Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews

The exhibition The Dragon’s Gift: Sacred Arts of Bhutan features emerging curatorial trends with regard to premodern Asian art, and displays a wealth of treasures from a little-known Himalayan kingdom on the northeastern border of India. Bronze Buddhas, thangkas of wrathful deities, footage of live performance, monks busy at their prayers, Buddhist lineage portraits, and gigantic textiles are just some of the multi-media experiences the show presents. From the only independent Vajrayana Buddhist kingdom in the world—a place where the GHP (Gross Happiness Product) officially replaces the GNP (Gross National Product)—an impressive array of objects from Bhutan are journeying throughout… Full Review

This fall, the battleground states of New Hampshire and Ohio each enlisted an Andy Warhol that was more man than machine and more substance than image to grapple with life and politics at the end of the Bush era. The Warhols on display in Andy Warhol: Pop Politics at the Currier Museum and in Andy Warhol: Other Voices, Other Rooms at the Wexner Center combine the nuances of mass media with the traditions of graphic arts and painting to delve into personal and public life in the second half of the twentieth century. The Currier exhibition, curated by Sharon Matt… Full Review

Black Womanhood: Images, Icons, and Ideologies of the African Body was an attractive and smart show. The Davis Museum and Cultural Center at Wellesley College, its second venue of three, offered a stunning introduction to the galleries from its entrance balcony where Allison Saar’s 2006 Cache—a life-sized, tin-clad nude figure in a fetal position held in place by a giant ball of wire—was draped across the floor beneath Baby Back, Renée Cox’s oversized blackout C-print self-portrait as a dominatrix odalisque from 2001. The two works engaged in a shrill dialogue that teetered between tongue-in-cheek humor and slap-in-the-face confrontation… Full Review

“I do like to hit the nerves,” painter Peter Saul confesses. Yes, but that doesn’t mean we have to like it when he does. In the past, whenever I encountered Saul’s paintings—unmistakable with their garish, artificially hot colors and repellant imagery—I quickly withdrew from this frontal assault on my sensibilities. As it turns out, I was shortchanging myself. I rescinded my snap judgments after seeing the first major U.S. survey of Saul’s paintings and drawings from the early 1960s to the present, organized by the Orange County Museum of Art and guest curator Dan Cameron. I caught up… Full Review

Giorgio Morandi, 1890–1964, co-organized by the Museo d’Arte Moderna of Bologna and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was the first comprehensive survey of Morandi’s work in the United States. The exhibition gathered 110 paintings, watercolors, drawings, and etchings by the reserved, often elusive, and sometimes underappreciated Italian painter of still life and landscape. The curators, Maria Cristina Bandera, Director of the Fondazione Roberto Longhi in Florence, and Renato Miracco, Director of the Italian Cultural Institute in New York, brought together a remarkable selection of works, drawn from both Italian and U.S. museums as well as private collections. There were… Full Review

In her recent career survey organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Boston, Tara Donovan creates ethereal, environmental sculptures out of such banal, everyday objects as toothpicks, Scotch tape, Mylar, and plastic cups. Working with one material at a time, and testing the range of its physical properties, Donovan subverts the utilitarian function of an object through a process of accumulation. In the seventeen works on view from the past decade, she stacks, piles, or otherwise masses her material to explore its latent sculptural capabilities, all the while turning mundane matter into the stuff of high art. When I… Full Review

In almost every sense, the exhibition Art and Love in Renaissance Italy and the accompanying catalogue are retrospective. First, they include many objects that were acquired by collectors at the beginning of the twentieth century, during an earlier period of interest in the history of private life. Second, they draw upon and summarize four recent decades of historical and art-historical scholarship focused on the family life of Renaissance Italians and the material objects that accompanied them through its various stages. Finally, they look back at those Renaissance Italians themselves and try to explain how they understood love (both sacred and… Full Review

Michelangelo: The Man and the Myth provides American audiences with a rare opportunity to intimately view twelve drawings (doubling the number in U.S. collections) and three documents by the hand of one of history’s most revered artists, all on loan from the Casa Buonarroti in Florence and never before exhibited in the United States. These original works are accompanied by six portraits of the artist (my favorite is the enigmatic bronze medal by Leone Leoni, 1561); six posthumous publications of his poetry, including one sonnet set to music by Benjamin Britten (1943); a twentieth-century bronze replica of Michelangelo’s marble Vatican… Full Review

Joseph Beuys famously proposed that, “every human being is an artist” (Joseph Beuys, “I Am Searching for Field Character,” in Art into Society, Society into Art, trans. Caroline Tisdall, London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1974, 48). How, then, do we understand the relationship between artists and audience? The Art of Participation, an extremely ambitious, multifaceted exhibition and catalogue by Rudolf Frieling, curator of media arts at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, provides numerous potential inroads to considering this question, among others. Desiring to determine whether there is an inherent conflict between the institutional goals of the… Full Review

Act/React, the Milwaukee Art Museum’s recent exhibition of interactive installation art, presented work by six contemporary artists: Janet Cardiff, Brian Knep, Liz Phillips, Daniel Rozin, Scott Snibbe, and Camille Utterback. While all employ some combination of customized computer software, surveillance cameras, digital video and projection, electronic photocells and circuits, microcontrollers, synthesizers, and amplifiers, the resulting artworks nonetheless conceal their technological underpinnings. Focusing on “non-technical” interactivity, which guest curator George Fifield specifies in the accompanying catalogue as activities that are “performed with the entire body of the viewer” (31), the exhibition elicited kinetic play, as one body moved toward and… Full Review