Reviews of Recent Museum and Gallery Shows
The Shed, New York, NY February 11–April 17, 2022 by Sarah-Rose Hansen Over the course of the eight galleries in Tomás Saraceno’s Particular Matter(s) exhibition, which was on view through mid-April at The Shed in midtown Manhattan, three separate moments introduce lighting shifts that are likely to cause the viewer to pause for pupillary adaptation. […]
Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA March 4–July 31, 2022 by Renée Brown In 1964 German artist Anneliese Hager (1904–1997) published a book of her poems and photograms entitled Weiße Schatten (White Shadows). Released in an edition of fifty-five, each volume has a unique cover featuring a full-bleed photogram by Hager (fig. 1). The layered black […]
MASS MoCA April 4, 2021–September 5, 2022 by Max Gruber Viewers were led by gallery attendants into a vast hall shrouded in darkness. A grave silence coated the space, broken only by anticipatory coughing, shuffling, and the knowledge that the resonant sound of Glenn Kaino’s installation was about to begin. Short, brilliant infusions of light […]
Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston, ON September 4, 2021—June 12, 2022 by Hailey Chomos In March 2020, the COVID-19 virus spread like wildfire. We retreated into our homes for what was promised to be a few weeks of lockdown; it was our duty to stay home in order to protect ourselves and others. More than […]
ICA Watershed, Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston July 3—September 6, 2021 by Colleen Foran Since 2018, the Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston (ICA) has annually commissioned a site-specific installation for the Watershed, its outpost in East Boston.1 This year’s exhibition highlighted the work of Dominican-American artist Firelei Báez (b. 1981). Báez’s family had roots […]
The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH November 1, 2020–March 14, 2021 by Diane Dias De Fazio Second Careers: Two Tributaries in African Art connected canonical works from western and central Africa to works from contemporary artists active in Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, and Mozambique, whose use of repurposed materials echoes practices of the past.1 […]
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA October 18, 2020–July 25, 2021 by Marina Wells The sounds of Billie Holiday, Beastie Boys, and The Clash bumped pleasantly in the background of the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), Boston’s exhibition Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation, curated by Liz Munsell and Greg Tate. Though the […]
Pablo’s Birthday, New York September 17–October 25, 2020 by J. English Cook In his elegiac ruminations in The Poetics of Space (1958), Gaston Bachelard describes the intimate, sensuous associations that we often apply to the notion of home. Unexpectedly, his prose foreshadowed the confrontations between emotional and architectural interiority in our contemporary pandemic times. “Memories […]
Shelter in Place Gallery, Boston October 6–9, 2020 by Shannon Bewley Jessica Burko’s latest sculptural installation at Shelter in Place Gallery (SIP) in Boston, Massachusetts, consisted of assemblages of found furniture and photographs (fig. 1). Her stacked vintage dresser drawers leaned against the gallery walls. Red and blue drawers provided a pop of color among […]
The Morgan Library & Museum, New York City January 31–September 13, 2020 by J. Cabelle Ahn Architects and scholars Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown introduced the idea of the “duck” and the “decorated shed” in their influential and controversial publication Learning from Las Vegas (1972).1 These two rivaling concepts speak to the continuity and […]