.reviews is revisiting reviews that relate to the social issues of the present, at a time when the field is taking them up in renewed ways. This week, we revisit a group of exhibitions at the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas, that centered transgender artists and their stories. For more read Martha Scott Burton’s review of Transamerica/n: Gender, Identity, Appearance Today, Andy Warhol: Portraits, and TransSanAntonian: Examining Trans Identities and Gender Fluidity in the Archives. Full Review
October 26, 2020
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FROM THE ARCHIVE: This autumn, caa.reviews is revisiting reviews that relate to the social issues of the present, at a time when the field is taking them up in renewed ways. As museums and galleries undergo seismic change, we look to another critical shape these institutions have taken: solidarity collections and the “museum in exile." Explore this concept and “the politics of historicizing a present in the face of dispossession, state violence, and fascism” through Matthew Bent’s review of the 2015–19 traveling exhibition Past Disquiet: Artists, International Solidarity and Museums in Exile. Full Review
October 19, 2020
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Nina Wiedemeyer
Exh. cat. New York: Prestel, 2019. 224 pp.; 155 color ills.; 76 b/w ills. Cloth $60.00 (9783791359045)
Nina Wiedemeyer and Friederike Holländer, eds.
New York: Prestel, 2019. 160 pp.; 109 color ills. Cloth €29.00 (9783791359014)
Bauhaus-Archiv/Museum für Gestaltung and Berlinische Galerie, Berlin, September 6, 2019–January 27, 2020
Bauhaus scholars had a wealth of exhibition offerings to choose from in 2019, from major events in Weimar and Dessau, to provincial museums capitalizing on local architects’ ties to the Bauhaus, to, not least of all, three special exhibitions in Berlin. One of these, Original Bauhaus, was based largely on the collection of the Bauhaus-Archiv and, to a lesser extent, the Berlinische Galerie. It sought to highlight the Bauhaus’s current relevance by presenting fourteen case studies. Each case study took an archival object or group of objects as its starting point—its “original”—and used further items and histories to probe… Full Review
September 30, 2020
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FROM THE ARCHIVE: This autumn, caa.reviews is revisiting reviews that relate to the social issues of the present, at a time when the field is taking them up in renewed ways. Today we're spotlighting Liza Oliver's consideration of museums' role in presenting Indigenous stories, through the 2018–19 British Museum exhibition Reimagining Captain Cook: Pacific Perspectives. Full Review
September 28, 2020
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FROM THE ARCHIVE: This autumn, caa.reviews is revisiting reviews that relate to the social issues of the present, at a time when the field is taking them up in renewed ways. Today, explore Chicanx civil rights history through the Autry Museum of the American West exhibition La Raza, reviewed by Mary Thomas. Full Review
September 9, 2020
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