Action/Abstraction at the Jewish Museum (-Sept. 21)
"...fast-moving ...exceedingly handsome if somewhat peripatetic ...not so much a historical survey as a series of lavishly illustrated talking points. It proceeds through various pairings and groupings that illuminate who [Clement] Greenberg and [Harold] Rosenberg promoted or ignored, where they differed or overlapped. ... The first gallery is a tour de force in itself. It lays out Abstract Expressionism’s greatest artistic rivalry in four works by Pollock and three by De Kooning." - Roberta Smith/NYTimes
Philip Guston at the Morgan Library (-Aug. 31)
"...a spellbinding survey... thrilling ...joyful graphic invention. ... They may appear Neanderthal, but they are the products of a sophisticated performance, a kind of method acting. The mandarin playing the stumblebum with passionate, Brando-esque conviction." - Ken Johnson/NYTimes
Paul Chan at the New Museum (-June 29)
"Chan is a paragon of 'good' politics (anti-war, pro-labor), but I suspect that writers and curators also like him because he's well-read. ... Poeticism and beauty are leavened here with specters of violence. But The 7 Lights feels more minor than momentous. ... the colorless shadow-images register either as heavy-handed symbols or as confused emblems that look intermittently comic and somber." - Martha Schwendener/Village Voice
George Lois: The Esquire Covers at the MoMA (-March 31, 2009)
"The show looks a little like a tidied-up version of a great many college dorm rooms back in the ’60s. ... What was remarkable then — and seems even more so now, when virtually every magazine cover is a thicket of text lines running behind or on top of one celebrity or another — is that the Lois covers were virtually textless. They achieved their effect by communicating a single idea through an image." - Charles McGrath/NYTimes
Tomma Abts at the New Museum (-June 29)
"...a Turner Prize–winning painter whose mini-canvasses, fourteen of which are on view at the ever-improving New Museum, could break your brain with all the rays and zigs and zags. Sometimes, like here, all this gushing abstract paint reminds us of those POW!s in the old Batman TV show — or the Bat Signal itself; other times, layers of limes and pinks painted in tidy swirls and chunky squares evoke tasty fruit, like a drippy watermelon or gentle slices of lemon." - Emma Pearse/NY Mag.
Flow at the Studio Museum in Harlem (-June 29)
"...each is immersed in a diasporic African artistic tradition whose contribution to world culture has been immeasurable... Along with issues of personal and collective identity, this anti-colonial motif weaves its way through 'Flow'...notable for its resourceful handling of diverse materials—traditional or contemporary, African or not, artistic and otherwise. ...art responds with an element of creative affirmation." - Alan Gilbert/Village Voice
Barbara Mensch at the South Street Seaport Museum (-April 15)
"...a photographer who devoted years to documenting the lives of the men who worked along the piers, pays tribute to that tradition, not long gone yet seeming already to be an element of the city’s mythic past. ... 'Mensch’s photographs sometimes give the impression of dating from another, much earlier era, although she used no antiquing tricks to achieve that effect: it is simply that the tribe she portrays seems a throwback,' Mr. [Phillip] Lopate wrote. 'Their faces and bodies express an almost ancient awareness of the price that must be paid to be a man, to hold one’s ground, especially in a society less and less respectful of working-class culture.'" - Sewell Chan/NYTimes
Shaker Design at the Bard Graduate Center
"...the Shaker world was not the stripped-down domain we imagine, but rather a polychrome environment. To that end, the gallery floor is painted yellow, a color common in Shaker rooms, and a few pieces bear other original hues. ... this exhibition is the most important New York presentation of Shaker design since the Whitney Museum’s 1986 survey." - Brian Sholis/ArtForum
Arte ≠ Vida: Actions by Artists of the Americas at the Museo Del Barrio
"The exhibition examines performance art by seventy-five artists of Caribbean, Latino, and Latin American descent... The exhibition’s premise about the near miss of art and life runs evenly throughout, provoking new questions about the histories of performance art." - Courtney J. Martin/Art Forum
