Recently Published Reviews

The historical study of clothing has surged during the past two decades as scholarly disciplines including art history began to shift toward the cultural contextualization of objects and, consequently, accept the category of material culture as worthy of attention on its own merits. Simultaneously, the near obsession with fashion and celebrity designers has soared. Museum curators have frequently contributed to these developments by staging exhibitions—the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s highly successful Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty (2011) immediately leaps to mind—that both attract nontraditional audiences and reinforce the increasingly elevated status of fashion. Valerie Steele, director and chief curator of the… Full Review

Fashion, by nature of its universal presence, countless manifestations, ephemerality of material, and inclination toward rapid and constant change, presents a daunting subject of academic research. The study of fashion requires mobility between the fields of history, visual and material culture, and anthropology in their various methodologies and theories. African fashion demands this mobility and more. Coming from the discipline of art history with a specialization in West African textiles, Victoria L. Rovine is a scholar with the rare combination of expertise to give the subject of African fashion its due attention. The book benefits immensely from Rovine’s academic background… Full Review

In The Traveling Artist in the Italian Renaissance: Geography, Mobility, and Style, David Young Kim examines how the mobility of artists was understood in early modern Italy. Seeing the era as being one “on the move” and “in motion,” he presents a rich account of this mobility, particularly its meaning in relation to geography and style. Ultimately, his book’s true concern is early modern subjectivity and how mobility could be understood as an “artful, puzzling, and controversial” process, one that could, in certain cases, help construct a successful artistic persona or banish it to the margins of history. Reading… Full Review

In Civil Rights Childhood: Picturing Liberation in African American Photobooks, Katharine Capshaw writes about the ways in which images enlisted African American children in the Civil Rights Movement. Her subject is photographic books—fiction and nonfiction—by black authors from the 1940s to the 1970s. The books consider, at first implicitly and later explicitly, the possibility of political agency in children (xi). In Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), Laura Wexler examines the “mammy image.” Capshaw addresses the lacuna that Wexler’s analysis produces in its “visual erasure” of black… Full Review

Aleksandra Lipińska has written an important book on Netherlandish sculpture that addresses many issues that are already of interest to historians of Netherlandish art and culture. Her topic is alabaster carving, a seemingly modest intervention until we realize that alabaster was the primary stone for all’antica sculpture in the Low Countries during the sixteenth century. It was also the material that introduced this antique manner in three-dimensional form to the region. In a way, Lipińska’s title, Moving Sculptures: Southern Netherlandish Alabasters from the 16th to 17th Centuries in Central and Northern Europe, resembles that of Michael Baxandall’s The Limewood… Full Review

The excellent exhibition El derrumbe de la estatua: hacia una crítica del arte público (1952–2014) (The Falling of the Statue: Toward a Critique of Public Art [1952–2014]) examined developments and shifts in public art practice in Mexico across the last half-century. As the title of the show suggests, the driving premise was to dismantle or topple its traditional definitions. Skillfully curated by José Luis Barrios and Alesha Mercado, the exhibition featured sculptures, models and maquettes, installations, drawings, photography, as well as film and video selected from the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (University Museum of Contemporary Art) (MUAC) and… Full Review

Cynthia Mills’s Beyond Grief: Sculpture and Wonder in the Gilded Age Cemetery is a highly readable, engaging, and authoritative book on American memorial sculpture in the late nineteenth century. She focuses her attention on four famous monuments: Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s Adams Memorial (1891), Rock Creek Cemetery, Washington, DC; Daniel Chester French’s The Angel of Death and the Sculptor (1893), Forest Hills Cemetery, Roxbury, Massachusetts; Frank Duveneck’s (with Clement J. Barnhorn) Memorial to Elizabeth Boott Duveneck (1891), Cimitero Evangelico degli Allori (Evangelical Cemetery of the Laurels), Florence, Italy; and William Wetmore Story’s Angel of Grief (1894), Protestant Cemetery, Rome, Italy. However, the… Full Review

