Recently Published Reviews

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

This substantial and important volume, edited by J. J. Pollitt, offers a comprehensive and updated survey of the evidence for mural and panel painting in the ancient Mediterranean, from the Aegean Bronze Age to Late Antiquity. The range of material under analysis is quite inclusive: the authors evaluate how a variety of painted media might have related to larger-scale or “free” painting, which in certain periods might be considered a “lost art” (see chapter 2). Those most familiar with the wall painting from Campania and Rome will find a more panoramic view, one that contextualizes Roman wall painting as part… Full Review

The allure of some of the most inspiring digital projects resides in their ability to recreate sites that are now lost to us, by reconstructing, for example, the now dismantled buildings and urban spaces of ancient Rome or the halls of Egyptian temples. Other projects are admired for the opposite capacity to invoke impossible worlds that never existed, bringing dispersed or even lost works of art together in virtual exhibitions, or positing material relationships that can only be imagined through the portal of a screen. Sumathi Ramaswamy’s Going Global in Mughal India occupies the latter realm, using new technologies to… Full Review

Visitors to the exhibition Discovering the Impressionists: Paul Durand-Ruel and the New Painting at the Philadelphia Museum of Art were funneled through a darkened passageway bordered by two fictive windows through which one glimpsed large archival photographs of two of Paul Durand-Ruel’s major galleries. On the left was his Paris establishment from 1869 until 1882 at 16 rue Laffitte, while on the right was his first New York branch on Fifth Avenue, opened in 1887, and a testament to the dealer’s ambitious foray into the international market. Once past this threshold, museumgoers were greeted by an 1866 portrait of a… Full Review

Art and Risk in Ancient Yoruba: Ife History, Power, and Identity, c. 1300 is Suzanne Preston Blier’s most recent book, and represents a culmination of a research arc spanning from her days as a graduate student until the present. Drawing deeply from the existing archive of material published on the city of Ile-Ife (Ife) as well as her own interviews conducted over the first decade of the twenty-first century, Blier amasses a compendium on the city of Ife and the objects produced by its inhabitants in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The volume’s bibliography is perhaps the most comprehensive ever… Full Review

Christa Clarke’s African Art in the Barnes Foundation: The Triumph of L’Art nègre and the Harlem Renaissance represents the latest scholarship on objects from the Barnes collection. As the title suggests, Clarke is concerned with recounting the history of Albert C. Barnes’s little-discussed yet incredibly significant collecting of artworks from Africa, as well as the relevance of these objects to the larger institution. Barnes amassed a sizeable and important collection of art at the beginning of the twentieth century and established the eponymous Barnes Foundation with the goal of using his collection as a pedagogical tool for students of the… Full Review

In urban studies, the broader social sciences, and science and technology studies, the human dimensions of water have been at the forefront of a move to break down the divide between nature and society. In particular, the interdisciplinary subfield of urban political ecology has emerged as an influential wave of scholarship seeking to incorporate the social production of nature into theorizations of geographical political economy, with many of its most important studies focusing on the provision of, and access to, water (Matthew Gandy, Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003; Maria Kaika… Full Review

In 1922, André Lhote claimed that Georges Seurat was “one of the lighthouses” then guiding a postwar generation of artists. Such an assertion might be understood simply as an assessment of Seurat’s enduring significance; but in her important new account of the artist, Michelle Foa steers a different approach to Lhote’s metaphor. Lighthouses are, in fact, thematically persistent for Seurat, and Foa bookends her analysis with two examples: the 1886 Hospice and Lighthouse of Honfleur and the 1889 Eiffel Tower (the latter to be understood, rightly, as a kind of urban lighthouse). Pointing to the key fact that lighthouses such… Full Review

During much of the colonial period and into the nineteenth century, a series of fourteen chapels marking the Vía Crucis, or Stations of the Cross, stretched from the Franciscan monastery in downtown Mexico City to the Calvary chapel at the western edge of the city’s Alameda park. The buildings were constructed between 1684 and 1706, with the support of members of the Third Order of Saint Francis. The chapels allowed residents of Mexico City, who were geographically removed from the Holy Lands by thousands of miles, to retrace the steps of Christ’s passion. Although the chapels—and the ritual practice… Full Review

Mexico City-based Belgian artist Francis Alÿs has long been interested in socio-political issues stemming from territory and displacement within marginalized communities, as witnessed through the vestiges of immigration, natural disasters, and warfare. Thus, it is no surprise that these themes feature prominently in three projects in his major solo exhibition, A Story of Negotiation, curated by Cuauhtémoc Medina and beautifully displayed at the Museo Tamayo. Installed in three generously sized white-cube spaces, Don’t Cross the Bridge Before You Get to the River (2008), Tornado (2000–2010), and Reel-Unreel (2011) consist of a symbiotic relationship between the artist’s chosen mediums of… Full Review

For years now, Mary Roberts has been generating scholarship on the complexities of nineteenth-century Orientalism. Her work emphasizes the interplay between painters, patrons, models, and viewers and, more generally, relations between Western and local actors of this complex world of art production and consumption. Her Istanbul Exchanges: Ottomans, Orientalists, and Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture provides a most welcome continuity with her previous work, as it aims at bringing a dialogic dimension to artistic interaction between Europe and the Ottoman Empire, a matter commonly treated from the perspective of a dominantly, if not exclusively, Western focus. Her book is a fresh, innovative… Full Review