Recently Published Reviews

The Urban Scene: Race, Reginald Marsh, and American Art is a visually astute, well-researched account of this important American artist as a discerning observer of the changing nature of urban life in the first decades of the twentieth century. Carmenita Higginbotham seamlessly merges theoretical insight, social history, formal analysis, and primary sources in service of an argument that delivers a welcome challenge to settled wisdom on the cultural production of this period. The book is significant because of the author’s command of a wide range of secondary literature and ability to extrapolate and further develop conceptual formations that are especially… Full Review

Divine Desire: Printmaking, Mythology, and the Birth of the Baroque at the San Diego Museum of Art was an exhibition of over seventy late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Netherlandish engraved prints, mostly by Hendrick Goltzius (1558–1617), his pupil and stepson Jacob Matham (1571–1631), and student Jan Pietersz Saenredam (1565–1607). The subject matter of the prints is predominantly mythological and secular, apart from a series on the virtues and vices. In selecting this subject matter, curator Michael A. Brown complemented material presented in another local exhibition, that of Goltzius’s sacred prints held in 2013–14 at the Crocker Art Museum and University… Full Review

Picturing the World: Painting at the 56th Venice Biennale Plenty has already been written about the daily recitations of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital at the 56th Venice Biennale, a gesture that served to recapitulate our nervous twitching about art and money. Across the grand swath of global art on display, there were indeed many compelling moments pointing to capitalism as the hoary culprit in our world of excess and inequity. Typically, at the heart of such claims in relation to the art world one finds the medium of painting. With its easel format, its desirability as status and… Full Review

Environmental Art at the 56th Venice Biennale The 2015 Venice Biennale, curated by Okwui Enwezor, focuses on the unpredictability and volatility of our historical moment, or what in another context Ulrich Beck calls the “risk society” (Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, London: Sage, 1992). As Michelle Kuo explains in an interview with Enwezor: “That is when the unintended side effects of modernization—technological, ecological—seem to be overwhelming the systems devised to contain them, creating entirely new crises and instabilities” (Michelle Kuo, “Global Entry: Okwui Enwezor Talks with Michelle Kuo about the 56th Venice Biennale,” Artforum… Full Review

Okwui Enwezor’s 2015 edition of la Biennale di Venezia, All the World’s Futures, opened with a somber installation on the facade of the Central Pavilion in the Giardini. At its summit, the striking words of Glenn Ligon’s neon marquee—“blues blood bruise”—announced themes of violence, suffering, death, and sorrow, as well as the role of music as a medium of collective resistance and power. Just below this sign, viewers confronted the Colombian artist Oscar Murillo’s series of black, patched canvases, hung as if they were curtains across the pavilion’s arcade, turning it into a monumental proscenium stage. Passing through the… Full Review

William Pope.L: Trinket at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), opened shortly after thousands took to the streets in protest of the Staten Island grand jury’s failure to convict the New York Police Department officer charged with Eric Garner’s death. While heightened media coverage of this and other social injustices resulting from racially motivated aggressions may have weighed heavily on those visiting the exhibition, it is unlikely that viewers would find aesthetic comfort in Pope.L’s recent works. Indeed, when the exhibition’s namesake—Trinket (2008/2015), a sixteen-foot-tall American flag writhing in the wind of four intimidating industrial fans—was first… Full Review

When speaking of modern landscape painters, John Ruskin argued that these artists see nature with “totally different eyes” and consequently offer spectators impressions rather than imitations of the natural world (John Ruskin, Modern Painters, New York: Wiley and Halsted, 1858, 75). A century after Ruskin published his influential text, the English sculptor Dame Barbara Hepworth similarly stated: “When a sculptor is the spectator . . . the artist tries to find a synthesis of his human experience and the quality of the land-scape” (Barbara Hepworth, A Pictorial Autobiography, New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970, 93). Ruskin’s theory, which only… Full Review

Puncturing the vertiginous pace of New York life is the poetic silence of the Doris Salcedo retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. The Colombian sculptor’s works address violence and are renowned worldwide as sites of collective mourning and reflection. The technical virtuosity of her installations make a retrospective nothing less than a herculean task, bravely undertaken in this case by the organizing institution, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA), and co-curated by Pritzker Director Madeleine Grynsztejn and curator Julie Rodrigues Widholm. The exhibition consists of ten installations that span Salcedo’s thirty-year practice, viewable on the MCA’s website… Full Review

