- Chronology
- Before 1500 BCE
- 1500 BCE to 500 BCE
- 500 BCE to 500 CE
- Sixth to Tenth Century
- Eleventh to Fourteenth Century
- Fifteenth Century
- Sixteenth Century
- Seventeenth Century
- Eighteenth Century
- Nineteenth Century
- Twentieth Century
- Twenty-first Century
- Geographic Area
- Africa
- Caribbean
- Central America
- Central and North Asia
- East Asia
- North America
- Northern Europe
- Oceania/Australia
- South America
- South Asia/South East Asia
- Southern Europe and Mediterranean
- West Asia
- Subject, Genre, Media, Artistic Practice
- Aesthetics
- African American/African Diaspora
- Ancient Egyptian/Near Eastern Art
- Ancient Greek/Roman Art
- Architectural History/Urbanism/Historic Preservation
- Art Education/Pedagogy/Art Therapy
- Art of the Ancient Americas
- Artistic Practice/Creativity
- Asian American/Asian Diaspora
- Ceramics/Metals/Fiber Arts/Glass
- Colonial and Modern Latin America
- Comparative
- Conceptual Art
- Decorative Arts
- Design History
- Digital Media/New Media/Web-Based Media
- Digital Scholarship/History
- Drawings/Prints/Work on Paper/Artistc Practice
- Fiber Arts and Textiles
- Film/Video/Animation
- Folk Art/Vernacular Art
- Genders/Sexualities/Feminisms
- Graphic/Industrial/Object Design
- Indigenous Peoples
- Installation/Environmental Art
- Islamic Art
- Latinx
- Material Culture
- Multimedia/Intermedia
- Museum Practice/Museum Studies/Curatorial Studies/Arts Administration
- Native American/First Nations
- Painting
- Patronage, Art Collecting
- Performance Art/Performance Studies/Public Practice
- Photography
- Politics/Economics
- Queer/Gay Art
- Race/Ethnicity
- Religion/Cosmology/Spirituality
- Sculpture
- Sound Art
- Survey
- Theory/Historiography/Methodology
- Visual Studies
Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews
Provocatively described by the artist Joan Jonas as a Mannerist, Robert Smithson is certainly best, and sometimes only, remembered for his iconic earthwork pieces, in particular his Spiral Jetty of 1970 (Brian Conley and Joe Amrhein, eds., Collection of Writings on Robert Smithson [New York: Pierogi, 2000], 37). So does this epithet have any merit? The recent retrospective of Smithson’s work at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the first such comprehensive exhibition in the United States, answered this with a resounding “yes.” Smithson’s formal language is certainly one of movement, space, spiritual intensity, anticlassicism, and the fusion of…
Full Review
January 25, 2005
Dutch and Flemish Drawings from the National Gallery of Canada was produced to celebrate the recent promised gift to the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa of a group of Dutch and Flemish drawings assembled by collectors residing in Toronto.[1] In the exhibition, works from this generous gift have been supplemented with sheets from the National Gallery’s own collection. Ottawa already owns several outstanding drawings from this region, including Gerard David’s small metalpoint copies of heads from the Ghent Altarpiece (cat. no. 1). The private-collection pieces will add substantially to the existing holdings of eighty Dutch and Flemish drawings.
