Browse Recent Reviews

“Usually, we do not exhibit this painting because it frightens the museum’s employees.” Kirill Svetlyakov, Head of the Department of New Tendencies in Art at the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, was leading a tour through Not Forever, a sweeping exploration of Soviet visual culture from 1968 to 1985. Svetlyakov had paused before the 1984 painting Carnival. Its artist, Nikolai Yeryshev (1936–2004), was a prize-winning participant in exhibitions organized by the state-run Soviet Union of Artists. Today, however, he remains known primarily within the Ural city of Orenburg, where he spent most of his career, and as one of… Full Review

In 2023 the political nature of sculpture barely needs stating. Over the past two decades, the toppling of statues has become a nexus between state-sanctioned violence and defiance against its monuments. Yet there has been little reflection on sculpture’s capacity to counter social injustices. In this context, Mark Antliff’s exploration of sculptors’ connections to anarchism between 1908 and 1914 is timely, even if the specificity of this moment of reflection is left unspoken. Antliff’s history of the cultural politics of London and Paris looks beyond painters’ and graphic artists’ anarchist credentials, well-established in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries… Full Review

The mood in Sreshta Rit Premnath’s exhibition Grave/Grove at the Institute of Contemporary Art San Diego is one of meditative calm. Spare sculptures spread across the gallery’s white and gray expanse, punctuated with reflective silver and tendrils of green. Yet despite this soothing spirit of first encounter, it does not take long for the works to cohere in front of the viewer and assert a wrenching consideration of migration, cruelty, hope, and how we, as a sociopolitical body, value human life. That such spartan aesthetic gestures can raise deeply troubling and urgent questions, while offering a careful optimism, speaks to… Full Review

Presiding majestically over a large and often lively piazza in Florence’s Oltrarno neighborhood, the Basilica di Santo Spirito is one of the most harmonious of all the city’s churches. The early Renaissance architect Filippo Brunelleschi designed it for a community of Augustinian Hermits and, even though the church remained unfinished at his death in 1446 and was completed not entirely to his specifications thereafter, it bears his strong imprint. Recalling early Christian basilicas, the Latin-cross church has a flat-roofed nave supported by Corinthian columns that spring from rounded arches. The creamy white intonaco walls are minimally articulated with pietra serena… Full Review

In the 1980s, New York City was marked by a series of crises including the AIDS epidemic, gentrification, crumbling infrastructure, and the ascent of neoliberal politicians whose attacks social welfare made the compound emergency faced by residents of the city all the more dire. This complex of social and economic devastation emerged with renewed skepticism about the artist’s capacity to disturb prevailing power structures alongside an interrogation of the role of art making in relation to more conventional types of activism. As Gran Fury put it in a 1988 poster advertising The Kitchen’s winter performance program, when it came to… Full Review

It is by design that many of the artworks in the Designing Motherhood exhibition and the chapters in the accompanying catalog originate from personal experience. After all, the embodied experience of birth, as either birthing or birthed people (or both), is one we all share. Yet the “things that make or break our births” have, thus far, received little attention—sometimes in their public recognition, occasionally in their design. The Designing Motherhood curators, design historians Michelle Millar Fisher and Amber Winick, felt we needed a “public reckoning with the designs that, for better or worse, shape experiences for all of us”… Full Review

Among recent contributions to Piranesi studies, Piranesi Unbound occupies a special place as a volume clearly aligned with the “material turn" of art history. The coauthors, experts on architectural drawings and prints, are implicitly and productively critical of the canonical type of art historical research, concentrating specifically on what classical art history has regarded as parerga—the technical, material, and economic aspects of artistic production. Utilizing variegated forms of writing, Yerkes and Minor draw the reader into the experience of a close study of individual material objects. From one chapter to the next, the narrative is liable to be interrupted… Full Review

In pre-Columbian art history, the Andes and Mesoamerica command almost all the scholarly attention. These more heavily studied geographical zones are outnumbered by the neglected ones—the Antilles, Isthmo-Colombia, and Amazonia-Orinokia, or AIAO for short. Is it simply the absence of monumental ruins, as some have suggested, that causes art historians especially to relegate these regions to the margins or is it the relative lack of archaeology on which we can rely? In fact, archaeologists have been excavating and accumulating data in these areas for well over a century and, over that period, some parts of the AIAO were not as… Full Review

From the 1940s until the 1990s, and especially in the 1960s and 1970s, all major and most minor archaeological sites from the Maya culture were plundered to meet the demands of the international art market. To name a few examples, Richard E. W. Adams recounts that starting in 1976 the deep jungle Maya city of Río Azul was targeted by an intense looting operation that eventually employed up to eighty diggers (Río Azul: An Ancient Maya City, 1999, 5). Von Euw and Graham recorded that in 1975, more than fifty looters trenches were dug at the site of… Full Review

Scholarship on the theory of the gaze explores the power dynamic within the act of looking and being looked at. The male gaze, the racist gaze, and the colonial gaze are analytical concepts that help us understand how representation is implicated in the construction of gendered and racialized hierarchies and systems of control. They also reveal how subjects resist visuality’s capture through processes of self-representation and aesthetic defiance. Tina M. Campt’s A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See offers a profound reconceptualization of the politics of visibility and spectatorship within contemporary art. The book features nine artists who work… Full Review