Recently Published Reviews

Framed within the elegant glass architecture of Tadao Ando, the towering figure of Balzac (1897) welcomes visitors to the Clark. This first gallery serves as both the introduction and the conclusion to the show which occupies the museum’s dedicated exhibition galleries downstairs. In the background, a cut-out window on a red wall opens onto a large photographic reproduction of the 1954 unveiling of Balzac at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Immersed within MoMA’s posh crowd, visitors are invited to linger in a dedicated reading space and enjoy some historical people watching. The purchase of Rodin’s controversial sculpture… Full Review

Setting the stage, deep red curtains mark the entrance to Painted Cloth: Fashion and Ritual in Colonial Latin America. Thoughtfully curated by Rosario I. Granados, the Marilynn Thoma associate curator of the Art of the Spanish Americas, this exhibition highlights the significance of cloth in the Spanish Americas, where it was a marker of social identity and a key facet of religious ritual. The works in the exhibition are predominantly drawn from eighteenth-century Peru and New Spain and span a variety of media, from paintings, sculptures, and prints that include textiles in their subject matter, to material culture related… Full Review

There are enough cities in America named after Christopher Columbus that until I arrived in front of The Columbus Museum and saw the banners for the Alma Thomas exhibition, I was worried that I might have traveled to the wrong one. America’s history of brutality, about which the name Columbus whispers or screams depending on who you are, is so vast that it forever spins off little whorls of cruelty like this—another tributary of brutality passed by, soaked in, so one can get somewhere else. On the walk to the museum in what turned out to be the correct Columbus… Full Review

Writing on the decolonial turn in curatorial practice, curator Ivan Muñiz-Reed asks, “How are curators and art institutions positioned within the colonial matrix, and is it possible for them to restructure knowledge and power—to return agency to those who have lost it?” (Afterall, 2020) A possible response to this provocative question is proposed by Reinventing the Américas: Construct. Erase. Repeat. Organized by Idurre Alonso, this exhibition displays many of the Getty’s collections of European colonial-era engravings, etchings, lithographs, illustrated chronicles, and decorative objects depicting the Americas during the so-called Age of Discovery. The show’s twist is that it seeks… Full Review

This volume, featuring nine essays and an extensive introduction by its editors, stems from scholarly discussions hosted by the Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Written by a multidisciplinary group of established scholars affiliated with universities across the United States and Canada, this book attempts to shift the scholarly debate about postclassical Rome from the concepts of decline and renewal to those of continuity, adaptation, reuse, reconstruction, memory, and (creative) resilience—a concept highlighted in the introduction (25–26). In this endeavor, the volume is successful and should be of interest to those engaged with… Full Review

The typical monographic treatment of a building or a community begins with a discussion of the patron’s plan and then traces the construction and development of the site to completion. In some cases, the history of the building or community is traced through subsequent changes and adaptations, concluding with its present state—or its destruction. This book takes a somewhat different course, as it starts with the founding of a utopian community in 1814 by George Rapp and  a group of disaffected Lutherans from Württemberg in Germany who applied the name New Harmony (after their earlier Pennsylvania settlement) to their new… Full Review

The artful protagonists of The Moving Statues of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam are witty enchantments, products of active imaginations whose disappearance requires further imaginative action. Angela Vanhaelen brings to life the Amsterdam doolhoven, labyrinths attached to an array of entertaining displays that sprang up in the prosperous Dutch city beginning in the seventeenth century. This unprecedented study of a phenomenon unique to Amsterdam reveals a landscape of innovation, foreign-sourced artisanal knowledge, and moral edification pivoting around unexpected sites: early modern amusement parks that, along with taverns and inns, functioned as spaces for a cosmopolitan range of visitors to encounter astonishing works… Full Review

It is no exaggeration to deem Ringgold the consummate American artist. The retrospective Faith Ringgold: American People at the New Museum is a thrilling turn through nearly seven decades of artmaking. Curators Massimiliano Gioni and Gary Carrion-Murayari, with curatorial assistant Madeline Weisburg, staged over one hundred artworks in roughly chronological order. Invested in the artist’s range of material experimentation, American People is a celebratory and rigorous display of Ringgold’s practice that claims the entire three floors of exhibition space in the museum and a devoted reading room on the top floor. The exhibition is bracketed by two of the artist’s… Full Review

The past two decades have seen an explosion of interest in early twentieth-century Mexican visual culture and especially in photography, which has been the subject of a number of important books which include Esther Gabara’s Errant Modernism: The Ethos of Photography in Mexico and Brazil (Duke University Press, 2008), Roberto Tejada’s National Camera: Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), and Andrea Nobile’s Photography and Memory in Mexico: Icons of Revolution (Manchester University Press, 2010). Other recent books include discussions of photography in a larger context that also includes painting, design, and literature, such as Tatiana Flores’s… Full Review

In the subtitle of The Double: Identity and Difference in Art since 1900, curated by James Meyer at the National Gallery of Art (NGA), the terms “identity” and “difference” do not signal, as they often do, an exhibition organized around categories of gender, race, ethnicity, or nationality. Identity is instead presented as much more slippery and unstable. Through the figure of the double, Meyer proposes a capacious thematic for understanding twentieth- and twenty-first-century art, as well as how we know and relate to ourselves, others, and the world around us. An extraordinary selection of over 120 works… Full Review

“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