Recently Published Reviews

Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power offers an expansive view of the depth and breadth of American art in the heady, dizzying years of black activism between 1963 and 1983. While the book accompanies the exhibition of the same name, it is less of an exhibition catalogue and more of a compendium of micro histories, essays, reflections, images, and memories of one of the most dynamic periods in the history of American art. A period when the politics of blackness drove a new generation of artists and spawned a flourish of creative advances, artistic alliances… Full Review

Based on manuscripts in the J. Paul Getty Museum’s collection, the one-room exhibition presented a well-defined overview of medieval ideas and depictions of prejudice and persecution. Even though the title of the exhibition contained the phrase “medieval world,” this was effectively the present-day world of Christians in western and central Europe in the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. This misnomer in the title does not distract from the nuanced treatment of the exhibition’s illuminated manuscripts, each with carefully chosen examples of themes such as (per the exhibition website Outcasts: Prejudice & Persecution in the Medieval World): ableism and classism… Full Review

Two art students get fed up with their teachers, hang together, and start making art on their own. They quit school, move to a hipper city, change hairstyles, and form an art commune. One of the duo dies young, the other marries, and their followers drift away, settle down, go commercial, and generally become the next generation’s object of loathing. The story would be banal were it not so early in the history of art. Founded in Vienna on July 10, 1809, by its “master” Friedrich Overbeck and “priest” Franz Pforr, the Brotherhood of St. Luke—nicknamed the Nazarenes because of… Full Review

“Nature is a Haunted House—but Art—a House that tries to be haunted,” Emily Dickinson writes in a letter to her confidant Thomas Wentworth Higginson. It is a laconic thought: clear as a bell in its expression, troubled as a knot in its concept. Who does the haunting? For some—Dickinson would surely count herself among them—nature bears the touch of its creation and is haunted by the leftover presence of the spirit that created it. But it is also part of Dickinson’s thought that we haunt nature; we pass through it, as insubstantial to it as it is implacable to us… Full Review

In her slim and concise “‘throat-clearing gesture’—the kind that introduces any inquiry with a series of queries and propositions that create an analytical space for thinking” (3), Tina Campt provides the theoretical accoutrements and methodologies necessary to contemplate what black refusal and resistance might sound like if we were to listen to images in addition to seeing them. A cogent combination of black feminist inquiry and diasporic visual culture, Listening to Images “reclaim[s] the photographic archives of precarious and dispossessed black subjects in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries by attending to the quiet but resonant frequencies of images that… Full Review

The topic of film festivals seems poised to be an emerging field of study, and Curating Africa in the Age of Film Festivals is dedicated to the festivals of Africa and to African film festivals elsewhere in the world, subjects not often considered fit for a book-length monograph. The book is also a contribution to African studies in general and to film and media studies. Author Lindiwe Dovey lets us know that she traveled to a large number of film festivals over the past twenty years, conducted interviews during these events with their organizers and filmmakers, and even engaged in… Full Review

The publication of Teotihuacan: City of Water, City of Fire and its accompanying exhibitions offers an extraordinarily comprehensive examination of one of the largest preindustrial cities in the world, its principal occupation lasting from 150 BCE to around 600 CE. Just as the ancient Mexican city drew people and resources from throughout Mesoamerica, the authors in the catalogue come from diverse nationalities and disciplines, and their essays synthesize explorations of Teotihuacan from the Aztecs to ongoing archaeological investigations. Those new to the wonders of this city as well as seasoned scholars of Teotihuacan will benefit from the text’s wide-ranging perspectives… Full Review

In recent decades, gender, and its role in the expression and construction of social identity and power, has emerged as an essential topic of inquiry in the study of ancient American cultures. Major breakthroughs have followed broader recognition that gender is fluid, historically contingent, and a focal point in the negotiation and contestation of power. Dressing the Part: Power, Dress, Gender, and Representation in the Pre-Columbian Americas contributes to this vital field by presenting a series of case studies that explore the ways in which the human body is concealed, revealed, adorned, and enhanced through costume to express, co-opt, or… Full Review

Some of the most inspiring contributions to the study of early modern art have been made by scholars not trained as art historians and not institutionally working in that discipline. Marc Fumaroli and Leo Bersani, to name but two examples, could not be more different in mindset, intellectual context, or political perspective, but both are literary historians who formulated profound, groundbreaking insights on the art of, respectively, Guido Reni and Michelangelo Merisi, also known as Caravaggio. Turf wars, and claims that one has to be an art historian in order to meaningfully talk about the visual arts, are, needless to… Full Review

Even readers unfamiliar with scholarship on the history of astronomy will quickly recognize Omar W. Nasim’s rich contributions to the field. Observing by Hands: Sketching the Nebulae in the Nineteenth Century convincingly articulates how pencil and paper paralleled the telescope as tools for astronomical observation. That astronomers’ routine paperwork has remained obscure to historians should come as no surprise. Private, unpublished notebooks often appear unintelligible, riddled with seemingly idiosyncratic information. Nasim masterfully proves this to be a misconception. The seemingly most monotonous behaviors necessitated by observational programs can yield, as Nasim shows, important information about conceptions of knowledge production and… Full Review

In Collective Situations: Readings in Contemporary Latin American Art, 1995–2010, editors Bill Kelley Jr. and Grant H. Kester bring together twenty-two texts that show artists carving out spaces for social action where others playing more conventional roles have failed. Art’s imaginative capacity, more than anything else, enables them to do this. But, as the documents in their enormously compelling and useful anthology demonstrate, art’s successes in affecting social and political change are often incomplete and almost always difficult to measure. Even so, the documents they gather attest to the power of art to create freedom and possibility within the… Full Review

What flight of fancy, delusion of grandeur, or insidious demonic force could tempt a contemporary author to write yet another book on Michelangelo (1475–1564)? The depth of Michelangelo’s genius has elicited sustained inquiry in modern art historical research for well over a century. One may ask, is there anything left to see or say? Bernadine Barnes’s new book entitled Michelangelo and the Viewer in His Time yields the answer yes on both counts. This book is not only worth reading, it has the necessary ingredients to remind contemporary Michelangelo scholars of a desirable style of writing and research that places… Full Review

Marking the centenary of the Russian Revolution, 2017 was a year rife with crises and controversies that cast 1917’s legacy as both strikingly familiar and impossibly remote. Alongside a rising tide of authoritarianism and Russia again donning the mantle of American adversary (with the charges led this time not by red-baiting conservatives, but by Democrats and liberal pundits seeking to remedy an election gone terribly wrong), alongside the ongoing fight for women’s rights and civil rights, for equal pay and a living wage, the twentieth century hardly seems to have come and gone, its passage marked instead by a return… Full Review

Marcus Milwright’s Islamic Arts and Crafts: An Anthology stakes an implicit—and sometimes explicit—claim for the place of objects and their production in the eastern Mediterranean and the larger Iranian world. Following the author’s work on a related topic, An Introduction to Islamic Archaeology (2010), it illustrates his mastery of written sources as well as the diverse materials, processes, and objects they discuss. With substantial scholarly apparatus in the form of notes, bibliography, index, and appendix, it will help shape the growing field of Islamic material culture as well as that of Islamic art. Milwright, in the introduction, makes clear the… Full Review

The exhibition Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA/Boston) helped to contextualize the history of the internet’s development in light of how it is shaping our interconnected present and, as a consequence, contemporary art practices. Importantly, the exhibition revolved around the concept that the internet is a cultural product. Such a concept is a fundamental step toward departing from the assumption that technological progress is neutral. The exhibition reflected on the fact that the internet has permeated other artistic practices. As consequence, not only new media art is… Full Review