Recently Published Reviews

El arte antes de la historia: Para una historia del arte andino antiguo (Art before history: For a history of ancient Andean art) is an ambitious edited volume emerging out of an equally ambitious 2016 conference. The conference, co-organized by the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú and University of California, Berkeley, brought together a diverse group of international scholars in Lima for three days. The book features essays that emerged from talks presented at the conference, and also integrates additional essays by a few authors who did not participate in the 2016 events. The goal of the volume is to… Full Review

Co-organized by Maine’s Portland Museum of Art and Atlanta’s High Museum of Art, David Driskell: Icons of Nature and History surveys almost seven decades of Driskell’s art practice across painting, printmaking, and collage. Curator Julie L. McGee gathered lesser- and well-known works created between 1953 and 2011 with a keen interest in highlighting David Driskell (1934–2020) as an artist, a lifelong occupation eclipsed at times by his outsize influence as a scholar of American and African American art. The inimitable Driskell inhabited a colorful life as a groundbreaking art historian, curator, professor, and collector dedicated to chronicling artists of African… Full Review

Context always matters in the perception and reception of art, but in the case of annual or biennial exhibitions designed to take the pulse of a particular place at a particular time, context is crucial. Made in L.A. 2020: a version was, through no fault of its own, vexed in this regard. Between the show’s organization and its opening to the public, delayed by nearly a year, the political and social landscape of Los Angeles and the nation as a whole shifted radically with the killing of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and too many others, the rise of the Black… Full Review

Throughout the entire text of Eloquent Bodies, we encounter Jacqueline E. Jung’s tactile, sensual delight in sculpture and her awareness of the role played by the viewer’s presence in space. Her study fits well with the flourishing world of sensory studies, yet is still deeply invested in the exploration of the cultural production of art. Although she presents a study of objects by analyzing their “presence effects,” Jung retains a deep commitment to their “meaning effects.” Her analysis also brings us into contact with the work of many scholars, including the pioneers who first brought the sculptures to our… Full Review

As viewers enter Carolina Caycedo’s solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago, they are greeted by a sculptural ofrenda, or offering, that suspends in absolute stillness from the ceiling. Composed of vibrantly colored fishing nets that stack to form a conical-shaped tent or skirt, the sculpture Limen (2019) welcomes viewers with the scent of fresh flowers that hang almost at their feet. Reminiscent of the Mexican marigolds seen in Día de los Muertos altars, red, yellow, and orange flowers rest on a wooden gold-panning bowl suspended from the sculpture, evoking the greed of colonial… Full Review

With the global turn in early modern studies, more and more work has been done to understand better the artistic exchanges between distant lands. Questions of taste and appropriation and explorations of how art objects functioned as diplomatic gifts have been probed, though mostly with a Eurocentric focus. Italy has, in many of these studies, maintained its (anachronistic) primacy as artistic interlocutor with the world, and Florence (and, by necessity, the Medici) its identity as the umbilicus mundi of early modern art. This persists, despite the fact that other areas in and beyond Italy had more political, social, and artistic… Full Review

Darryl Dickson-Carr writes, “African American satire’s earliest purpose in both oral and written form was to lampoon the (il)logic of chattel slavery and racism itself” (African American Satire: The Sacredly Profane Novel, University of Missouri Press, 2001). Despite the power of Black satire, there are few comprehensive studies of it. The early twenty-first century saw the publication of several books, including Dickson-Carr’s and Dana Williams’s edited collection of essays, African American Humor, Irony, and Satire (Cambridge Scholars, 2007). More recently Danielle Fuentes Morgan has published Laughing to Keep from Dying: African American Satire in the Twenty-First Century (University… Full Review

In Heritage and Debt: Art in Globalization, David Joselit seeks to remedy the biases that have prevented art historians working in the United States and Europe from recognizing the complex ways in which artists operating on the so-called periphery have invoked references to traditional culture. His endgame is to demonstrate how artists engage with heritage to produce work whose contemporaneity is posited in its response to the geopolitics of globalization. Joselit does this by asking how tradition has been put to contemporary uses by artists from regions that include Africa, Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe… Full Review