…
Full Review
December 20, 2004
The advertising poster for the exhibition Work Ethic includes the text “Artists. Hard at work or hardly working? You decide” above a photograph documenting the Hi Red Center’s Ochanomizu Drop (Dropping Event) of 1964, which consisted of dropping clothes and objects from a rooftop, their retrieval and placement in a suitcase that was subsequently stowed in a public locker, ending with the sending of its key to an individual chosen randomly from the telephone book. At one level, the poster points to the type of provocation one might expect from the exhibition itself, presumably that it will challenge one’s understanding…
Full Review
December 20, 2004
At the start of the exhibition Valenciennes, Daubigny, and the Origins of French Landscape Painting, visitors are presented with a minor masterpiece by the mid-nineteenth-century French landscape painter Charles-François Daubigny, a remarkably fresh and boldly rendered vision of a modest corner of the French countryside at Optevoz, in the Bas-Dauphiné region of southeastern France. Painted around 1856, The Water’s Edge, Optevoz depicts a local fishing pond, rocky, overgrown, and devoid of human intervention. The handling of the paint is rough and direct—most clearly apparent in the brilliantly expressed sky—giving the canvas the feeling of an artist’s informal sketch, an…
Full Review
December 6, 2004
Beyond Geometry: Experiments in Form, 1940s–1970s makes modern art’s recent past reflect meaningfully on the present. The word “beyond” in the exhibition’s title promises a look at evidence not covered or hidden by the noun to which it is attached. Although the years from 1940 to 1970 press for breadth, they also situate the exhibition in a specific era with no claims for timeless transcendence. In modern art, form—as separate from content—has a suspenseful, contentious history. During the Cold War (and even before, in Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union), form and formalism were demonized and censored by the content-driven, socialist realist…
Full Review
November 15, 2004
Montien Boonma: Temple of the Mind, a traveling exhibition of Buddhist-inspired art by the internationally acclaimed Thai artist, Montien Boonma (1953–2000), leaves the viewer with vivid memories of transforming experiences. Boonma’s art is not marked by iconic images and didactic narratives, but rather expresses more conceptually the tenets and healing aspects of Buddhism. Most of the art in this exhibition dates from the early 1990s to 2000, a period during which Boonma’s wife became ill and died from cancer; he then became fatally ill himself. In this difficult time, Boonma turned more emphatically to Buddhism for spiritual and physical…
Full Review
November 4, 2004
In early 1964, shortly after acquiring the studio space at 231 East Forty-Seventh Street in New York that would become known as the Factory, Pop artist Andy Warhol commissioned British fashion photographer David McCabe to document his life for one year. Although the project resulted in over 2,500 photographs, none of the images were used by Warhol, nor were any published until last year’s release of McCabe’s book, A Year in the Life of Andy Warhol (London: Phaidon Press, 2003). The book contains 450 of the shots arranged in chronological order, with captions and short stories by David Dalton, one…
Full Review
October 7, 2004
That most Chicagoans who have encountered Dan Peterman’s work have done so without knowing it seems as fitting a tribute to the artist’s ambitions as does the current exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (MCA). Indeed, as much as I enjoyed seeing Plastic Economies, I have equally enjoyed using Peterman’s installation Chicago Ground Cover (1997)— without realizing it was an installation—while learning to samba, salsa, shimmy, and shake atop the smooth surface during classes held by Grant Park’s SummerDance program. The highly functional exterior dance floor, made of reprocessed, postconsumer plastic, extends Peterman’s earlier, gallery-based project, Ground…
Full Review
September 14, 2004
Shortly before I visited the Museum of the Art Institute of Chicago to see the exhibition Seurat and the Making of “La Grande Jatte”, an art historian friend in Berlin wrote me, asking if the show was traveling to Europe. The answer is no, and visitors to the exhibition are told the reason why: in 1958, a fire broke out at New York’s Museum of Modern Art while A Sunday on La Grande Jatte was on display there. Though Georges Seurat’s canvas was unharmed, the Art Institute decided that the painting would never again be lent. That absolute stipulation…
Full Review
September 10, 2004
Tracing artistic origins and sources is always tricky business, never more so than when one is seeking to identify and explain a concept as broad and malleable as naturalism. First there is the problem of the term itself. Postmodern theory has rightly claimed that there is no such thing as a naïve, unmediated, “natural” representation of the world around us. Not only are there different kinds of naturalism and different purposes it can serve, but one culture’s naturalism may also strike another’s as highly stylized and limited by convention. Even when there is general agreement that a certain group of…
Full Review
August 12, 2004
Load More