Recently Published Reviews

Renegade Edo and Paris: Japanese Prints and Toulouse-Lautrec is a focused gem of an exhibition at the Seattle Asian Art Museum, accompanied by a slim catalog of the same name. This is the first time the museum has compared Japanese and French art in a single exhibition. The majority of the Japanese prints in the show are part of the museum’s permanent collection alongside works on loan specifically for this exhibition, mostly prints by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. The show opens with a room dominated by two large mid-seventeenth-century six-panel Japanese screens depicting Edo inhabitants enjoying spring and summer activities that… Full Review

Years ago, as a graduate student researching Winslow Homer, I drove a rental car to Prouts Neck to get a better sense of the views the artist painted when living on the Maine coast. What I found was a single road leading to a mile-wide promontory well marked with signs accusing me of trespassing. Reluctant to turn back, I parked along the last stretch of public road and walked furtively past manicured gardens and stately summer residences towards Homer’s studio (which at the time had not yet opened to the public). As I walked, it became increasingly clear that I… Full Review

Both embodied and conceptual, bridge and barricade, “Jugoslovenka”—the name for a Yugoslav woman—is the complex prism through which Jasmina Tumbas offers her rich transnational history of performance art from the formation through the fall of socialist Yugoslavia. The history of performative politics that Tumbas has written is structured by paradox and contradiction, as illustrated by her comparative look at two photographs of Dragana Milojević, a woman attending a demonstration against Slobodan Milošević in Belgrade on March 9, 1991. In the first photograph, Milojević appears to stand defiantly in front of a crowd, with her arm above her head and her… Full Review

Ever since the influential book by Wilhelmina Jashemski, The Gardens of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and the Villas destroyed by Vesuvius (‎Aristide D. Caratzas, 1979), the gardens of Pompeii have been in the spotlight of archaeological research. Besides questions about the cultivation and use of garden areas, the often lavishly decorated peristyles, in particular, attracted attention. In the Book Pompeian Peristyle Gardens: Studies in Roman Space and Urbanism, Samuli Simelius has now, for the first time, undertaken a compelling comparative analysis of all two hundred fifty-two Pompeian peristyle gardens excavated in Pompeii, which were visible in 79 CE. The analysis examines how… Full Review

Surviving works of art created by Indigenous Mesoamerican artists seem to challenge paradigms of art history developed for the study of European traditions. Claudia Brittenham’s Unseen Art: Making, Vision, and Power in Ancient Mesoamerica tackles one of the paradoxes central to the study of ancient Mesoamerican material culture: works of art with restricted visibility. The works considered in this volume were meant to be seen briefly, or only by certain people, or for only certain moments in time. Brittenham’s premise is that understanding how such works operated allows us a new approach to questions of visibility, power, and inequality—and… Full Review

In the introduction to their edited volume Media Theory in Japan (Duke University Press, 2017), Marc Steinberg and Alexander Zahlten ask “What happens if the very conditions of thinking mediation arise from the particular media and media cultural forms with which we interact?” (6). For them, the answer was to “resist the universal language of theory in favor of a contextual and unstable practice of theory, without giving up on the belief that theorization—of media or anything else for that matter—is an indispensable tool with which to grapple with our times” (6). Steinberg and Zahlten look to media praxis, or… Full Review

As the first dedicated monograph to Black artists’ involvement in the federal projects of the 1930s and 1940s, Mary Ann Calo’s African American Artists and the New Deal Art Programs: Opportunity, Access, and Community constitutes a major intervention. Existing scholarship on Black artists in the New Deal is few and far between; outside of exhibitions with small catalogs, like Lehman College Art Gallery’s 1989 Black Printmakers and the W.P.A., material is mainly dispersed across survey texts on the federal projects or on twentieth-century African American artmaking. These publications have sought mainly to interrogate the extent to which federal employment enhanced… Full Review

