Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews

Growing up in Florida, I’ve always felt how easily the landscape becomes a screen for other people’s fantasies—a place that sells light and illusion in equal measure. The exhibition Anastasia Samoylova / Walker Evans: Florida, which brings together over fifty works spanning nearly a century, places two visions in dialogue: Evans, with his steady, unsentimental eye on a mid-century Florida still being carved by migration, tourism, and quiet labor; and Samoylova, capturing a hyper-saturated, fractured terrain on the brink—a Florida unraveling under its own image. What strikes me in seeing their work together isn’t just how time has shifted… Full Review

Guest curated by Rigoberto Luna on exhibition at the Tucson Museum of Art (TMA), Ya Hecho: Readymade in the Borderlands; Ya Hecho: Confeccionado en las Tierras Fronterizas centers on the politically fraught landscape of the US-Mexico border. Amplifying the symbolic potential of materials, the exhibition draws from the assemblage aesthetic of rasquachismo, a Chicano style embodying resilience, as well as the underlying concept of the Duchampian readymade. The use of the term readymade serves as a form of material shorthand referencing the found objects utilized in the artworks. However, thematically, the exhibition more directly engages in the class… Full Review

Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective is an immersion into the richly complex vision of an artist—whose practice spanned painting, quilting, drawing, writing, and collecting—deeply attuned to the body as a site of resistance. On view at The Philadelphia Art Museum or PhAM (formerly The Philadelphia Museum of Art, PMA) from February 8 to June 1, 2025, the exhibition marked the third and final stop of its travelling tour, which offered audiences the fullest breadth of Ramberg’s (1946–1995) work to date. Ramberg was a pivotal member of the Chicago art scene before her untimely death at the age of 49, yet… Full Review

In 1951, when the experimental composer John Cage visited an anechoic chamber, a scientific room engineered to absorb resonance, at Harvard University, his ensuing narrative of that experience would shape the discourse of sound and silence in the decades to come. Famously, Cage became aware of two tones persisting beneath the absolute silence: the pulse of his nervous system at work and his blood circulating.  Beneath the surface of supposed silence, a field of experience erupts. Cage would go on to describe silence as “all sound, all the time” (“Experimental Music,” in Silence: Lectures and Writings, Wesleyan University Press, 1961… Full Review

Traveling from the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), LA to the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Chicago, by way of the Guggenheim Bilbao, Paul Pfeiffer’s Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom spans over twenty-five years of photography, video, and sound sculpture, foreshadowing questions of representation in the age of AI. Pfeiffer’s sizable retrospective arrives at a moment where populism, nationalism, and digitally mediated beliefs dictate the shape of American life. Mapping his own biographical, social, and psychological histories through mass spectacle and celebrity culture, the artist interrupts the symbolic capital of professional sports… Full Review

Southern/Modern: Rediscovering Southern Art from the First Half of the Twentieth Century, on view at the Mint Museum, offers a compelling account of the flourishing artistic environment in the Southern United States during the first half of the twentieth century. Historically, modernist art has largely been tied to the major centers of the United States and Europe. In recent decades, however, scholars have increasingly acknowledged the multiplicity of modernist impulses in the visual arts, emphasizing the powerful cross-currents of modernist practices that emerged concurrently across the globe, including within previously ignored geographies like the Global South. Yet, despite the… Full Review

Younès Rahmoun: Here, Now, currently on view at the Smith College Museum of Art (SCMA), is the Moroccan artist’s first retrospective exhibition held in North America. True to Rahmoun’s multidisciplinary and expansive practice, Here, Now is comprised of four different installations on Smith College’s campus. Younès Rahmoun: Here, Now begins on the first-floor gallery of Smith College Museum of Art (SCMA), where visitors are introduced to Rahmoun’s artistic career and biography. One of the first sections in the gallery presents archival materials, such as sketches and notes in both Arabic and French, documenting Rahmoun’s artistic… Full Review

“Why in Seattle?” a reporter asked Ai Weiwei at the press conference. “Why not?!” he answered. This brief interaction stayed with me no less profoundly than the aura of the actual works representing Ai’s decades-long activism. A few weeks later, I began to demystify that “why not?!”: it could be only a matter of time before the sociopolitical climate changes dramatically even in the most liberal corners of the world, such as Seattle. In that sense, refreshing our collective memory through projects that expose the many forms of power abuse is, at the very least, something we should do. This… Full Review

The subtitle of Vincent Valdez’s mid-career retrospective at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Just a Dream . . . , summons a disenchanting fall to reality. It is a phrase one may invoke to create emotional distance from potential disappointment—“It’s just a dream”—or to downplay such disappointment after the fact—“It was just a dream.” But devoid of a preceding subject and verb, the phrase remains referentially and temporally enigmatic. Like Valdez’s art, it looks simultaneously to the past, present, and future. Moreover, the would-be trivializing finality of the fragmentary statement is deferred by an ellipsis. These three dots deny the comfort… Full Review

The shifting soil, the receding water, and the chirping birds—echoes of a landscape etched by the relentless passage of time—guide us through the small gallery where fragility becomes perceptible, taking up a sensory presence. This first work in the exhibition, Points of Confluence: In Between the Island and the Desert, is a sound collaboration between the artists in the two-person exhibition Muddy Terrains: Mariana Ramos Ortiz + Estephania González, featuring San Juan-based Mariana Ramos Ortiz and Phoenix-based Estephania González. In this show at the Arizona State University Art Museum, the transient and delicate nature of our environment is… Full Review