Concise, critical reviews of books, exhibitions, and projects in all areas and periods of art history and visual studies

Reviews in caa.reviews are published continuously by CAA and Taylor & Francis, with the most recently published reviews listed below. Browse reviews based on geographic region, period or cultural sphere, or specialty (from 1998 to the present) using Review Categories in the sidebar or by entering terms in the search bar above.

Recently Published Reviews

Ezra Shales
London: Reaktion Books, 2017. 272 pp.; 70 b/w ills. Cloth $29.95 (9781780238227)
Ezra Shales’s The Shape of Craft derives its name as a pointed homage to George Kubler’s influential treatise, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (1962). Though he was an eminent Mesoamericanist, Kubler’s book had unusual reach and scope and was widely admired by modernists and practicing artists alike, including his former students at Yale, Sheila Hicks and Richard Serra. Clearly the work of an adroit and poetic storyteller, Shales’s book seeks to extend the lineage and framework for Kubler’s rejection of the art historical masterwork, thereby reordering the cultural hierarchy in favor of humanity’s humble origins… Full Review
October 15, 2018
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Valerie J. Mercer
Exh. cat. Detroit: Detroit Institute of Arts, 2017. 80 pp.; 35 color ills. Cloth $19.95 (9780895581754)
Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI, July 23–October 22, 2017
Museum of African American History
Detroit: Museum of African American History, 2017.
Museum of African American History, Detroit, MI, July 23, 2017–January 2, 2018
At 3:15 a.m. in the early morning of July 23, 1967, members of the vice squad of the Detroit police department raided the second-floor apartment located at 9125 Twelfth Street. This after-hours drinking parlor, or “blind pig,” was a well-known establishment to patrons and police alike. As a familiar watering hole, the site served its black middle-class patrons when other segregated spaces in downtown Detroit would not, yet its illicit status provoked many raids, including nine in the preceding twelve months. While previous incidents may have yielded fines, minor arrests, or increased bribery dues, on this muggy July morning, the… Full Review
October 10, 2018
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Emma Acker, ed.
Exh. cat. San Francisco and New Haven: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco in association with Yale University Press, 2018. 244 pp.; 150 color ills. Cloth $65.00 (9780300234022)
de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA, March 24–August 12, 2018; Dallas Museum of Art, September 16, 2018–January 6, 2019
Cult of the Machine: Precisionism and American Art is one of the year’s major exhibitions. It was organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco to be shown at the de Young Museum before traveling to the Dallas Museum of Art. The exhibition takes a new look at the American painters who, in the years after World War I, developed an art expressive of American modern life by making use of the flattened, geometric, simplified forms of European modernism. Cult of the Machine places Precisionism against a wide variety of art forms; the 126 works shown in San Francisco… Full Review
October 5, 2018
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516 Arts, Albuquerque, NM, August 11–October 20, 2018.
