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Installed in a city many consider ground zero for Black Lives Matter at a particularly volatile moment in U.S. race relations, Adam Pendleton: Becoming Imperceptible at the Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) in New Orleans is charged with a political urgency at odds with the artist’s restrained forms, prosaic typography, and cryptic citations. Yet the triumph—and challenge—of Pendleton’s language-based enquiries reside in their capacity to interrogate system and process as provocatively as they explore the African American experience. The show’s title, Becoming Imperceptible, evokes the ontological investigations of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, who coined the phrase, and a specifically… Full Review

The third incarnation of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) opened to great fanfare in May 2016. The new building more than doubles SFMOMA’s galleries, increases by over ten times the educational facilities, and multiples by four the spaces devoted to cinema and performance. Despite the expanded potential, reactions were mixed. Much of the criticism focused on the architecture, notably the rippling facade of fiberglass-reinforced polymer panels. The sheathing incorporates white sand from the dunes of Monterey Bay that plays with the light atmospherically. Critics have described the facade diversely as “a giant iceberg” (Los Angeles Times… Full Review

In spring 2014, the Metropolitan Museum of Art presented a groundbreaking exhibition of early Hindu and Buddhist artworks from Southeast Asia. Aptly titled Lost Kingdoms: Hindu-Buddhist Sculpture of Early Southeast Asia, the exhibition brought together treasures from nearly thirty institutions and collections across nine different countries, many of which had never before traveled outside their country of origin. Carefully grouped, juxtaposed, and emplaced in the Metropolitan’s galleries, the artworks revealed striking similarities and intriguing departures from Indian prototypes. Examining long-distance networks, regional developments, and local adaptations, Lost Kingdoms sought new ways of understanding how, and why, Indian ideas and… Full Review

“When you join an institution, you join its history as much as you work to create its future,” explained Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), Chief Curator Helen Molesworth shortly after accepting the position in 2014. Since then, Molesworth has reinstalled the museum’s Grand Avenue galleries as The Art of Our Time (August 15, 2015–September 12, 2016). A revision of postwar art history, it began with the experimentalism of North Carolina’s Black Mountain College instead of the familiar crucible of New York City. Winding toward the present, Molesworth similarly articulated formal and conceptual sympathies between the familiar and the… Full Review

Stephen Sheehi’s The Arab Imago: A Social History of Portrait Photography, 1860–1910 focuses on the social history of indigenous photography in the Ottoman World between 1860 and 1910. The book redresses the lack of critical attention to local photography, analyzing the production, performance, exchange, circulation, and display of photography in Ottoman Egypt, Lebanon, and Palestine. Sheehi pursues in-depth research and analysis of both visual and written primary sources by local practitioners, most of whose names are known only to a small number of researchers. The book is an ambitious and theoretically challenging study, a significant and original work of social… Full Review

When the Spanish mendicant orders built the first monastery complexes of the Yucatan Peninsula on top of extant pre-Columbian towns, temples, and ceremonial centers, one of their aims was to take possession of indigenous sacred space, appropriate its inherent sacredness, and reuse it to establish the Catholic faith in the New World. In Maya Ideologies of the Sacred: The Transfiguration of Space in Colonial Yucatan, Amara Solari examines the city of Itzmal in Yucatan as an example in order to illustrate how this project was heavily influenced, even challenged, by deep-rooted Maya traditions and conceptions of space. The indigenous… Full Review

The exhibition We Chat: A Dialogue in Contemporary Chinese Art took its name from the popular social-media app in China, giving space and voice to ten artists born after the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76). These artists are some of China’s “Millennials” (known also as the “Me Generation,” and successors of what might be called the “Mao Generation”), who were of single-digit age during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest-turned-massacre. Self-reflective and uninhibited by conventional social constructions of the past, the artists and their work suggest a new art history in the making. As a generation, they are similar to… Full Review

I have been carrying around Jennifer Tyburczy’s Sex Museums: The Politics and Performance of Display for months now, and have received, understandably, quite some attention for it. I have been reading it on my morning commute to work on the train, sitting in cafes and parks with it, and, most notably, have been often seen with it at work, much to the amusement of my students. Not only do people have a lot to say about the title, but the cover image furthers the book’s seductive allure. It features the dorsal view of a person in front of Gustave Courbet’s… Full Review

The exhibition Nari Ward: Sun Splashed at the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) is the first mid-career retrospective of the Jamaica-born artist, and it includes over two decades of his work. It overlapped with Firelei Báez: Bloodlines, a smaller solo exhibition of primarily paintings and drawings by the Dominican Republic-born Báez, a former student of Ward’s. Both artists live and work in New York City—Ward in Harlem and Báez in Brooklyn. Curator Diana Nawi installed Ward’s diverse oeuvre across three galleries. The works in the first gallery all dealt loosely with issues of inclusion, immigration, American… Full Review

James Baldwin in Turkey: Bearing Witness from Another Place is based on nearly thirty images of James Baldwin by Sedat Pakay, a renowned photographer and documentary filmmaker who first met Baldwin when Pakay was a young student at Robert College (now part of Boğaziçi University) in Istanbul. The photographs were originally showcased in an exhibition at the Northwest African American Museum in Seattle in 2012. The collection comprises a foreword, several essays by novelists, biographers, and scholars who knew Baldwin intimately or intellectually, a poem by Michael Harper, and an interview with Pakay. The book’s back jacket features a… Full Review