Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews

Any time you have a chance to see a photography exhibition drawn from the collection of the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, take it. These shows are few and far between: the last one opened eight years ago, when curator Gloria Williams Sander acknowledged the full idiosyncratic range of the department with her remarkable exhibition, The Collectible Moment (2006–7). Even a small glimpse of the collection affords the rare chance for a trip to the 1960s and 1970s, the moment just before big business gripped Los Angeles culture by the throat. It was a time when the contemporary mandate for… Full Review

In the spring of 2014, the Philadelphia Museum of Art hosted Treasures from Korea: Arts and Culture of the Joseon Dynasty, 1392–1910. There was great anticipation for this major exhibition of Korean art as it followed two others the previous year at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Silla: Korea’s Golden Kingdom, 2013–14) and at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco (In Grand Style: Celebrations in Korean Art During the Joseon Dynasty, 2013–14). Treasures from Korea will travel from Philadelphia, first to Los Angeles, and then Houston, yet problems of transportation and sensibility to light mean… Full Review

Isa Genzken: Retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA) is a visually cacophonous experience. Located on the second-floor galleries, the show takes up most of the surface space (save for a small room of Alexander Calder’s geometrically shaped mobiles just steps from the elevator). The exhibition greets viewers with massive, brightly painted blue walls that separate to reveal two opposing doorways cut by an interior hallway: the right side is a black wall with white didactic text; the left is a yellow wall inset by a large-scale reproduction of a photograph of the American comedian, pantomime, and 1930s… Full Review

Curated by Sabine Breitwieser, Michael Darling, Jeffrey Grove, and Laura Hoptman, Isa Genzken: Retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art is the first comprehensive exhibition in the United States to showcase the work of this formally innovative and ethically provocative German artist. The show spans a broad range of Genzken’s material practices—among them steel and concrete sculpture, easel (spray) painting, x-ray, assemblage, and video—and representational concerns, from high-tech precision formalism to the impact of consumer culture in an era rife with war and terror. The curators unify Genzken’s diverse oeuvre by inviting the viewer to perceive it through the… Full Review

Nazi officials confiscated more than twenty-one thousand works of art from German public collections during the infamous “degenerate art” action of 1937–39. Nearly six hundred of these stolen works appeared in the hastily organized propaganda exhibition, Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art), which opened in Munich on July 19, 1937. The exhibition drew an estimated two million visitors to the cramped and shabby galleries of the Munich Archaeological Institute, and it traveled, in modified form, to eleven cities throughout Germany and Austria between 1937 and 1941. Nearly eight decades later, the Nazi attack on modern art continues to draw crowds. In a… Full Review

Splendore a Venezia: Art and Music from the Renaissance to Baroque in Venice at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts included 120 works of art, music manuscripts, and musical instruments as a means to explore the connections between music and art in the Serenissima between 1488 and the fall of the Venetian Republic in 1797. Curator Hilliard T. Goldfarb states the premise of the exhibition in the catalogue: “the remarkable interface of these forms of artistic expression that rose to such extraordinary and influential creative heights during the period . . . have not been previously explored in a single… Full Review

Born in Portland, Oregon, in 1922, Richard Diebenkorn grew up in San Francisco, and went on to attend Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley. After serving in the Marines between 1943 and 1945, Diebenkorn returned to the Bay Area and enrolled for a semester on the GI Bill at the San Francisco Art Institute (then the California School of Fine Arts) where he would become an instructor from 1947 to 1950, while living in Sausalito. After a few years elsewhere, by 1953 Diebenkorn, his wife, Phyllis, and their children arrived in Berkeley. Perhaps because of this biography as… Full Review

Yoga, and the variety of practices that can be subsumed under that heading, is identifiable in sculptures, paintings, photographs, and films representing virtually every region of the Indian subcontinent over the course of more than three millennia—from third-century depictions of Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain ascetics, to the transgressive rituals of medieval yoginis, to the recognizable asanas practiced today in yoga studios worldwide. Deities engaged in yogic practice and instruction populate the walls of temples in Bengal in the east, Rajasthan in the west, Uttar Pradesh in India’s north, and Tamil Nadu in the south. Revered (and feared) human practitioners… Full Review

For far too many scholars the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art, which has since come to be known as the Armory Show, was not simply a watershed event in the story of international modernism; it was rather a pioneering event in American modernism. The exhibition is generally regarded as the moment when contemporary American artists first emerged from under whatever rock they were hiding and made their presence known to a public at large, bolstered and legitimized by a large contingent of European modernism, including some of the most recent work being produced overseas at that time. During the… Full Review

Curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver, senior curator, Contemporary Art Museum Houston (CAMH), Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art was presented in New York over two venues: Grey Art Gallery and Studio Museum in Harlem. Timed to coincide with Performa 13 (the biennial performance art festival held in New York in November), this pioneering exhibition was activated by a number of performance commissions and bridged two legendary neighborhoods long associated with artists: Harlem and Greenwich Village. The exhibition press release stated that it was the first “to survey over fifty years of performance art by visual artists of African… Full Review