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The tradition of university art museums forming excellent collections, which began in Europe with the Ashmolean and Fitzwilliam in England and Erlangen University in Germany, has flourished in the United States. Second only to the Harvard Art Museums, the Princeton collection of Italian drawings is of great importance, and in many respects is better than the majority of important civic museums. It includes some outstanding Renaissance drawings by Carpaccio, Michelangelo, Parmigianino, and Schiavone, as well as perhaps the finest representation of Guercino drawings in America. It is now nearly four decades since Felton Gibbons wrote his comprehensive yet problematic… Full Review

The eponymous catalogue to the exhibition Who More Sci-fi Than Us?: Contemporary Art from the Caribbean aims to examine the complexity of Caribbean art through the metaphor of science fiction. Curator of the exhibition and co-founding director until 2011 of the Instituto Buena Bista, Curacao Center for Contemporary Art in the Dutch Caribbean, Nancy Hoffman writes in the introduction that the logic of the Caribbean is perfectly captured in Junot Díaz’s The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (New York: Riverhead, 2007) when an apparently omniscient narrator describes Oscar’s fascination toward the genre of science fiction as a consequence… Full Review

In the American Folk Art Museum’s exhibition catalogue When the Curtain Never Comes Down: Performance Art and the Alter Ego, curator Valérie Rousseau highlights the creative expressions and artistic practices of twenty-six individuals and one religious community. With selections that span the late nineteenth century to the present, Rousseau succeeds in opening new discussions on objects and related performative actions of artists referred to as “self-taught” and “art brut.” A great many of these artists, mostly patients from psychiatric facilities in Europe and Latin America, are unknown in the United States. Critics responded positively to the exhibition’s… Full Review

A casual perusal of the monograph Lynette Yiadom-Boakye quickly establishes—in its ratio of image to text—the main objective of the book to be a celebration of the artist’s oeuvre rather than a critical engagement with it. Of the 136 pages in the slim, attractive volume, the substantive text amounts to less than fifty pages while more than fifty-five leaves are devoted to beautifully designed, full-page color reproductions, most of them featuring a single image of Yiadom-Boakye’s compelling, portrait-style pictures of black figures. Moreover, many of these large color plates are set off by blank white leaves on the opposite side… Full Review

In Edwardian London through Japanese Eyes: The Art and Writings of Yoshio Markino, 1897–1915, William S. Rodner presents the first scholarly monograph in English on Yoshio Makino (or “Markino,” as the artist romanized the spelling of his family name). There have been a few publications and exhibitions in Japan on this once popular illustrator in early twentieth-century London, but it is in Rodner’s book that one finds a detailed and engaging account of Markino’s most productive years in London that culminated in his popular illustrated books such as The Colour of London (1907) and A Japanese Artist in London… Full Review

It is safe to assume that museumgoers in San Francisco, home to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA), are as up on new technology as any public, and that the Bay Area’s traditionally progressive inhabitants are invested in balancing commercial profit and social justice. Yet as the exhibition Earth Machines quickly reveals, the local Silicon Valley high-tech industry propels a cycle of innovation and consumption that threatens to outstrip our ability to understand and manage its global, social, and environmental consequences. Curator Ceci Moss has convened an international set of artists—Alisa Baremboym, Spiros Hadjidjanos, Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe… Full Review

Featuring work from 1960 through the present, Billy Apple®: The Artist Has to Live Like Everybody Else was one of the most significant survey exhibitions ever accorded a living New Zealand artist. Staged in the country’s largest public art museum, it gave institutional and public recognition to an extraordinarily complex and comprehensive individual practice, and demonstrated the importance of a Pop-Conceptualism nexus to the recent history of New Zealand art. The title of the exhibition and the accompanying handbook—Billy Apple®: A Life in Parts—pointed to the centrality of biography as a key lens through which to… Full Review

Co-organized by the National Gallery of Art and the Kimbell Art Museum, Gustave Caillebotte: The Painter’s Eye presents fifty canvases produced during the period when the artist was most directly engaged with the Impressionist group, between 1875 and the early 1880s. These were the years, according to curators Mary Morton and George Shackelford, when Gustave Caillebotte was at his best—when he was still living in Paris and closely connected with artists like Auguste Renoir and Edgar Degas. Yet, notably, the exhibition does not include the word “Impressionist” in its title. By contrast, in previous Caillebotte shows, the term has played… Full Review

Art historian Eva Díaz’s The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College is a tightly focused examination of the activities of Josef Albers, John Cage, and R. Buckminster Fuller at Black Mountain College, North Carolina, during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. As Mary Emma Harris argues in her foundational history, The Arts at Black Mountain College (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), experimentation was integral to Black Mountain College’s pedagogical vision, and scholars have rightly called attention to its importance when evaluating the college’s impact on the arts during the 1950s and 1960s (see, for example, Vincent Katz and Martin… Full Review

Alex Katz, This Is Now offers a refreshing look at Katz’s landscapes, which, as the exhibition clearly demonstrates, have occupied the artist throughout his career. Those primarily familiar with Katz’s figurative work and portraiture, subjects for which he is arguably best known, discover another, important aspect of Katz’s oeuvre, one that does not entirely leave the figures behind, while those already knowledgeable about his landscapes enjoy compelling compositions and provocative pairings that deepen an appreciation of the artist’s achievements in this genre. Wieland Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art Michael Rooks brings together around fifty paintings, from… Full Review