Art historical studies of Preclassic sculpture in Mesoamerica have long noted a “homocentric” focus on the representation of the human body. In her pioneering study of Olmec stone monuments, Los Hombres de la Piedra (Universidad Autónoma de Mexico, 1977), Beatríz de la Fuente dubbed their creators “the men of stone,” referencing a cultural predilection for sculpting near life-size human bodies in both two and three dimensions. Julia Guernsey returns us to a consideration of human bodies as the dominant subject of Preclassic art in Human Figuration and Fragmentation in Preclassic Mesoamerica, managing to both dramatically expand the field… Full Review

The Czech Surrealist known as Toyen (née Marie Čermínová, 1902–1980) has too long been relegated to the margins of the movement. Interest in her art grew after her death, spearheaded by a 1982 Centre Georges Pompidou retrospective devoted to her work alongside that of her Czech friends and collaborators Jindřich Štyrský and Jindřich Heisler, as well as a later 2000 retrospective at Prague’s City Gallery. This year, for the first time, she will be celebrated with a major solo retrospective at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, which will tour to the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and the National… Full Review

In 1893 Jules Luquiens (somewhat prematurely) lamented the failure of electric light. “It dazzles,” he wrote, “but does not clarify” (9). It is to this poetics of light that at once illuminates and blinds that Hollis Clayson’s Illuminated Paris attends, though fortunately, it does not suffer the same malady. Surveying artistic responses to the proliferation of lighting technologies in public spaces throughout Paris in the late nineteenth century, Clayson triangulates material and urban history with rigorous close looking. Rather than fixating on particular light sources and their corresponding technologies, she focuses instead on the phenomenological effects of nocturnal illumination and… Full Review

Lisa Tickner was eighteen years old when Ken Russell’s TV documentary Pop Goes the Easel was first aired on the BBC in 1962. This media exploration of British Pop art marks the beginning of the episodic narrative of London’s New Scene, with chapters structured by year (1962–69) and each focused on a particular cultural event. From Russell’s experimental TV staging of four Pop artists, subsequent chapters cover the commercial Kasmin Gallery, a major survey exhibition at the Tate, the photobook Private View, Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blow-Up (1966), the commercial export of “swinging London,” May 1968 at Hornsey College… Full Review

Panteha Abareshi’s solo exhibition Tender Calamities—presented in both physical and online formats at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (LAMAG)—highlighted the complexities of illness and disability. Originally hailing from Canada, Los Angeles–based artist Abareshi (they/them/theirs) pressed their audience to reconsider the relationship between embodiment and its representations. Drawing from their own experience with chronic illness and the othering of the sick and disabled body, Abareshi confronted the trauma and violence of the medical industrial complex and how ostracizing and objectifying the experience of seeking care can be. In turn, LAMAG’s exhibition layout did double duty, showing the… Full Review

By the time Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) had reached his early thirties, he was already being hailed the “Michelangelo of his age.” The epithet was direct acknowledgment that no living artist was as successful as Bernini at imitating Michelangelo’s style and also at matching his grandiose ambitions as a sculptor and an architect. Bernini’s earliest biographers, including his son, Domenico, were quick to latch on to the conceit, constructing narratives that pushed the theme of Bernini’s imitatio Buonarroti (in imitation of Buonarroti)—that the path Bernini chose to pursue with his art was a path that deliberately followed Michelangelo’s. But did… Full Review

(Click here to view the online multimedia publication.) “What if museums narrated their history, our histories, not as a chronology of single artists or ‘masterpieces,’ but rather as a story of group work?” Thomas Lax, curator of media and performance at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), asks this question in his preface to the third volume of the Walker Art Center’s Living Collections Catalogue. Side by Side: Collaborative Artistic Practices in the United States, 1960s–1980s, coedited by scholar Gwyneth Shanks and curator Allie Tepper, is a dynamic investigation of how artists have negotiated the politics… Full Review