Recently Published Reviews

Jane Jin Kaisen: Parallax Conjunctures, the first solo exhibition in the United States by the South Korean–born visual artist and filmmaker (Danish, b. 1980), presented three media works that uncover repressed histories of postwar Korea and its diaspora. Two video installations, The Woman, the Orphan, and the Tiger (2010) and Sweeping the Forest Floor (2020), were presented on either side of the exhibition hall, and a photographic installation Apertures | Specters | Rifts (2016) was mounted in the center. Comprising an array of various historical references, political innuendos, and temporalities spanning the past hundred years, each work crafted a narrative… Full Review

Visitors facing the entrance to Envisioning Evil: “The Nazi Drawings” by Mauricio Lasansky are offered only one glimpse of what they can expect if they choose to enter: a decorated Nazi officer raises his arm in a Hitler salute while blood-like drops fall from his wrist and smear the page. On his head is a terrifying bestial skull that appears both fixed and projected on the man’s scalp. A close look reveals smudges, partial erasures, hard pencil strokes, and tears to the paper. This work is steeped in rage. Mauricio Lasansky’s (1914–2012) torment is on full display upon entering the… Full Review

The 1960s are often art historicized as a period when artists began to shift their practices away from materiality and toward forms of abstract thought. According to the economist-turned-art-historian Sophie Cras, it also turns out to have been a decade when financial abstraction came to the forefront, and not just for artists who suddenly found themselves flung from the garret into a boom market, but for the public as a whole, heralding a cultural obsession with inflation, speculation, and arbitrage. Across the Cold War West, and specifically in the France and United States explored by Cras, this was a time… Full Review

At a 1993 festival in Timisoara, four years after protests in the city sparked a nationwide revolution that overthrew the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaușescu and his Romanian Communist Party, the artist Dan Perjovschi tattooed the word “Romania” on his left arm. Ten years later, in Removing Romania (2003), Perjovschi underwent laser treatment to erase the national label from his skin. This process, the artist explains, did not so much remove the ink as disperse its pigmented molecules throughout his body. Traces of Romania remained embedded in his cells and tissue, invisible but ever present. On the one hand, Perjovschi’s… Full Review

This pathbreaking volume features nineteen substantial research studies that burrow deep into individual examples of the physical, geographical, aesthetic, philosophical, political, and historical circumstances that led to the creation, appreciation, alteration, destruction, restoration, reassembly, and constant reinterpretation of sculpture produced in fifteenth-century Italy. While these essays are all clearly addressed to fellow Renaissance scholars, a remarkable twentieth essay, the introduction by coeditors Amy R. Bloch and Daniel M. Zolli, provides an overview of the field that is so highly accessible and original in the range of media and topics addressed that it should become standard reading for both advanced undergraduates… Full Review

In the past few decades, design history has productively turned toward investigations of gender. Partly as a result of this emphasis, proportionately little attention has been paid to issues of race in the United States. This lacuna has become painfully salient in the wake of the protests sparked across the nation following the murder of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer in the summer of 2020. Kristina Wilson’s Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Power in Design serves as a timely corrective. Integrating themes of race and gender—and noting their… Full Review

Crafting America, an expansive exhibition organized by Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, explored the role of craft within the broader field of post–World War II creative production in the United States. The first room posed the exhibition’s organizing question: “What is Craft?” In the spaces that followed, the curators answered by means of more than a hundred objects by ninety-eight artists that provided a rich understanding of craft as an array of strategies of making. Some of the works remained comfortably within traditional approaches to the category, while others took a more experimental and politically… Full Review

As its title suggests, ReVisión: Art in the Americas seeks to revise traditional approaches to the visual history of the Americas and provide a distinct perspective. Its principal method for doing so is to challenge the separate treatment in scholarship and museum practices of visual production from before and after the arrival of Europeans in Latin America—specifically, by collapsing chronology and showing works of ancient, colonial, modern, and contemporary Latin American art side by side in a thematic presentation. As curators Victoria Lyall and Jorge Rivas Pérez state in the exhibition’s catalog, rather than seeking to present a “comprehensive history… Full Review