Adrian W. B. Randolph’s Touching Objects: Intimate Experiences of Italian Fifteenth-Century Art is an impressive scholarly work, moving effortlessly from discussions of mid-twentieth-century German art historians to contemporary methodological issues around feminism and aesthetics. Randolph’s fluency in language and culture is matched by his conceptual and intellectual confidence. The result is a demonstration of where art history has traveled and what now might be asked and known about works of art. Specifically, this book, which addresses objects made for or associated with the feminine or the domestic sphere (except in one instance), inquires not merely what the images in or… Full Review

In his first major exhibition in the United States, Egyptian artist Wael Shawky (b. 1971) presented three elaborate films featuring fantastical marionettes performing Amin Maalouf’s The Crusades through Arab Eyes (1983), a book originally written in French but here translated into classical Arabic. Following the exhibition layout at MoMA PS1, viewers first encountered the production materials—sketches, sets, and the marvelous puppets—before entering the darkened screening rooms. The films were not simply synthetic narrative entertainment, but highly constructed performances, and viewers possessed an intimate knowledge of how they were made. Part of the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) wider push to… Full Review

Amid their dense vegetation, the forests of West Africa’s Upper Guinea Coast yield a bounty of contradictory impressions. They host both captivating natural beauty and obscure supernatural terrors. They appear intrinsically wild, yet are carefully cultivated by neighboring communities. Their muddy feeder roads and indistinct bush paths render them seemingly remote and impenetrable, but they have served as conduits for countless movements in the name of exchange and conflict. This complex terrain mirrors and inspires complex cultures. Centuries of invasions and alliances, trade and theft, and creativity and mimesis have motivated an array of social affiliations defined by categories… Full Review

Of all the characters passed down from Giorgio Vasari’s Vite, it is Piero di Cosimo perhaps more than any other who came to embody the belief widely held in the Renaissance that art imitates life. What is known of his biography is remarkably sparse, apart from the stories Vasari gleaned as a young apprentice in the workshop of Andrea del Sarto, once a pupil of the eccentric master. Born in 1462, Piero was actually the son of Lorenzo d’Antonio, not a goldsmith (as Vasari would have it) but a succhiellinaio, or blacksmith. Throughout his career, Piero held an… Full Review

Kehinde Wiley’s lavish paintings demand a lushly illustrated and deeply contemplated exhibition catalogue, which is what Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic provides. It frames the artist’s oeuvre, beginning with his residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2001, and spans his recent developments and the increasingly global scope of his art. The volume joins a considerable body of illustrated book-length attention to the artist, and avoids the more conventional exhibition catalogue format of themed chapters or single-author commentary. Instead it includes two introductory essays followed by succinct interpretations by thirty-five invited commentators. This approach allows multiple voices to frame… Full Review

Mark Bradford’s solo exhibition, Scorched Earth, curated by Connie Butler at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, included twelve paintings, a mural, and a sound installation. Scorched Earth was tough and admirably far-reaching. Exquisitely detailed, the paintings evoked pain and violence. They looked inward and back, and they were surprisingly aqueous. Three haunting, untitled, twelve-foot-by-twelve-foot, black-and-white, unstretched canvases in a low-lit section of a gallery at the Hammer suggested dusky rivers and abrupt stops where Bradford accumulated, stained, and resisted staining by laying on and pulling away wet paper. One of Bradford’s signature text paintings seemed like a… Full Review

Jacob Lawrence figures prominently in the small cohort of African American modernists to achieve renown in their lifetimes. In his case, that recognition came early, bound up with the reception of The Migration of the Negro, his narrative painting cycle of 1941 that is now known as the Migration Series. Over a couple of years, he earned a fellowship to develop it, researched and painted its sixty tempera panels, and published twenty-six in Fortune Magazine. In 1942, he sold the cycle to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), which acquired the even-numbered paintings, and the Phillips Memorial… Full Review