At the independent museum 516 Arts in downtown Albuquerque, an exhibition looks at Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria through themes of climate change, global weather patterns, colonial essentialism, Caribbean commodification, nationalism, Afro-Caribbean identity, bankruptcy, and local resiliency on the unincorporated US territory. Puerto Rico: Defying Darkness collects paintings, installations, videos, photographs, and multimedia works by sixteen Puerto Rican artists from the island and locations across the US mainland, including Albuquerque. Curator Josie Lopez uses Naomi Klein’s book The Battle for Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes on the Disaster Capitalists as a frame for the exhibition, illustrating the tension between outside corporate… Full Review
October 3, 2018
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Patricia J. Fay
Series: Latin American and Caribbean Arts and Culture. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2017. 376 pp.; 122 color ills.; 16 b/w ills. Cloth $90.00 (9780813054582)
Patricia J. Fay’s book, Creole Clay: Heritage Ceramics in the Contemporary Caribbean, fills a void in the broad and diverse history of world ceramics. She does this by focusing our attention on an area of the world generally thought of as a vacation destination instead of a region rich in culture with complicated histories of colonialism, the African diaspora, slavery, hard-won independence, culture, and art, specifically ceramics. Fay deftly weaves the history of this region with the production of utilitarian objects. Her exploration of traditional techniques, raw materials, and the living potters who continue to create traditional ware, against the… Full Review
October 1, 2018
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Mireille M. Lee
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 382 pp.; 110 b/w ills. Hardcover $99.00 (9781107055360)
The study of the role of dress in ancient societies has seen a boom in recent years, absorbing new techniques in archaeology and approaches from “new dress history,” cultural studies, and theories of the body. Mireille Lee’s previous work has already been influential in putting Greek dress on the agenda, and this current volume offers new insights into dress as a communicative medium as well as synthesizing scholarship across a number of related subfields (gender, identity, ethnicity, sexuality, status, class, etc.). By taking Greek conceptions of the body as her starting point, Lee structures the volume by applying the layers… Full Review
September 28, 2018
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David Adjaye and Peter Allison
New York: Thames & Hudson, 2016. 400 pp.; 700 color ills. Cloth $50.00 (9780500343166)
This compact edition of David Adjaye’s exploration of Africa brings together in one volume the fruits of his eleven-year-long project to visit and visually document the capitals of the continent’s fifty-four countries. The front cover image of Adjaye, Africa, Architecture: A Photographic Survey of Metropolitan Architecture serves as a key to the intellectual and conceptual approach of the book: a map of Africa’s six climatic zones. This map, credited to his architectural practice Adjaye Associates, is referred to as both a terrain and political map. This captures well the essence of his approach and investigation, namely, the rich and complex… Full Review
September 26, 2018
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D. Medina Lasansky, ed.
Pittsburgh: Periscope, 2014. 640 pp.; 126 ills. Paperback $35.00 (9781934772256)
This collection of essays has attracted little attention since its publication in 2014, an oversight that should be remedied. Through nineteen essays and nine photo essays edited by D. Medina Lasansky, The Renaissance: Revised, Expanded, Unexpurgated places the early modern past and the postmodern present in dialogue with one another and examines the ways in which the Renaissance has been appropriated and received in Anglo-American popular culture. As Lasansky notes in the introduction, the Renaissance has never been more popular: from the video game Assassin’s Creed to Botticelli Olive Oil and The Da Vinci Code to the various televised incarnations… Full Review
September 24, 2018
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Catharina Manchanda, ed.
Exh. cat. Seattle: Seattle Art Museum, 2018. 96 pp.; 59 color ills. Cloth $35.00 (9780300233896)
Seattle Art Museum, February 15–May 13, 2018
The title of Figuring History, an exhibition of twenty-six large-scale works by Robert Colescott (1925–2009), Kerry James Marshall (b. 1955), and Mickalene Thomas (b. 1971), signals at least two of the show’s significant themes. Both terms have double meanings. “History” refers to people and events of the past as well as to the history of art. “Figuring” indicates both the representations of the human figure and the artists’ attempts to “puzzle out the place and meaning of those figures” (39) in historical and art historical narratives. Employing different strategies, all three artists grapple with figures in history and histories… Full Review
September 21, 2018
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Franklin Sirmans and Yael Lipschutz, eds.