Some might caution that writing a book focused almost entirely on unbuilt projects by a lesser-known architect of the modernist movement would be tantamount to relegating one’s work to the margins of scholarship. However, using this exact formula is what makes Ana María León’s Modernity for the Masses: Antonio Bonet’s Dreams for Buenos Aires the valuable contribution to architectural history and Latin American studies that it is. Focused on the intersection of spatial politics and the politics of the Argentine state through the lens of Catalan architect Antonio Bonet, León reveals the intertwined histories of modern architecture and statecraft through… Full Review

What is the value of staging an exhibition on Land art in the 2020s? The Nevada Museum of Art (NMA) in Reno posed this question over a year’s worth of programming on the topic during an acute year of climate crisis. Reno sits at the crossroads of two major ecosystems: the Great Basin and the Sierra Nevada. It is the third-largest city in a state where 80 percent of the land is nominally public while its extractive economy is decidedly privatized. Land art, too, historically embraces such complexity. The 1960s-born genre originally claimed its removal from commercial art… Full Review

Judy Chicago’s smoke-and-fireworks performance Forever de Young, on October 16, 2021, drew thousands of people to Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. This site-specific performance was planned in conjunction with Chicago’s first retrospective exhibition, held at the de Young Museum. The early fall day was beautiful, and the number of new COVID-19 cases had dipped, lending the outdoor gathering an upbeat aura. Expectation built for the crowd as Thomas Campbell, director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Claudia Shmuckli, the museums’ curator of contemporary art; Jordan Schnitzer, sponsor of the exhibition; and Judy Chicago herself each… Full Review

In Latinx Photography in the United States: A Visual History, Elizabeth Ferrer highlights the contributions of Latinx individuals to the history of American photography. Loosely defined as a term whose genesis resides in ethnic, linguistic, and class-based systems of identification, “Latinx” quickly turns into an exhortation to abandon the implicitly exclusionary structures of language through an affirmative, gender-neutral, and inclusive form of self-identification. With this claim, the author intervenes in the historiography of the medium by calling for more inclusive narratives. The book is illustrated with emblematic images of aesthetic and historical value and provides more than eighty biographical… Full Review

It has now been some time since historians and critics began to seriously attempt a definition of contemporary art understood not simply as the art produced today but as a historical phenomenon. Beginning in the second half of the 2000s, scholars including Terry Smith, Amelia Jones, Peter Osborne, and Richard Meyer offered analyses of this phenomenon, exploring its relationship to modernism, its philosophical underpinnings, and its aesthetic characteristics—insofar as aesthetic considerations can still be considered to play a role in its definition. Octavian Esanu’s The Postsocialist Contemporary serves as both a deepening of these previous efforts and a methodological and… Full Review

Reading Joseph C. Williams’s Architecture of Disjuncture feels both like stepping back into familiar architectural-historical territory and peering forward to the exhilarating advances heralding the discipline’s future; in this sense, it is very much a product of the current slow but inexorable transitioning of the study of medieval architecture to the digital age. The book is devoted to the meticulous scrutiny of a single building, the Romanesque cathedral of Molfetta, Apulia, Italy, via the implementation of a diverse array of research methodologies ranging from the hands-on examination of the building fabric with the aid of modern technology to the reconsideration… Full Review

The title of this study of early Florentine book printing calls to mind two classic texts: Martin Wackernagel’s The World of the Florentine Renaissance Artist: Projects and Patrons, Workshop and Art Market (1938) and Lauro Martines’s The Social World of the Florentine Humanists, 1390–1460 (1963). All three books describe the conditions of cultural production in quattrocento Florence in the context of government structures, family ties, trade alliances, innovation, and patronage. Artisans, merchants, and humanists emerge as members of social groups that shaped their lives and professions. Lorenz Böninger’s study contextualizes early book printing in Florence as an investment opportunity that… Full Review