CAA News Today

Edith Wolfe visits Adam Pendleton: Becoming Imperceptible at the Contemporary Art Center in New Orleans.  The exhibition is “charged with a political urgency at odds with the artist’s restrained forms,” yet “the triumph—and challenge—of Pendleton’s language-based enquiries reside in their capacity to interrogate system and process as provocatively as they explore the African American experience.”  Read the full review at caa.reviews.

Erin M. Rice reviews African Textiles: The Karun Thakar Collection with contributions by Duncan Clarke and Miriam Ali-de-Unzaga. While “the text itself does not provide the groundbreaking research the authors call for, it does highlight parts of a collection with great potential for future in-depth, object-based research,” and “the book is superbly illustrated with quality, color photographs.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.

Elisa A. Foster reads Toledo Cathedral: Building Histories in Medieval Castile by Tom Nickson. The author “endeavors to untangle the complicated and often tacitly accepted ‘building history’ of the cathedral’s construction.” “A wonderfully interdisciplinary study,” the “impressive” volume “is a significant contribution to recent scholarship on medieval Spain as well as Gothic architecture more broadly.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.

Tirza True Latimer discusses the reopening of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Although the architecture, which “more than doubles” the galleries, offers “the tacit promises of disruption,” “the artworks exhibited in SFMOMA’s inaugural year are predominately canonical.” Only “time will tell what stories can be told and how the holdings can be differently expanded, displayed, and contextualized.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.