Exh. cat. New York and London: Prestel, Delmonico, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2015. 128 pp.; 80  color ills.; 24 b/w ills. Hardcover $39.95 (9783791354347)
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, June 7, 2015–January 3, 2016
Noah Purifoy: Junk Dada takes an in-depth look at the artistic and biographical journey of the under-recognized African American artist and activist, Noah Purifoy (1917–2004) and his large-scale installation and home environment, the Joshua Tree Outdoor Museum (1989–2004). This lush catalogue, richly illustrated with eighty photographs by Fredrik Nilsen, features insightful essays by Yael Lipschutz, art critic and archivist of the Noah Purifoy Foundation in Joshua Tree, California; Lowery Stokes Sims, curator emerita of the Museum of Art and Design, New York City, and former executive director of the Studio Museum in Harlem; and Kristine McKenna, the Los Angeles–based art… Full Review
September 20, 2018
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Diarmuid Costello
New York: Routledge, 2018. 166 pp.; 12 color ills.; 18 b/w ills. Paper $29.95 (9780415684491)
Diarmuid Costello’s book brings together an abundance of historical and analytical debates to make clear that the philosophy of photography is a delineated field in its own right. Although the title On Photography: A Philosophical Inquiry reflects Susan Sontag’s seminal book and may bring to mind Vilém Flusser’s attempt to single-handedly philosophize photography, it is in no sense similar to those approaches. Costello has gathered a rich corpus of philosophical thoughts on two questions: What is a photograph and what is photography? (7). Instead of resorting to a “cultural criticism” approach (embraced by thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, Sontag, Roland… Full Review
September 17, 2018
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Alessia Frassani
Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017. 256 pp.; 46 color ills.; 52 b/w ills. Cloth $45.00 (9780806157566)
In her microhistory of Yanhuitlan, a town in the rugged Mixteca Alta of Oaxaca, Mexico, Alessia Frassani complicates our understanding of the collaborative and enduring interchange of indigenous and European constituencies in New Spanish society. Although historians attempting to reconstruct the dynamics of an ancient, multiethnic community often discover that their evidence is random and scarce, the documentation of Yanhuitlan, in stone, wood, and paper, is fortuitously consistent. Exploiting this ample data, Frassani explores not only the built environment, primarily in Yanhuitlan’s impressive Dominican monastery (convento) and its still splendid interior, but also the relevant archival material, ranging… Full Review
September 14, 2018
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Lynne Cooke
Exh. cat. Washington, DC: University of Chicago Press and National Gallery of Art, 2018. 448 pp.; 450 color ills.; 467 ills. Cloth $65.00 (9780226522272)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, January 28–May 13, 2018; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, June 24–September 30, 2018; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, November 18, 2018–March 18, 2019
Outliers and American Vanguard Art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, offers an ambitious study of the significance of self-taught art to the production of mainstream US American artists. The expansive exhibition presents more than 250 works by 84 artists and is organized around three historic periods that, argues its curator Lynne Cooke, saw a surge in formal support for objects made beyond the conventional bounds of the art world: 1924–43, 1968–92, and 1998–2013. Outliers and its accompanying catalogue present an original and compelling account of US American art, bringing together many rarely exhibited artworks in illuminating… Full Review
September 12, 2018
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Allison Morehead
Refiguring Modernism (Book 21). University Park: Penn State University Press, 2017. 264 pp.; 51 color ills.; 60 b/w ills. Hardcover $89.95 (9780271076744)
Gustave Kahn’s characterization of Symbolism as “the exteriorization of the Idea” is usually explained as the Symbolists privileging the imagination over a naturalistic art practice that reproduced the visible world. In Nature’s Experiments and the Search for Symbolist Form, Allison Morehead reorients this quotation and Symbolist art itself toward science, specifically the experimental method. One of the crucial arguments in Nature’s Experiments is that even as positivism was being widely critiqued at the end of the nineteenth century, experimental methodology was gaining authority as a mode with which to realize not only scientific truths, but also truths about the human… Full Review
September 10, 2018
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Jessica L. Fripp, Amandine Gorse, Nathalie Manceau, and Nina Struckmeyer, eds.
Paris: Mare & Martin, 2016. 296 pp.; 15 color ills. Paperback €35.00 (9791092054422)
The edited volume, as a scholarly format, has proliferated in recent years but is too seldom celebrated. Its demands—principally brevity when it comes to individual essays—and its overall capaciousness produce texts and experiences of discovery this reviewer cherishes. When it comes to the topic of sociability, moreover, there could scarcely be a more appropriate form of presentation. If all books are social—collaborations linking author, editor, copyeditor, indexer, designer, printer, and so on—multiauthored volumes seem explicitly sociable. Frequently emerging from conference panels or colloquia, they are traces and performances of conversation and of groups coming together around a common purpose, to… Full Review
September 7, 2018
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