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Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective is an immersion into the richly complex vision of an artist—whose practice spanned painting, quilting, drawing, writing, and collecting—deeply attuned to the body as a site of resistance. On view at The Philadelphia Art Museum or PhAM (formerly The Philadelphia Museum of Art, PMA) from February 8 to June 1, 2025, the exhibition marked the third and final stop of its travelling tour, which offered audiences the fullest breadth of Ramberg’s (1946–1995) work to date. Ramberg was a pivotal member of the Chicago art scene before her untimely death at the age of 49, yet… Full Review

In Performing Vulnerability: Risking Art and Life in the Burmese Diaspora, Emily L. Hue focuses on the moment when Myanmar artists leave a relatively enclosed domestic art community, by choice or force, and are ejected into a world where they must brace against forces that she terms “the humanitarian industry” (3) and “the art market” (8). Hue writes that freedom of expression “can be fleeting” in these new environments “yet artists still work in the spirit of manifesting more,” countering assumptions that freedom awaits in Global South to Global North migrations (186). She frames her impressive project through the… Full Review

In 2023, Zimbabwean-born art historian Barnabas Ticha Muvhuti became the first recipient of the ARAK Collection Art Writing Residency in Qatar, where he got to interact with the ARAK collection of modern and contemporary African art. Abbreviated as ARAK after the collector AbdulRahman Al Khelaifi, the collection is arguably the most comprehensive collection of African art in the Middle East. The ARAK Collection features more than five thousand artworks by over three hundred fifty artists from countries south of the Sahara and is currently located in Doha. Chronicles of the Road: Five Nations, Five Artists is the culmination of the… Full Review

There are many intersecting contemporary art worlds. We are prone to miss some of the most vital aesthetic, cultural, and political functions of artists and their work when we train our eyes exclusively on the glittering circuit of global biennials and fairs. Here, the recontextualization of “outsiders” among the ranks of blue-chip artists, curators, and critics often eclipses the efficacy of art’s place-based affiliations. Eugenia Kisin’s book, Aesthetics of Repair: Indigenous Art and the Form of Reconciliation, builds a compelling picture of a globally networked regional Indigenous art world from within. The Northwest Coast of her study is long… Full Review

Within the last decade, an influential generation of Black American women artists who came of age in the 1960s has received long overdue recognition in major museums across the United States. Retrospectives of Betye Saar (2015), Howardena Pindell (2018), Emma Amos (2021), Faith Ringgold (2022), and Elizabeth Catlett (2024), as well as the groundbreaking show We Wanted A Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85 (2017), have brought scholarly and popular attention to a cohort of artists whose legacy endures in modern and contemporary art of the US. The spotlight on this generation continues to shine with Vivian Browne: My Kind of… Full Review

Museum exhibitions on the material and visual culture of the Crusades may offer accessible means to engage with the complexities of medieval Europe’s interactions around the Mediterranean. By presenting objects and narratives from the Crusading era, exhibitions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Jerusalem 1000–1400: Every People Under Heaven (2016–17) bridge scholarly research and public understanding, making a distant and contested geography materially and imaginatively tangible. They reveal the religious, political, and artistic forces that shaped the Crusades while inviting reflection on how European perceptions of the Holy Land were constructed and preserved. Through such curation, these exhibitions demonstrate… Full Review

The cover of this enticing publication features a seemingly simple painting by Rufino Tamayo (1899–1991) in which two slices of watermelon are reduced to bold, red semicircles; like bright smiles greeting you at a restaurant door, they invite the reader to devour the chapters inside, each named for characteristic categories on a Mexican menu. This clever framing gestures nicely to the seductive entanglement of art and food in postrevolutionary Mexico, which is here explored and exposed by Lesley Wolff in Culinary Palettes: The Visuality of Food in Postrevolutionary Mexican Art—a series of dynamic case studies bridging food studies, visual… Full Review

The first work that visitors to The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture encounter is Roberto Lugo’s DNA Study Revisited (2022), a resin life cast of the artist’s body painted in four different patterns that index Lugo’s mixed Taino, Spanish, African, and Portuguese ancestry. Standing before the title wall of the exhibition, the work serves as a vibrant and enigmatic initial example of what it can mean to inscribe race on the body and how artists can engage with racial identity. Cocurated by Karen Lemmy, Tobias Wofford, and Grace Yasumura, The Shape of Power brings together more… Full Review

During the eighteenth century, correspondence emerged as the predominant medium of communication, enabling the maintenance of long-distance relationships and the formation of new intellectual networks. For artists and connoisseurs in particular, letters served as a crucial space for critical debates. The circulation of ideas and information encouraged the development of new research and stimulated publishing initiatives. In Italy—where the cultural landscape was defined by strong polycentrism—this phenomenon was especially evident. Even in smaller towns, scholars reconstructed local art histories and made visible painters, sculptors, and architects who were previously excluded from critical discourse. In Bergamo, Giacomo Carrara emerged as the… Full Review

In 1951, when the experimental composer John Cage visited an anechoic chamber, a scientific room engineered to absorb resonance, at Harvard University, his ensuing narrative of that experience would shape the discourse of sound and silence in the decades to come. Famously, Cage became aware of two tones persisting beneath the absolute silence: the pulse of his nervous system at work and his blood circulating.  Beneath the surface of supposed silence, a field of experience erupts. Cage would go on to describe silence as “all sound, all the time” (“Experimental Music,” in Silence: Lectures and Writings, Wesleyan University Press, 1961… Full Review