Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews

A brainchild of former Getty Museum Director Michael Brand and scheduled to commemorate the bicentennial of Mexican independence from Spain, The Aztec Pantheon and the Art of Empire was the most ambitious exhibition undertaken by the Getty Villa since its reopening in 2006. A “museum and educational center dedicated to the study of the arts and cultures of ancient Greece, Rome, and Etruria” (according to its website), the Getty’s Roman-style villa proved a provocative and unexpectedly resonant site for the presentation of Aztec culture. One of the goals of the Spanish conquest (1519–21) was to loot this rich… Full Review

The Victoria and Albert Museum’s small but fascinating exhibition Raphael: Cartoons and Tapestries for the Sistine Chapel brought together four tapestries from the Vatican Museum’s famous ten-piece Acts of the Apostles set and seven of Raphael’s original full-scale designs for the weavings, which are housed at the V&A. The show offered an unprecedented opportunity to compare preparatory and final works, each a Renaissance masterpiece in its own right. In addition, a small group of drawings and prints related to the project, on loan from Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, the Louvre, and from the V&A’s own collection, focused attention on… Full Review

Two decades ago, a crowd of Afghanistan’s VIPs gathered at the Koti Bagcha in the Presidential Palace for an exclusive one-day showing of a small collection of the country’s rarest antiquities. The collections had been securely stored in the vaults below the Presidential Palace during the later years of the Soviet occupation (1979–89), owing to a group of concerned Afghan officials who organized their protection under the auspices of then-President Mohammad Najibullah. After the exhibition, the pieces were returned to the bank vaults and a year later the country was amid the throes of the Mujahideen civil war (1992–94). It… Full Review

The Pre-Raphaelite Lens: British Photography and Painting, 1848–1875, on view at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, was a concise and handsome exhibition that addressed an ambitious topic: the dynamic interaction between artistic media from the late 1840s until the 1870s. The artistic movement known as Pre-Raphaelitism provided the lens that focused this investigation. Photography was still in its first decade as public knowledge when the young artists who styled themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood met in London in 1848. Nevertheless, as Diane Waggoner, the associate curator in the Department of Photographs and organizing curator of the exhibition… Full Review

It makes perfect sense. Why wouldn’t George Lucas and Steven Spielberg champion and collect the art of Norman Rockwell? They’ve all shared enviable talents at telling engaging stories about the dreams that make ordinary people heroic. Their stories evoke feelings of nostalgia for an earlier time of innocence—a mythic construction at the heart of many popular narratives of the “American” experience. Indeed, Lucas and Spielberg have developed substantial collections of Rockwell’s paintings and large-scale preparatory drawings, which senior curator Virginia Mecklenburg organized in a stunning display of almost sixty works at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the exhibition’s… Full Review

June Wayne’s exhibition Narrative Tapestries: Tidal Waves, DNA, and the Cosmos symbolized her triumphant return to the city of her youth and marked the re-opening of the Art Institute of Chicago’s (AIC) permanent textile galleries after a five-year renovation. The show featured eleven out of twelve exquisite tapestries Wayne created in collaboration with three different French ateliers from 1970–74 led by the following artists: Pierre Daquin, Camille Legoueix, and Giselle Glaudin-Brivet. An exhibition catalogue accompanied the show with informative essays by Christa C. Mayer Thurman, curator emerita of the Department of Textiles at AIC, and Wayne, as well as high-quality… Full Review

The ancient Mexican civilization traditionally known as the Olmec, approximately 1800–400 BC, left a rich material record of its presence. Yet without written documentation, scholars are left to ponder both the origin of the Olmec and the specific cultural, spiritual, and political significance of the many, primarily stone, works excavated since the nineteenth century. Olmec: Colossal Masterworks of Ancient Mexico, a collaboration between the Instituto Nacional de Antropolgía e Historia, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, curated by Kathleen Berrin and Virginia Fields, included a selection of over 140 Olmec… Full Review

In the summer 2010 issue of Artforum, dedicated to “the museum revisited,” Kathy Halbreich, associate director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, shared the new standards she has brought to the museum’s program, prominent among them a desire to engage actively with “the issues that shape [their visitors’] lives,” enriching the viewer’s experience with “newly relevant” systems of “distribution and display” (Artforum 48, no. 10 [Summer 2010]: 278). Apparently her worthy mandate has not yet penetrated to the Edward Steichen Photography Galleries, where the exhibition Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography, organized by Roxana… Full Review

John Baldessari: Pure Beauty was an extensive retrospective composed of over 150 works created by the artist over the last 45 years. To access this exhibition on the Los Angeles County Museum of Contemporary Art (LACMA) campus, I walked through the Ahmanson Building, past EATLACMA, by the contemporary LA artist collective Fallen Fruit, down a set of stairs to cross beneath Smoke, Tony Smith’s soaring hexagonal 1967 sculpture, which quite literally fills the atrium. Exiting that building I walked out onto an outdoor pavilion still under construction, which, I noticed rather ironically, is called the BP Grand Entrance… Full Review

Physicists are poised to articulate a historic “theory of everything” that will tie together gravity, light, and all the rest of the stuff that makes up the universe as merely different manifestations of the same essential subatomic reality. Mark Dion is that rarest of artists whose body of work is arguing for a parallel aesthetic breakthrough: the revelation that not only are sculpture, painting, drawing, and the rest accepted forms of contemporary art, but so too are activities like historical research, interventions, publications, performances, relational aesthetics, collaboration, pedagogy, institutional critique, natural history, anthropology, cultural detritus, and satire, to name just… Full Review