Recently Published Reviews

For at least twenty centuries before the European invasions of the 1500s, artists from the Pre-Columbian cultures of Mesoamerica and the southwestern United States elaborated a wide range of elite objects with mosaic tesserae, including human and animal skulls, scepters, knife handles, diadems, pectoral ornaments, masks, disks, plaques, and jewelry for the ear, nose, and lips. Maya, Mixtec, Aztec, and Ancestral Puebloan artists fashioned the tesserae from a variety of culturally significant materials, including jade, turquoise, iron oxides, and many types of marine shell. Both native accounts and modern research have shown that these materials were selected primarily for their… 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

For nigh on fifty years, it has been fashionable to denounce mid-century urban renewal projects, as well as the planners and politicians who brought them into being. Even as the bulldoze-and-build movement reached its zenith in the 1960s, many Americans began to develop posthumous nostalgia for quaint, tumbledown neighborhoods that were rent asunder to make way for superblocks, highways, and modernist behemoths. This widespread sentiment gave rise to a cottage industry of screeds against urban renewal. Happily, the invective of a previous generation is now being displaced by more judicious analyses. To that end, architectural historian Elihu Rubin's … 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

Pamela A. Patton’s Art of Estrangement: Redefining Jews in Reconquest Spain makes an important contribution to the already rich field of medieval art and Jewish-Christian relations. Scholars such as Bernhard Blumenkranz, Michael Camille, Ruth Mellinkoff, Heinz Schreckenberg, Sara Lipton, Debra Higgs Strickland, Mitchell Merback, Vivian Mann, Nina Rowe, Herbert Kessler, and David Nirenberg, among others, have examined the ways in which Christian art expresses perceptions of Jews and Judaism.[1] As Patton points out, these studies focus primarily on northern European art. Patton expands the scope of this current scholarship by demonstrating that Iberian Christian imagery incorporated, altered, or resisted northern… Full Review

Over the last twenty-five years, meals constructed by artists as art have flourished through a range of itinerant arts initiatives in public and private spaces and become recent programmatic mainstays in galleries and museums around the world, giving the impression that these works are a contemporary trend. Yet, in the 1930s the Italian Futurists generated a body of work about food that predated these artist projects—opening a restaurant, La Taverna del Santopalato (Tavern of the Holy Palate), in Turin, Italy, for example, that was forty years ahead of Food, the restaurant founded in New York by Gordon Matta-Clark, Caroline Goodden… 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

Glenn Willumson’s Iron Muse: Photographing the Transcontinental Railroad begins with a discussion of a photograph by Andrew Joseph Russell titled East and West Shaking Hands at Laying Last Rail (no. 227) (1869), also known as Meeting of the Rails, Promontory, Utah, 1869. The photograph features workers and executives from the Central Pacific Railroad and the Union Pacific Railroad celebrating the completion of the transcontinental line. Willumson starts by analyzing how Russell’s photograph is often reproduced as historical illustration, but its original context is rarely considered. To read the image as symbolic of technological superiority and the triumph of national… Full Review

There is a kind of fatigue in recent literature on photography. The ritual of declaring a ubiquitous abundance of photographic images, both historical and contemporary, is usually accompanied by a compulsion to address this situation and a requirement to analyze them. But how, in what framework, and to what ends? Understanding photography as a journey, as a set of “itinerant languages,” is one way to respond to this challenge. The Itinerant Languages of Photography, edited by Eduardo Cadava and Gabriela Nouzeilles, offers itself as the product of a double voyage of conferences and workshops in different locations… Full Review

Selfies, Instagram feeds, photo tagging: whatever value we may have once placed on the privacy of our photographs seems gone forever. The incorporation of digital cameras into cell phones has created this condition, launching us into a post-camera, post-print era where we press the button and a messaging service does the rest. The “rest” is to render instantly our private moments into public documents that can be neither reversed nor regulated. As many critics of new media have proclaimed, it is the end of photography as we once practiced it and the end of privacy as we once felt it… Full Review