Recently Published Reviews

In her book Painting the Gospel: Black Public Art and Religion in Chicago, Kymberly N. Pinder uses religious imagery affiliated with black churches in the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago’s South Side as a case study to explore the ways that African American artists and pastors have collaborated to insist upon self-representation of and for their congregations. This short book manages to be very narrow and specific in its discussion of a handful of churches in one of Chicago’s traditionally black neighborhoods and simultaneously massive in scope as it traces the neighborhood’s religious-art production over the course of the twentieth… Full Review

Recently, I chaperoned some undergraduates visiting the Cleveland Museum of Art. As I was admiring the Jonah Marbles, a student rushed up in excitement, eager to tell me about an extraordinary work of embroidery. I followed her and immediately recognized it as a piece of white work from Altenberg an der Lahn. Thanks to Stefanie Seeberg’s excellent discussion of this and similar works in her Textile Bildwerke im Kirchenraum: Leinenstickereien im Kontext mittelalterlicher Raumausstattungen aus dem Prämonstratenserinnenkloster Altenberg/Lahn, I could explain that such textiles were not made to be white-on-white embroideries—but that they originally featured outlining in contrasting colors… Full Review

The lights went out in New York City for two days in the summer of 1977, a summer marred also by more murders by the Son of Sam killer and a continuing fiscal crisis. In that time of crisis, privately funded arts groups stepped forward to enrich the city’s public-school programs with art classes taught by working artists. Forty years later, The City and the Young Imagination at the Museum of the City of New York looked back over the work of children in classes sponsored by one such group, Studio in a School (hereafter “Studio”), founded that fall under… Full Review

The editors of Resounding Images: Medieval Intersections of Art, Music, and Sound begin the volume with a brief review of some of the recent literature addressing medieval conjunctions of sound and image. The anthology that follows comprises sixteen case studies, each exploring specific intersections of the acoustic with the visual and the spatial. Several themes run through these essays. Many of the authors consider architecture in relation to the production and reception of sound, some stressing the selective control or regulation of sound. Silence is a recurrent topic. Others focus on manuscripts as the nexus for images, music, and text… Full Review

Party Like It’s 1989 What would the late provocateur and self-proclaimed “SlutForArt” Tseng Kwong Chi have made of the annual Met Gala paparazzi fest, particularly the opening of the blockbuster 2015 exhibition China: Through the Looking Glass? The much-blogged-about fundraiser—tickets cost $30,000 each and brought in $12.5 million that year—featured a star-studded roster of global celebrities, including Rihanna, Fan Bingbing, Justin Bieber, Kim Kardashian West, Jennifer Lawrence, Madonna, and so on, conjuring varying degrees of chinoiserie. The New York Times has called the event—held the first Monday each May on opening night of the Costume Institute’s annual exhibition—the “Oscars… Full Review

The exhibition Meleko Mokgosi: Pax Kaffraria consisted of a series of mural-size paintings that interwove historical narratives of postcolonial southern African countries with cinematic contemporary scenes from the daily lives of the individuals who uphold, live within, resist, define, and embody the nation-states. Mokgosi, born in Francistown, Botswana, and living in New York City, presented the project in eight nonlinear chapters, each one composed of three to eight canvases, with the exception of the first chapter, Lekgowa, which consisted of a single circular canvas. Six of the eight chapters of Pax Kaffraria were installed in the Grand Gallery of… Full Review

Rebecca Pinner examines the cult of the Anglo-Saxon king Edmund (d. 869) in the High and late Middle Ages. Exploring both textual proliferation—as she points out, more than thirty versions of his legend were created (2)—and visual representation, Pinner attempts to uncover how a king for whom only the sketchiest biographical details are recoverable became the subject of a “vast, elaborate cult” (5) by the end of the Middle Ages. She argues that the haziness of Edmund’s biography was the reason for extensive devotion to him, claiming that “ambiguity is precisely what led to Edmund’s popularity” (6). Relying on an… Full Review

