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The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art floats between several different visions of itself. Like any museum, how the institution envisions its mission and future will affect the way it builds its collections, installs its exhibitions, and otherwise engages with its publics. The purpose here is not to suggest preferred goals and objectives for Crystal Bridges, but to evaluate its success in achieving the goals it seems to claim in the museum’s inaugural exhibition from its permanent collection, Celebrating the American Spirit: Masterworks from the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. This sprawling exhibition fills five expansive galleries (including… Full Review

So much controversy has surrounded the creation of the Crystal Bridges Museum that it almost inevitably colors the perception of its remarkable new building in Bentonville, Arkansas. One of the causes, of course, is the origin of most of the museum’s enormous endowment: the Walmart fortune. Even a cursory Google search quickly reveals the fault lines of the debate: detractors point out the hypocrisy of financing a philanthropic high-culture celebration of American art from the profits of a corporation known for its poor labor practices, cheap disposable goods, and outsourcing of production to China. Apologists argue that the real reason… Full Review

Among the many pleasures involved in viewing Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series at the Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA) in Newport Beach, California, is the fact that this exhibition has come hard on the heels of State of Mind: New California Art circa 1970, a brainy, spirited exhibition that covered roughly the same time period and featured photographs, films and videos, performance documentation, and installation works representing the Conceptual art movement as it appeared in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay area. Galleries that had been filled with verbally oriented and often witty works that discarded… Full Review

The Art of Disegno: Italian Prints and Drawings from the Georgia Museum of Art, during its stop at the Crocker Art Museum, presented a panoramic display of drawing as an art form from the sixteenth to eighteenth century in Italy. It also included a fine selection of intaglio and woodcut prints. Drawn from the collection of Giuliano Ceseri—who has loaned his collection to the Georgia Museum of Art—and from the collection of the Georgia Museum, the exhibition, curated by Robert Randolf Coleman and Babette Bohn, presented a wide-ranging approach to works on paper from the period, and did so… Full Review

The newly commissioned, site-specific installation, Figura que defina su propio horizonte (Figure Who Defines His Own Horizon), by the Cuban-born artist José Bedia is an apt centerpiece to his career survey, Transcultural Pilgrim: Three Decades of Work by José Bedia. A diminutive figure in dark bronze—a trickster as well as a reference to the artist himself, with a horned head and smoking a cigarette—is chained by the ankle to a tree stump. The chain and stump are a restraint, but in the context of Bedia’s idiosyncratic iconography, they are also an umbilical or tether that links the artist to… Full Review

No Impressionist was more innovative than Edgar Degas. Oblique glimpses of dancers in limelight, candid vignettes of brothel mores, and roughshod runs over respectable standards of finish still provide grist to students of Degas, whether in the library or studio. At the same time, the grounding of his art in expertise at drawing the nude sets him apart as the most traditional of the Impressionist group. Thus, his discomfort with being called an Impressionist, after Degas’s associates adopted the name derisively coined in Louis Leroy’s satirical review of the 1874 exhibition of the Société anonyme des artistes peintres, sculpteurs, graveurs… Full Review

Their story is legendary in Miami. Don and Mera Rubell began collecting art in 1967, when they lived in New York City. Their modest budget came from Mera’s salary as a Head Start teacher, and their acquisitions strategy consisted largely of purchasing work that excited their passions. The untimely passing of Don’s brother, Steve Rubell, in 1989, left them with a considerable inheritance with which to expand their collecting, and in 1996, they opened the Rubell Family Collection to the public in their adopted home, Miami. The Rubell Family Collection pioneered a new institutional model of private art collections… Full Review

The Victoria and Albert Museum’s show Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970–1990 is an attempt to survey postmodernism as a design strategy rather than an epoch or paradigm of contemporary culture. Of course these elements prove difficult to separate, especially with regard to such a loaded term, employed by so many with intentions vast and diverse. The subtitle of the exhibition, Style and Subversion, is therefore important in its signal toward artistic innovation as a platform from which to think through poignant social and cultural transitions undertaken at the hands of architects, artists, and designers in a move away from… Full Review

As I entered the art galleries of the Oakland Museum of California (OMCA), a boy, maybe eight years old, sat leaning into his father. They were watching, intently, Will Rogan's video One Thing I Can Tell You Is You've Got to Be Free (2000). A quirky, deadpan ode to the art spirit, the six-minute loop sets an unpretentious tone for the reinstallation of the museum's permanent collection. In each of a series of eighteen vignettes, an object in motion—a bouncing ball, a paper airplane, a tossed shoe—flies into the frame toward an improbable target and makes a perfect landing. The… Full Review

During the 1920s and 1930s, Charlotte Perriand and Sonia Delaunay both sought to transform the field then known as the decorative arts by applying the formal innovations of modernism and the industrial innovations of capitalist production to the design and manufacture of domestic objects. The two women were roughly contemporaries, formed by the avant-garde milieu of Paris between the wars, and both are now seen most often through the lens of feminist art history, which is in part responsible for recovering their work from obscurity. Two concurrent exhibitions—one in Paris devoted to Perriand and one in New York surveying Delaunay—offered… Full Review