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

Jacqueline Jung
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 282 pp.; 30 color ills.; 180 b/w ills. Cloth $113.00 (9781107022959)
The Gothic Screen contributes to the body of integrative studies of Gothic art and architecture with an examination of the monumental choir screen that stood between the liturgical choir and the nave and ambulatory. Not a comprehensive catalogue of Gothic screens, the book seeks to “expand our sense of what screens accomplished in their ecclesiastical setting,” which is here understood as “both the physical setting of the Gothic church and the social environment that the church shaped” (2). In this vein, Jacqueline Jung focuses attention on how a screen’s architectural design and sculptural program forged community and structured identity among… Full Review
May 8, 2018
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Sarah Williams Goldhagen
New York: HarperCollins, 2017. 384 pp. Cloth $40.00 (9780061957802)
Critics lamenting the sorry state of today’s built environment are legion. Only a few recognize that many of those responsible for this situation are members of a professional and academic establishment that emerged during the past quarter century, virtually controlling the discourse in the design professions throughout the world. Sarah Williams Goldhagen, a distinguished architectural historian who taught at Harvard for ten years and was the architecture critic at the New Republic for eight, begins her new book by suggesting that she is one of these enlightened few. In previous books about Louis Kahn’s monumental architecture and Moshe Safdie’s global… Full Review
May 3, 2018
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Keely Orgeman
Exh. cat. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017. 172 pp.; 161 color ills.; 8 b/w ills. Paper over board $45.00 (9780300215182)
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT, February 17–July 23, 2017; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, October 6, 2017–January 7, 2018.
The Danish-born immigrant, inventor, performer, and artist Thomas Wilfred (1889–1968) made art on his own terms, literally. He dubbed his brand of work Lumia, a neologism designed to break with the past and establish a new artistic genre consisting solely of moving electric-light displays. Fifteen of Wilfred’s works, dating from the 1920s to the 1960s, were painstakingly restored for this luminous, and illuminating, exhibition. Accompanied by a beautifully produced and informative catalogue, Lumia: Thomas Wilfred and the Art of Light offered a unique opportunity to be immersed in the work and ideas of an artist whose last retrospective was held… Full Review
May 3, 2018
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Claire Tancons and Krista Thompson, eds.
Exh. cat. New York and New Orleans: Independent Curators International and Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans, 2016. 230 pp.; 100 color ills. Hardcover $49.95 (9780916365899)
Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, March 7–June 7, 2015; National Gallery of the Cayman Islands, January 14–March 18, 2016; National Art Gallery of the Bahamas, April 28–July 10, 2016; DuSable Museum of African American History, May 23–August 13, 2017; Museum of the African Diaspora, September 20, 2017–March 04, 2018; Ulrich Museum of Art, April 21–August 12, 2018
EN MAS’: Carnival and Performance Art of the Caribbean was published in conjunction with the launch of a traveling group exhibition showcasing the work of nine contemporary artists, each from the circum-Caribbean or its diaspora: John Beadle, Charles Campbell, Christophe Chassol, Nicolás Dumit Estévez, Marlon Griffith, Hew Locke, Lorraine O’Grady, Ebony G. Patterson, and Cauleen Smith. The artists were commissioned to create performance works in public spaces in cities with active carnival traditions, from Nassau, Bahamas, and Port of Spain, Trinidad, to Notting Hill, London, and New Orleans, Louisiana. The catalogue features archival documentary traces of each performance using photographs… Full Review
May 3, 2018
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Michelle White, ed.
Exh. cat. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. 192 pp.; 289 ills. Paper $50.00 (9780300233148)
The Menil Collection, Houston, October 13, 2017–February 25, 2018; Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis, April 6–August 11, 2018
Mona Hatoum: Terra Infirma at the Menil Collection, the artist’s first major solo exhibition in the United States in about two decades, presents an overview of Hatoum’s career in a nuanced yet direct manner. Hatoum’s work benefits from its quick metaphorical wit; however, this initial, deceptively easy clarity lingers and transforms into something else entirely, an experience underscored by the work’s placement throughout various rooms of the Menil Collection. Both artist and space offered the works for the viewer’s own interpretation, although attention to their specific historical and political context is frequently warranted by Hatoum. The majority of the exhibition… Full Review
May 2, 2018
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Donald Albrecht and Thomas Mellins, eds.