In the format of a lavishly illustrated coffee-table book, the twenty-two articles of this weighty volume inform an expert public about the very complex site of Santa Maria Antiqua (henceforth SMA), a Roman imperial first-century construction inside the Forum that at some point, probably in the fourth century, became a church. The volume showcases the latest results from technical, iconographical, and historical research stemming from the recent restoration work on the monument (2001–13), presented at a conference at the British School at Rome in 2013. Authors include the recent restoration team and their director, Maria Andaloro, as well as… Full Review

Ignacio A. Adriasola Muñoz’s Fragment, Image, and Absence in 1960s Japan is one of the latest contributions to the study of radical Japanese art in the 1960s—the era marked by rapid economic growth and tumultuous political events. The book provides a look at a wide range of radical artistic practices that challenged the social and cultural status quo of the period. The author’s focus is at once specific and broad as he couples detailed analyses of individual artists and artworks with discussions of general trends characterizing the art of the period. While the artists discussed in the book are more… Full Review

In Tropical Aesthetics of Black Modernism, Samantha A. Noël cites E. E. Cummings’s description of Josephine Baker in the premiere of La Folie Du Jour at the Folies-Bergère in 1926 as “equally nonprimitive and uncivilized or, beyond time in the sense that emotion is beyond arithmetic” (169). Noël’s study makes sense of how the tropical has been framed beyond arithmetic or reason into an aesthetic strategy by Black artists across the Black Atlantic. If, for Cummings, tropicality, as personified by Baker, is “neither infrahuman nor superhuman, but somehow both; a mysteriously unkillable Something,” (169) Noël explores its persistence through the… Full Review

Why might a study on the cult of the Virgin of Loreto in Mexico be of interest to readers today? Precisely because it deals with one of the most universal Marian devotions of the early modern period, which allows us to understand the global through the local. As demonstrated by Luisa Elena Alcalá, the Virgin of Loreto embodies a relic of exceptional duality. In one respect, it comprises the Holy House, the very place where the Virgin received the announcement of Jesus’ birth and where the Holy Family would live after their return from Egypt. In 1291, after escaping the… Full Review

Charlene Villaseñor Black’s latest book is concerned with female saints and their aesthetic dimensions and transformations. The author chooses five case studies in an effort to demonstrate and explicate the marked changes the devotions underwent from early modern Spain to New Spain. The function of images within wider, religious, social, and political contexts is a primary concern for the author, and she strives to be especially attuned to “women’s experience” and “issues related to indigeneity and race” (8). All chapters follow a similar pattern—first showing how select saints were seen in Spain before discussing their manifestations and marked differences in… Full Review

Since 2007, the Center for the History of Collecting at the Frick Art Reference Library in New York has been a leader in its field. As a list in this book’s foreword demonstrates, the center has produced a number of scholarly tomes that have enriched the study of collecting. This volume departs somewhat from its predecessors in examining the collecting practices and art market of a much earlier period than the center has hitherto done, namely those in Italy during the years 1450–1650. In publishing with Brill’s growing series Studies in the History of Collecting & Art Markets, the center… Full Review

Omar Ba’s recent exhibition Omar Ba: Political Animals, at the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA), updates W.E.B. Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness, which Du Bois restricted to the African American experience in the United States. Du Bois positioned double consciousness as the burden African Americans endure as emissaries of Black culture, while at the same time pledging allegiance to the ideals of being an American in a society ruled by whiteness. Du Bois writes, “It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness . . .  one ever feels his two-ness, an American, a Negro; two souls… Full Review

For visitors to the National Anthropology Museum in Mexico City, it would be “hard to imagine today a mummy or the glass model of a jellyfish next to the emblematic Piedra del Sol” (4). How stabilizing are the geographical, historical, or cultural ligaments between a disintegrating skeleton, a jellyfish in glass, and the premier iconic, basalt embodiment of Mexico? Compelling viewers to buy into a curatorial proposition in which the display of such disparate objects in proximity to each other did or could make sense is the work of the innovative and provocative collection of ten riveting essays in Museum… Full Review