This month marks the opening of the first major Australian solo exhibition of Pierre Huyghe’s work at the TarraWarra Museum of Art, so today we revisit this review by Alex Bigman, who assesses the humor and mythology of Huyghe’s retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. This article was originally published on January 21, 2015. There is a scene in Pierre Huyghe’s shadowy, dreamlike film The Host and[…..]

“Memorials are the way people make promises to the future about the past.” Alice Greenwald, director of the National 9/11 Memorial Museum, reminds us that a memorial is as much how we describe who we are now as it is about a prior event. The 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina provides an opportunity to look back at a particular moment of disaster, injustice, upheaval, and[…..]

“Art” is a contentious word. Endless positing over any succinct, defining properties has spawned countless op-eds, theses, and textbooks. The topic is comparable to that of discussing religion in mixed company—differences of opinion have more than once drawn blood. The Great Debate About Art, currently on view at Upfor in Portland, Oregon, is a small group exhibition contextually centered on Roy Harris’ 2010 book of[…..]

Museums are constantly devising new platforms to present their permanent collections. Interventions and mining-the-museum have become commonplace curatorial strategies, and institutions frequently turn to contemporary artists to animate, recontextualize, and bring visibility to canonized cultural objects. Disguise: Masks and Global African Art is Seattle Art Museum’s latest attempt to draw connections across temporal, geographic, and cultural lines. Leveraging the museum’s collection of African masks, the[…..]

Novelist Don DeLillo once quipped, “California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of lifestyle. This alone warrants their doom.” This concept is the curatorial mission behind HA HA! BUSINESS!, currently on view at Luis de Jesus, Los Angeles. HA HA! BUSINESS! reprimands what it sees as a jingoistic and self-centered lifestyle—a world filled with social-media fiends who are willing to cut down the[…..]

CONSTRUCT\S: Installations by Asian Pacific American Women Artists at the Wing Luke Museum is a journey into the lives and minds of six artists who employ a range of media and creative tactics to explore sociocultural identity, familial history, and locality. The exhibition does not claim to be a comprehensive survey of “Asian Pacific American art.” Rather, it provides an array of entry points into[…..]

The desire to create forms via chance and natural phenomena is reflected in the works in Alyson Shotz: Force of Nature at Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in Charleston, South Carolina. Despite a disparate range of formats, including porcelain sculpture, complex wire installations, and color aquatints, this exhibition brings together a wide array of works that originate from a process-based practice and share connections to[…..]