Exh. cat. Munich: Hirmer Publishers, 2017. 160 pp.; 200 color ills. Hardcover $39.95 (9783777428567)
Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, September 11, 2017–January 1, 2018; Museum of the City of New York, New York, June 22–October 28, 2018
On the occasion of the milestone exhibition Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art, organized by MoMA in 1940, critic, anthropologist, and cultural promoter Anita Brenner stated that the brilliant artistic scene that arose in Mexico in the early 1920s had reached its eclipse. For Brenner, as well as other influential voices from the arts field, the show at MoMA did not embody the true richness and complexity of two decades of intense artistic exploration in Mexico. Instead, it demonstrated how a series of avant-garde movements had become part of an institutional discourse. Other voices were less critical. Painter and anthropologist… Full Review
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James Romaine and Phoebe Wolfskill, eds.
University Park: Penn State University Press, 2017. 204 pp.; 33 color ills.; 22 b/w ills. Hardcover $79.95 (9780271077741)
Beholding Christ and Christianity in African American Art, edited by James Romaine and Phoebe Wolfskill, offers a unified and underexamined perspective on artwork by late nineteenth- to mid-twentieth-century African American artists. Each of the fourteen chapters showcases a selected artwork by an individual artist, highlighting how “engagement with religious subjects, symbols, or themes can be an expression of an array of concerns related to racial, political, and socioeconomic identity” (3). From neoclassical sculptor Mary Edmonia Lewis, modernist painters Aaron Douglas, William H. Johnson, Jacob Lawrence, Archibald Motley Jr. and others, to self-taught artists like William Edmondson, the case studies… Full Review
May 2, 2018
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Pellom McDaniels III, ed.
Exh. cat. Atlanta: Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University, 2017. 98 pp. Paperback
Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, & Rare Book Library, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, September 15, 2016–May 28, 2017
Camille Billops and James V. Hatch are artists, educators, archivists, and activists who dedicate their lives to creating, teaching, collecting, and preserving art that reflects the experiences of the African diaspora. Pellom McDaniels III, curator of African American Collections at the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University, curated an exhibition and book based on the Camille Billops and James V. Hatch Archives and the James V. Hatch and Camille Billops Papers housed at the Emory University library. The exhibition and catalogue, both entitled Still Raising Hell: The Art, Activism, and Archives of Camille… Full Review
May 2, 2018
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Robert Storr
Exh. cat. New York: David Zwirner Books, 2015. 112 pp.; 74 color ills. Cloth $65.00 (9781941701089)
David Zwirner Gallery, London, October 11–November 22, 2014
In Untitled (Mirror Girl) (2014), a young woman, voluptuous, luxuriating in her nudity, strikes a pose in front of her star-trimmed mirror. She holds her breasts in her hands to emulate a magazine spread, and she is stunning. An assortment of clothes and shoes decorate the floor beneath her, their colors and textures rhyming with the geometrical patterns across the rug and wallpaper. A cat sits quietly in the background, creating a collage effect—a technique Kerry James Marshall has used throughout his career. An eroticized charge emanates through the woman’s open gaze, and the conditions of the room, where surfaces… Full Review
May 1, 2018
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Anna Dezeuze
Rethinking Art's Histories. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017. 344 pp.; 72 b/w ills. Paperback €19.99 (9781526112903)
Anna Dezeuze’s ambitious book Almost Nothing: Observations on Precarious Practices in Contemporary Art establishes a lineage for work from the 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s that engages with the issue of precariousness. Dezeuze compellingly argues that, beginning in the late 1950s, artists began to mine a conceptually fertile vein of lived experiences at the margins—whether actual or assumed. She understands the term “precarious” as established by the artist Thomas Hirschhorn—whose works of the 1990s and the following decade are considered in the book’s introduction and later chapters—as having to do with human actions and decisions and thus… Full Review
May 1, 2018
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Tamar Garb and Fiona Bradley, eds.
