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

Maria and Kazimierz Piechotka
Trans Krzysztof Z Cieszkowski Warsaw: Salix alba Press, 2015. 184 pp.; 129 b/w ills. Paper €22.50 (9788393093779)
Landscape with Menorah: Jews in the Towns and Cities of the Former Rzeczpospolita of Poland and Lithuania is the revised and updated edition of Krajobraz z menora. Zydzi w miastach i miasteczkach dawnej Rzeszpospolitej (Wrocław: Zaklad Narodowy im Ossolinskich Wydawn, 2008), which was published during the lifetime of Kazimierz Piechotka (1919–2010). His wife and equal collaborator, Maria (1920–), supervised revisions and the fluent translation into English. The Piechotkas, trained as architects, are the source of much of today’s knowledge about synagogues, Jewish settlements, and other buildings for Jewish communities in the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Their earlier publications are essential to… Full Review
June 2, 2016
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John J. Marciari, Carmen Albendea, Ian McClure, Anikó Bezur, Jens Stenger, and Benito Navarrete Prieto
Exh. cat. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014. 96 pp.; 46 color ills. Paper $20.00 (9780300207866)
Curator John Marciari made headlines in 2010 when he announced his discovery of what he deemed to be an early masterpiece by none other than Diego Velázquez. The painting, depicting the Education of the Virgin, was in poor condition, and it had languished for decades in the Yale University Art Gallery basement. Yet Marciari perceived in it the hand of a master. Writing in Ars Magazine, he hailed the Yale Education as “the most significant addition to [Velázquez’s] work in a century or more” (John Marciari, “Redescubriendo a Velázquez/Velázquez Rediscovered: The Education of the Virgin at Yale,” Ars Magazine… Full Review
June 2, 2016
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Palm Springs: Palm Springs Art Museum Architecture and Design Center, 2015.
Exhibition schedule: Palm Springs Art Museum Architecture and Design Center, March 14–July 26, 2015
The experience of seeing Andrea Zittel’s recent exhibition at the newly opened Architecture and Design Center at the Palm Springs Art Museum is probably somewhat unusual given what many of us have come to expect of contemporary art shows in prominent art-world epicenters. The space, for one thing, is a repurposed bank originally designed in 1961 by the beloved local architect E. Stewart Williams, and its recent renovation by the Los Angeles-based firm Marmol Radziner leaves intact such features as the vault (now home to a small gift shop) and a drive-up window that juts unobtrusively into the exhibition area… Full Review
May 26, 2016
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Wendy Kozol
Minnapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. 280 pp.; 39 b/w ills. Paper $22.50 (9780816681303)
The involvement of photography in helping to contest as well as legitimize war as a means to resolve conflict has been studied by a large number of scholars in recent years. Often motivated by their belief in humanitarianism, scholars commonly aim to salvage photography from its absorption into overt belligerent politics, highlighting instead the role it plays in communicating war atrocities. While as a consequence photography has been seen and defended in academia mainly as a medium that triggers moral responses to warfare, the fact that photographs may also affect their viewers to support war—or, indeed, to call for war… Full Review
May 26, 2016
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Carmenita Higginbotham
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015. 224 pp.; 36 color ills.; 44 b/w ills. Cloth $79.95 (9780271063935)
The Urban Scene: Race, Reginald Marsh, and American Art is a visually astute, well-researched account of this important American artist as a discerning observer of the changing nature of urban life in the first decades of the twentieth century. Carmenita Higginbotham seamlessly merges theoretical insight, social history, formal analysis, and primary sources in service of an argument that delivers a welcome challenge to settled wisdom on the cultural production of this period. The book is significant because of the author’s command of a wide range of secondary literature and ability to extrapolate and further develop conceptual formations that are especially… Full Review
May 26, 2016
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Michael A. Brown and Niria E. Leyva-Guttíerrez
Exh. cat. San Diego: San Diego Museum of Art, 2015. 45 pp.; 32 color ills. Paper $19.95 (9780937108520)
Exhibition schedule: San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego, March 28–June 30, 2015
Divine Desire: Printmaking, Mythology, and the Birth of the Baroque at the San Diego Museum of Art was an exhibition of over seventy late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Netherlandish engraved prints, mostly by Hendrick Goltzius (1558–1617), his pupil and stepson Jacob Matham (1571–1631), and student Jan Pietersz Saenredam (1565–1607). The subject matter of the prints is predominantly mythological and secular, apart from a series on the virtues and vices. In selecting this subject matter, curator Michael A. Brown complemented material presented in another local exhibition, that of Goltzius’s sacred prints held in 2013–14 at the Crocker Art Museum and University… Full Review
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Okwui Enwezor, ed.
