Reviews

Mickalene Thomas: More Than Everything

Lehmann Maupin Gallery - New York
By Anne Swartz
Even as she works in a range of media, Mickalene Thomas’s signature is clear and evident in her recent show at Lehmann Maupin Gallery on New York City’s Lower East Side. She’s looking at a bright view of the world and digesting a range of sources: [...]

The Dialectic City [Document|Context]

Laboratorio de Artes Binarios (LAB) - Santurce, Puerto Rico
Curated by Carla Acevedo-Yates
By María Arlette de la Serna
This exhibition reminds me that big cities invite us-almost force us-to experience opposites simultaneously. Coming myself from one of the largest and most populous cities in the world, I know that the relationship between a city and its citizens [...]

The Art of Hacking

NIMk - Amsterdam
The Attitude of Hacking: More Than Just Cracking.
By Caridad Botella
“The Art of Hacking,” on exhibition at the Nederlands Instituut voor Mediakunst (NIMk) in Amsterdam, explores the artistic side of hacking, taken as an attitude instead of a crime. This mode of interfering with existing systems often generates negative reactions that make [...]

Maurizio Cattelan: All

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum - New York
By Anne Swartz
I went to this exhibition expecting to hate it, jaded as I was by past visits to see Cattelan’s work. Imagine my surprise when I found myself amused and engaged by the installation of 132 of his works from the central rotunda ceiling in the [...]

Doublespeak

Salt Lake Art Center - Utah
Curated by Micol Hebron
By Cara Despain
Using the shrewdly crafted writing of Hồ Xuân Hương, a revered 19th-century Vietnamese poetess, as a springboard, “Doublespeak” aims to examine female contemporary artists through tropes used historically by women to communicate: double entendre, coding and metaphor. In patriarchal/oppressive societies, women used such means to [...]

You Are All Individuals!

Castrum Peregrini - Amsterdam
Curated by Nina Folkersma
By Paco Barragán
One of the promotion clips of the show “You Are All Individuals!” showcases the famous scene from Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979) in which Brian, who is mistaken for the Messiah and tired of people following him, shouts out loud from the window: “You don’t need [...]

Pedro Reyes: Baby Marx

Walker Art Center - Minneapolis
Curated by Bartholomew Ryan and Camille Washington
By Regan Golden-McNerney
The protagonists in Baby Marx are an unlikely duo-Adam Smith and Karl Marx reincarnated as wooden puppets. Baby Marx is the title of artist Pedro Reyes’ in-progress video, as well as his exhibition at the Walker Art Center that transforms the gallery into [...]

Stan VanDerBeek: The Culture Intercom

Contemporary Art Museum - Houston
Curated by Bill Arning and Joao Ribas
“Only a country that feels invulnerable can afford political turmoil as entertainment.”
-Lionel Shriver
By Garland Fielder
The culture of infotainment that currently reigns supreme in America has tentacles reaching far into the past. The yellow journalism that passes for news spewed forth nightly on cable channels has [...]

Where Do We Migrate To?

Center for Art and Visual Culture. University of Maryland - Baltimore
Curated by Niels van Tomme

By J.W. Mahoney
Visual artists have, for many centuries, been readily useful as the only capable recorders of the visual character of their times - in cultural, natural, or social contexts. The artist Jacques Le Moyne made the only extant visual records [...]

We Are Grammar

Pratt Manhattan Gallery - New York
Curated by Dave Beech and Paul O’ Neill

By Jeff Edwards
The survey of recent text art “We Are Grammar” is deeply indebted to Lawrence Weiner’s 1968 Declaration of Intent, particularly its assertion that a work of art need not be built. Many of the pieces in the show owe the lion’s [...]