Edinburgh: The Fruitmarket Gallery, 2017. 192 pp.; 120 color ills. Hardcover $45.00 (9781908612410 )
Rosalind E. Krauss, ed.
Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017. 208 pp.; 53 b/w ills. Paperback $22.95 (9780262533454)
Last year saw the publication of two excellent books about William Kentridge, the first of which accompanied an exhibition of his work, paired with that of fellow South African artist Vivienne Koorland, curated by Tamar Garb at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh. The three met in Cape Town the mid-1970s (Koorland painted Garb’s portrait in 1977), and it was Garb’s long relationship with Kentridge and Koorland that inspired her to curate the show. In the catalogue’s introductory essay, Garb expertly weaves together the shared themes the two artists explore in their work. She begins with a comparison of Koorland’s PAYS… Full Review
May 1, 2018
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Adrienne L. Childs and Susan H. Libby, eds.
Exh. cat. Giles, 2017. 80 pp.; 55 color ills. Paperback $30.00 (9781907804496)
Cornell Fine Arts Museum at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, January 14–May 14, 2017
This catalogue of a relatively small but important exhibition at the Cornell Fine Arts Museum at Rollins College is devoted to depictions of black Africans and people of the African diaspora produced by Western European artists (British, French, Italian, German, Spanish, and Danish) between the mid-eighteenth century and the 1890s. The volume begins with a short, pithy introduction by David Bindman, the general editor of Harvard University Press’s Image of the Black in Western Art series. The rest of the catalogue was prepared by Adrienne L. Childs and Susan H. Libby, who have both written extensively in this particular field… Full Review
April 30, 2018
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Orianna Cacchione, Li Pi, Robyn Farrell, and Katherine Grube
Exh. cat. Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2017. 96 pp.; 60 color ills. Hardcover $25.00 (9780300226225)
The Art Institute of Chicago, March 30–July 9, 2017
Zhang Peili: Record. Repeat. represents a significant scholarly work on Zhang Peili, the multimedia artist often acknowledged as China’s first video artist. The exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) featured twelve video works made between 1988 and 2007, including five large, multichannel installations. It opened with 30 × 30 (1988), considered the first video artwork made in China. The single-channel, thirty-two-minute-long video shows in tight close-up Zhang’s white-gloved hands and sneaker-clad feet as he shatters a mirror and then painstakingly reassembles it piece by piece, before breaking it again. The exhibition’s most recent work was also… Full Review
April 30, 2018
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Melissa Barton
New Haven: Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, 2017. 144 pp.; 140 color ills. Paper over Board $25.00 (9780300225617)
Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library (01/13/17–04/17/17)
In Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Jacques Derrida theorizes the archive in terms of two conflicting forces: the pleasure principle (eros) and the death drive (thanatos). Through these antithetical terms, he suggests that archives are defined by a struggle over what they preserve or save and what they forget or destroy. This leads Derrida to define the “archivization” process as that which “produces as much as it records the event.”1 To some, beginning a review of Melissa Barton’s Gather Out of Star-Dust: A Harlem Renaissance Album with Derrida may seem incongruous, especially given that Barton makes no mention… Full Review
April 30, 2018
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Dana Miller
Exh. cat. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016. 232 pp.; 180 color ills.; 15 b/w ills. Hardcover $65.00 (9780300221862)
Whitney Museum of American Art, September 16, 2016–January 9, 2017;Wexner Center for the Arts, The Ohio State University, February 4–April 16 2017; K20 Museum in Düsseldorf, December 2 2017–April 8, 2018
Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight was a groundbreaking exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and its catalogue—with essays by Dana Miller, Gerardo Mosquera, Serge Lemoine, and Edward J. Sullivan, over one hundred full color plates, and a chronology by Moñica Espinel—is the perfect supplement. Carmen Herrera (b. 1915, Havana, Cuba) is female, Cuban, and an abstract and minimalist painter and sculptor. Her art background is in architecture and painting, and she utilizes both of these disciplines in her work. Before Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight opened at the Whitney Museum in fall 2016, Herrera’s name and her work… Full Review
April 27, 2018
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