Exh. cat. 2 volumes. Venice: Marsilio Editori, 2015. 1054 pp. Paper $130.00 (978883172128)
Exhibition schedule: Venice, May 9—November 22, 2015
Picturing the World: Painting at the 56th Venice Biennale Plenty has already been written about the daily recitations of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital at the 56th Venice Biennale, a gesture that served to recapitulate our nervous twitching about art and money. Across the grand swath of global art on display, there were indeed many compelling moments pointing to capitalism as the hoary culprit in our world of excess and inequity. Typically, at the heart of such claims in relation to the art world one finds the medium of painting. With its easel format, its desirability as status and… Full Review
May 18, 2016
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Okwui Enwezor, ed.
Exh. cat. 2 volumes. Venice: Marsilio Editori, 2015. 1054 pp. Paper $130.00 (978883172128)
Exhibition schedule: Venice, May 9—November 22, 2015
Environmental Art at the 56th Venice Biennale The 2015 Venice Biennale, curated by Okwui Enwezor, focuses on the unpredictability and volatility of our historical moment, or what in another context Ulrich Beck calls the “risk society” (Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, London: Sage, 1992). As Michelle Kuo explains in an interview with Enwezor: “That is when the unintended side effects of modernization—technological, ecological—seem to be overwhelming the systems devised to contain them, creating entirely new crises and instabilities” (Michelle Kuo, “Global Entry: Okwui Enwezor Talks with Michelle Kuo about the 56th Venice Biennale,” Artforum… Full Review
May 18, 2016
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Okwui Enwezor, ed.
Exh. cat. 2 volumes. Venice: Marsilio Editori, 2015. 1054 pp. Paper $130.00 (978883172128)
Exhibition schedule: Venice, May 9—November 22, 2015
Okwui Enwezor’s 2015 edition of la Biennale di Venezia, All the World’s Futures, opened with a somber installation on the facade of the Central Pavilion in the Giardini. At its summit, the striking words of Glenn Ligon’s neon marquee—“blues blood bruise”—announced themes of violence, suffering, death, and sorrow, as well as the role of music as a medium of collective resistance and power. Just below this sign, viewers confronted the Colombian artist Oscar Murillo’s series of black, patched canvases, hung as if they were curtains across the pavilion’s arcade, turning it into a monumental proscenium stage. Passing through the… Full Review
May 18, 2016
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Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2015.
Exhibition schedule: Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, March 20–June 28, 2015
William Pope.L: Trinket at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), opened shortly after thousands took to the streets in protest of the Staten Island grand jury’s failure to convict the New York Police Department officer charged with Eric Garner’s death. While heightened media coverage of this and other social injustices resulting from racially motivated aggressions may have weighed heavily on those visiting the exhibition, it is unlikely that viewers would find aesthetic comfort in Pope.L’s recent works. Indeed, when the exhibition’s namesake—Trinket (2008/2015), a sixteen-foot-tall American flag writhing in the wind of four intimidating industrial fans—was first… Full Review
May 12, 2016
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Penelope Curtis and Chris Stephens, eds.