Jan Lievens: Friend and Rival of the Young Rembrandt considers the early career of one of the Dutch Republic’s most beguiling artists, a painter-printmaker who worked for courts in The Hague, London, and Berlin but also practiced his craft for eight years in Antwerp and participated in Amsterdam’s grandest decorative program in the seventeenth century, the new Town Hall. Part gentleman painter à la Peter Paul Rubens, part hustler on a competitive market for art, Jan Lievens (1607–74) continues to intrigue scholars because of his constantly evolving style. The artist spent his first years as an independent master in Leiden… Full Review

We art historians have gained some familiarity with the independence-era history of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) from Raoul Peck’s acclaimed film Lumumba (2000) and from several published studies on the life and death of Patrice Lumumba, its first prime minister. A key publication is A Congo Chronicle: Patrice Lumumba in Urban Art, a catalogue for the exhibition of the same title presented at the Museum for African Art in New York, April 23–August 15, 1999. Evaluations of Lumumba inevitably incorporate the vicious, CIA-inspired conspiracy that led to Lumumba’s murder, pointing to his executioner… Full Review

The French eighteenth century, an era often derided and dismissed as frivolous and libertine, has been experiencing a revival by scholars in the last three decades, with the prolific artist Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806) occupying a singular position in the period’s rehabilitation. Fragonard has been the subject of at least four major monographic shows in the last three years—including the recent Fragonard: The Fantasy Figures (2017) at the National Gallery of Art and Fragonard Amoureux: Galant et Libertin (2015–16) at the Musée du Luxembourg. While his dazzling paint handling and prominent commissions—one thinks of The Progress of Love at the Frick… Full Review

“Where’s the poet?” Cy Twombly posed this question in a drawing he made in August 1960 while on the island of Ischia in the Gulf of Naples. Yet, as Mary Jacobus tells us in her new book, Reading Cy Twombly: Poetry in Paint, this is not merely the painter’s question but a quotation from an unfinished poem John Keats wrote in 1818. Furthermore, the borrowed Keats line is not alone in Twombly’s drawing. These words are accompanied by more text (the heading “Sonnet” and the phrase “mists of idleness”) as well as a grid of twelve numbered sections (with… Full Review

In Revolutionary Horizons: Art and Polemics in 1950s Cuba, Abigail McEwen, associate professor of Latin American Art at the University of Maryland, offers an original and meticulously researched account of an understudied episode in the history of Latin American modernism: the rise of abstract art in Cuba during the 1950s. The book’s main protagonists are not so much artists or works of art as the complex field of discursive and ideological formations that structured Cuban cultural politics during the tumultuous decade leading up to the 1959 revolution. In the absence of a single figure or group that might naturally… Full Review

Drawing Difference: Connections between Gender and Drawing is the work of the author duo Marsha Meskimmon and Phil Sawdon, whose multiple areas of expertise cross theory and practices of scholarly writing, contemporary drawing, and curatorship. Through this manifold competence, Drawing Difference attends to and appreciates drawing as a material, embodied process and therefore engages, in detail, with how the works discussed were executed and installed. The lens of gender, which has been for over two decades the focus of Meskimmon’s pioneering body of books on “women making art,” is evident throughout. From the first sentence, it is apparent that the… Full Review

Ancient American rock art studies and mainstream art history have long maintained an awkward, often uneasy scholarly relationship. Ancient American rock art typically receives only occasional passing mention in mainstream art-historical publications. In The White Shaman Mural, Carolyn E. Boyd, associate professor of anthropology at Texas State University and founder of the Shumla Archaeological Research and Education Center in Comstock, Texas, endeavors to narrow this scholarly gap through a highly detailed analysis and interpretation of the White Shaman mural, an ancient polychrome rock art panel situated along the Rio Grande in west Texas. The mural is associated with the… Full Review

Artist and Empire: Facing Britain’s Imperial Past is both a fascinating and frustrating compendium of art made since the sixteenth century that either depicts, reflects, or comments upon British colonialism. Written by a team of Tate curators, with contributions by Gus Casely-Hayford, Annie E. Coombes, Paul Gilroy, Nicholas Thomas, and Sean Willcock, this exhibition catalogue seeks to address the legacies of the British Empire: to reconsider how empire was recorded and perceived by those artists actively involved in, or affected by, Britain’s colonial enterprise; to equitably present and reconsider artworks by indigenous or colonized people; to identify and celebrate artistic… Full Review