Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

Zanele Muholi presented the full breadth of the South African artist’s work to date. Muholi’s photographic practice attends to the Black LGBTQIA+ community and addresses sexual politics, racial violence, self-affirmation, and lesser-known histories. Originating at Tate Modern, the exhibition is an international feat, curated by Tate’s Yasufumi Nakamori and Sarah Allen with Gropius Bau’s Natasha Ginwala. In a video interview, Muholi opens with the statement, “What matters most is content—who is in the picture and why are they there?” In Zanele Muholi, the curators echo the artist’s sentiment, as Muholi’s photographic and multimedia series unfold throughout Gropius Bau’s ten… Full Review

The exhibition Viva Video! The Art and Life of Shigeko Kubota was the first large-scale survey exhibition since Kubota’s career survey at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York, in 1991, and this catalog—recipient of the 2021 Ringa Art Encouragement Prize—attests to the extent that interest and research on her work has progressed. The reevaluation of women artists has been proceeding apace throughout the world. Designated the “mother of video art,” Shigeko Kubota has been a particular subject of reconsideration and was recently honored with an important focused exhibition Shigeko Kubota: Liquid Reality at the Museum of Modern… Full Review

How do we tell the stories of domestic violence? Most domestic violence happens behind closed doors, as does most advocacy to assist survivors. Artist Carmen Winant’s installation brings documentation of abuse and advocacy together through a reconsideration of photographs, newspaper clippings, guidebooks, and other ephemera culled from the archives of Philadelphia-based organization Women in Transition and the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence. On the first floor of the installation are several collages. In one, Moon faces Demons (2022), Winant presents a group of sixteen photographs, each centered on a faded piece of construction paper then adhered together with blue tape… Full Review