Exh. cat. London: Tate Publishing, 2015. 203 pp.; 131 color ills.; 72 b/w ills. Cloth $55.00 (9781849763318)
Exhibition schedule: Tate Britain, June 24–October 25, 2015
When speaking of modern landscape painters, John Ruskin argued that these artists see nature with “totally different eyes” and consequently offer spectators impressions rather than imitations of the natural world (John Ruskin, Modern Painters, New York: Wiley and Halsted, 1858, 75). A century after Ruskin published his influential text, the English sculptor Dame Barbara Hepworth similarly stated: “When a sculptor is the spectator . . . the artist tries to find a synthesis of his human experience and the quality of the land-scape” (Barbara Hepworth, A Pictorial Autobiography, New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970, 93). Ruskin’s theory, which only… Full Review
May 12, 2016
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Julie Rodrigues Widholm and Madeleine Grynsztejn, eds.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. 240 pp.; 105 color ills. Cloth $50.00 (9780226244587)
Exhibition schedule: Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, February 21–May 24, 2015; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, June 26–October 14, 2015; Pérez Art Museum, Miami, April 20–July 17, 2016
Puncturing the vertiginous pace of New York life is the poetic silence of the Doris Salcedo retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. The Colombian sculptor’s works address violence and are renowned worldwide as sites of collective mourning and reflection. The technical virtuosity of her installations make a retrospective nothing less than a herculean task, bravely undertaken in this case by the organizing institution, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA), and co-curated by Pritzker Director Madeleine Grynsztejn and curator Julie Rodrigues Widholm. The exhibition consists of ten installations that span Salcedo’s thirty-year practice, viewable on the MCA’s website… Full Review
May 12, 2016
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Adrian W. B. Randolph
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014. 328 pp.; 50 color ills.; 70 b/w ills. Cloth $75.00 (9780300204780)
Adrian W. B. Randolph’s Touching Objects: Intimate Experiences of Italian Fifteenth-Century Art is an impressive scholarly work, moving effortlessly from discussions of mid-twentieth-century German art historians to contemporary methodological issues around feminism and aesthetics. Randolph’s fluency in language and culture is matched by his conceptual and intellectual confidence. The result is a demonstration of where art history has traveled and what now might be asked and known about works of art. Specifically, this book, which addresses objects made for or associated with the feminine or the domestic sphere (except in one instance), inquires not merely what the images in or… Full Review
May 12, 2016
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Exh. cat. Berlin: Kerber, 2015. 152 pp.; 92 color ills. Paper $47.50 (9783735600523 )
Exhibition schedule: K20, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, September 6, 2014–January 4, 2015; MoMA PS1, New York, January 31–August 31, 2015; Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar, March 17, 2015–August 16, 2015
In his first major exhibition in the United States, Egyptian artist Wael Shawky (b. 1971) presented three elaborate films featuring fantastical marionettes performing Amin Maalouf’s The Crusades through Arab Eyes (1983), a book originally written in French but here translated into classical Arabic. Following the exhibition layout at MoMA PS1, viewers first encountered the production materials—sketches, sets, and the marvelous puppets—before entering the darkened screening rooms. The films were not simply synthetic narrative entertainment, but highly constructed performances, and viewers possessed an intimate knowledge of how they were made. Part of the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) wider push to… Full Review
May 5, 2016
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Jan-Lodewijk Grootaers and Alexander Bortolot, eds.
Exh. cat. Minneapolis: Minneapolis Institute of Art, 2014. 240 pp.; 500 color ills. Paper $39.95 (9780989371810)
Exhibition schedule: National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, April 9–August 17, 2014; Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis, September 20, 2014–February 8, 2015; Indiana University Art Museum, Bloomington, March 7–May 10, 2015
Amid their dense vegetation, the forests of West Africa’s Upper Guinea Coast yield a bounty of contradictory impressions. They host both captivating natural beauty and obscure supernatural terrors. They appear intrinsically wild, yet are carefully cultivated by neighboring communities. Their muddy feeder roads and indistinct bush paths render them seemingly remote and impenetrable, but they have served as conduits for countless movements in the name of exchange and conflict. This complex terrain mirrors and inspires complex cultures. Centuries of invasions and alliances, trade and theft, and creativity and mimesis have motivated an array of social affiliations defined by categories… Full Review
May 5, 2016
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