Barbara Mundy is well known and greatly respected for her scholarship on the Mesoamerican mapping tradition. This new book now demonstrates her deep knowledge of the Aztec capital of Mexico-Tenochtitlan both before and in the century after the Spanish conquest of Mexico. Deeply researched, insightfully conceptualized and argued, and written in an engaging style, it is a book of particular importance. Mundy explains Mexico-Tenochtitlan and early colonial Mexico City as no one has, infusing life into the dry facts of the city’s sixteenth-century history and guiding the reader to a close, insider’s view of the capital as it functioned and… Full Review

Jean-Michel Basquiat: Now’s the Time, the catalogue produced to accompany the first major exhibition of the artist’s works in Canada, takes its name from one of Basquiat’s 1985 paintings. In that Now’s the Time, white letters spelling out “NOW’S THE TIME”© and PRKR stand out against a black circle, collectively invoking a vinyl pressing of jazz legend Charlie Parker’s 1945 arrangement of the same name. The homage makes clear that Parker’s life and work mattered to Basquiat. Both were uncompromising black artists who articulated clear visions through a mastery of seemingly improvisatory aesthetics. They did so while struggling… Full Review

Cubism constitutes one of the greatest revolutions in the history of Western art, on a par with the one launched at the beginning of the fifteenth century by two other young artists, in another booming economic and cultural center permitting radical innovations within the realms of the arts and sciences—though Florence, at the time that Filippo Brunelleschi and Donatello reached their first heights in the early quattrocento, was an undoubtedly quieter place than was early twentieth-century Paris when Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque reached theirs. Why is such a comparison worthwhile, one might wonder? For one, because both… Full Review

What is the role of an image in a ritual setting? This unflagging question in the study of religious art and visual culture has been raised again by Koichi Shinohara, a historian of East Asian Buddhism who has already produced a number of inspiring works treating the issue. Images in Asian Religions: Text and Contexts (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2004; co-edited with Phyllis Granoff) is one such work, in which he utilized a close reading of apologetic writings by the seventh-century Chinese vinaya specialist Daoxuan and his colleague Daoshi to discuss how a distinctive discourse about image worship… Full Review

The story told through this exhibition begins and ends in the Garden Court of the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) where in 1932 the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera executed a monumental set of wall paintings to celebrate the city’s industrial spirit against the backdrop of the devastating Great Depression. Just months before the arrival of the muralist and his wife, Frida Kahlo, the city had considered closing the museum and selling its artworks, but this commission was part of a larger set of efforts to restore Detroit’s identity. Rivera’s splendid Detroit Industry murals make this show, curated by contemporary specialist… Full Review

J. M. W. Turner: Painting Set Free is the first exhibition to focus on the artist’s works produced from 1835 to 1851, from the time he was sixty years old until his death at seventy-six—the period when Turner was consciously shaping his legacy and producing the mature oils and watercolors that have so heavily influenced modern art concerned with light and color. Sam Smiles, Tate Research Fellow and associate professor of Art History and Visual Culture at the University of Exeter, took the lead in conceiving this groundbreaking exhibition of oil paintings and watercolors to promote the idea that Turner… Full Review

Chika Okeke-Agulu’s thoroughly researched and beautifully illustrated Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth Century Nigeria significantly advances an understanding of modern African art. He considers a key time period in Nigerian art history, from the late 1950s eve of independence (Nigeria gained its independence in 1960) to roughly 1968 at the beginning of the Nigerian Civil War (1967–70). The term “postcolonial modernism,” Okeke-Agulu rightly insists, means that the artistic developments of this time cannot be disentangled from prevailing nationalist ideologies. He sees postcolonial modernism as an “international phenomenon,” and throughout the book highlights the connections of Nigerian ideas and… Full Review

In 1960, Dominique and John de Menil instituted a project to study images of persons of African descent in Western art. As Adrienne Childs and Susan Libby note in the introduction to their edited volume, Blacks and Blackness in European Art of the Long Nineteenth Century, that project, which began as a photographic archive, was initiated in response to segregation and racial discrimination in the United States. The Menil’s undertaking eventually culminated in a series of five books, republished by Harvard University Press, along with three new volumes, the last appearing in 2014 (click here for review)… Full Review