Reviews of Recent Museum and Gallery Shows
Peacock Room REMIX: Darren Waterston’s Filthy Lucre Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Washington, DC, through January 2017 The Peacock Room by James McNeil Whistler is composed of a full room of elaborately decorated panels that were designed for Frederick R. Leyland, a British businessman and an art collector, for his London dining room in 1876. This […]
The Younger Generation: Contemporary Japanese Photography J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA October 26, 2015 – February 21, 2016 In the 1990s, critic Iizawa Kōtarō coined the phrase “girl photography” to refer to the work of young Japanese photographers who happened to be women. The Younger Generation: Contemporary Japanese Photography, on view at the […]
Alice in Wonderland British Library, London November 20, 2015 – April 17, 2016 The British Library has staged a free exhibition to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the publication of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), the now well-known story of Alice’s descent through a rabbit hole into a fantasy world inhabited by anthropomorphic […]
Camera Ottomana: Photography and Modernity in the Ottoman Empire, 1840-1914 Koç University Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations, Istanbul, Turkey April 21 – August 19, 2015 Camera Ottomana, curated by Zeynep Çelik, Edhem Eldem, and Bahattin Öztuncay, on display during the summer of 2015 at Koç University’s Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations (RCAC) on Istanbul’s bustling […]
Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College, 1933–1957 Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston October 10, 2015 – January 24, 2016 Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957, currently on view at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Boston, features an elite and eclectic collection of works important to American and European modernism in the fields […]
Ornament and Illusion: Carlo Crivelli of Venice Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston October 22, 2015 – January 25, 2016 The Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum of Boston, on the heels of last year’s outstanding show of sculptors’ drawings, has mounted another brilliant Renaissance exhibition: “Ornament and Illusion: Carlo Crivelli of Venice.” This monographic presentation, the first […]
Presented at Florence’s Palazzo Strozzi March 8 – July 20, 2014, the exhibition Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino: Diverging Paths of Mannerism offered an illustration of the equally divergent approaches taken by European and American scholars to the often controversial study of Mannerist painting. While American scholars frequently characterize the artifices of Mannerism as a diversion from […]
What will you leave behind when you die? This appeared to be the question asked in the recent mid-career retrospective Jim Hodges: Give More than You Take at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston (ICA). In organizing this exhibition, the ICA’s curators worked closely with Hodges to install artworks representative of nearly three decades […]
The newly installed Kunstkammer Gallery at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which opened on June 4, 2014 as part of the museum’s larger project to renovate the display of European art in the Evans Wing, aims to replicate for the modern viewer the dazzling experience of entering just such a space in the Renaissance […]