Darwin’s Garden at the New York Botanical Garden (-June 15)
"....a stunning, multipart exhibition... Though most people associate that book and Darwin’s ideas generally with his voyage to the Galápagos and his study of finches there, his work with plants was far more central to his thinking..." - Cornelia Dean/NYTimes
Couples at the Islip Art Museum (East Islip, NY) (-June 2)
"...assembling the work of six couples and inviting viewers to deduce which artist is paired with which. ... Perhaps it's the delicacy of the museum's sensibility that prevented it from including any homosexual relationships and seeing what dynamic that produced. ... But it might have been interesting to include some variety in lifestyle as well as in artistic style." -
Origami at the Parrish Art Museum (Southampton, NY) (-June 22)
"...nearly 100 works by some of the world's star paper-folders, highlighting both the broad diversity of their technique and the vast range of their variations. The exhibit, organized by the Mingei International Museum in San Diego, Calif., created a sensation when it opened in 2003, obliging the museum to extend its run from three to 18 months. The work, almost exclusively by living artists, feels both eternal and strikingly modern, with one foot in a fabled past and the other firmly in the present." - Ariella Budick/Newsday
Mike's World at the ICA Philly (-Aug. 3)
"If Mike's World makes you think Wayne's World, you're not so far off. Like L for Loser. ...from that slightly uncomfortable place, he finds the satirical edge of what's truly loopy, capturing trends, tastes, the conventional wisdom of moments in time, at once archiving them and turning them all against themselves. ...this is a serio-comic exploration of the American Dream." - Libby Rosof/Artblog
Lawrence Weiner at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA (L.A.) (-July 14)
"Weiner at his most provocative creates an egalitarian field of thought and feeling. His work is radically subjective. Its meaning belongs to anyone who encounters it, inside a museum or out on the street... Despite the elegance of individual works, the career-long accumulation of about 100 texts, along with lots of posters, books and multiples, can make for a sometimes clamorous environment." - Christopher Knight/LA Times
Jan Fabre at the Louvre (Paris) (-July 7)
"Seriously, what is the Louvre thinking of? The commissioner in charge, Marie-Laure Bernadac, explained that they want to use contemporary art to attract younger people, and also to liven up some of the less-visited galleries. ... The whole place begins to feel like some dusty theatrical props storeroom and the great paintings on the walls are reduced to just another form of prop. It is sad. And what is really sad is that in a few years time, the Louvre will probably say: 'Oh, we tried having contemporary art and it didn't work.' Whereas what they should really say is: 'Why on earth did we choose Jan Fabre?'" - Lynn Barber/The Observer
"...you may be more confused than enlightened. The ponderous explanations, prattling about death and resurrection, sacrifice and metamorphosis, are of little help. One inscription on the wall reads (in English): 'Only Acts of Poetic Terrorism.' Could this be the secret motto of the show?" - Jorg von Uthmann/Bloomberg
Blue at the Textile Museum (Washington, D.C.) (- Sept 18)
"The 'Blue' show is not a blockbuster. The Textile Museum isn't into blockbusters. Its mood is rather sweet, miniature, old-fashioned; the brash new Newseum could swallow the little Textile Museum at a gulp. ... Its real theme is indigo. But the show's reflections on blueness are enough to invite your thoughts to riff." - Paul Richard/Washington Post
Monumental Prints in the Age of Durer and Titian at Wellesley College (Wellesley, MA) (-June 8)
"...beginning in the late 15th century, artists stretched the technical boundaries of woodcuts, engravings, and etchings with multipage prints that rival tapestries and easel paintings in size and drama. ... Woodcuts' complicated technique can sometimes make them seem, well, wooden. But here the lines become gestural, and as big, sinewy, and flowing as the sea's tempest." - Greg Cook/Boston Globe
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