Recently Published Reviews

Robert Slifkin’s Quitting Your Day Job: Chauncey Hare’s Photographic Work investigates Hare’s documentary photography, charting his initial interest in and eventual disengagement from the medium, and his combat with those in the upper echelons of the photographic world. Taken during the 1960s and 1970s, Hare’s subjects, white- and blue-collar workers, were Hare’s colleagues, or those he encountered in several cross-country journeys. Slifkin organizes his meditations thematically, in short essayistic chapters, following Hare’s relationship to family, gender relations, employment, postwar documentary photography, and art institutions. Ultimately these are explorations of Hare’s sense of self, or “authority” as Slifkin articulates it. Some… Full Review

Not since Kirk Savage’s Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monuments in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton University Press, 1994) and Freeman Murray’s germinal text Emancipation and the Freed in American Sculpture: A Study in Interpretation (Press of Murray Brothers, 1916) has a scholar so adeptly and rigorously tackled the relationships between race, enslavement, and sculpture as does Caitlin Beach in Sculpture at the End of Slavery. The book’s table of contents gives early indication of the geographically expansive and historically rich terrain through which Beach navigates. Each chapter is anchored by the work of a singular artist, which the… Full Review

In 2020, the flooding Yangtze River covered the feet of the giant Buddha statue at Leshan, in southwest China’s Sichuan Province. As a local proverb warns, “When the Great Buddha washes his feet, the world is in chaos.” In 2022, drought revealed three Ming-dynasty (1368–1644) Buddha statues on an island in the Yangtze located within Chongqing municipality, also in southwest China. These examples underscore the timeliness—indeed, the urgency—of Sonya S. Lee’s Temples in the Cliffside: Buddhist Art in Sichuan. Lee takes up the question of how Buddhist art has survived in Sichuan’s humid, rainy environments from the Tang dynasty… Full Review

The Routledge Companion to Women in Architecture, edited by Anna Sokolina, is a welcome addition to the understanding of the varied contributions women practitioners have made to the built environment, particularly across the twentieth century. She has drawn together a collection of essays, twenty-nine in all, that showcase women’s individual contributions to architecture in different ways, from speculative projects to developer-builders. The essays are grouped into five sections in chronological sequence. The first encompassing the preindustrial age to the early 1900s, with the four sections that follow spanning the twentieth century. Most of the chapters utilize biography as the… Full Review

Although the study of premodern art history often relies on fragmentary evidence, the absent object remains curiously understudied—acknowledged but rarely examined as a critical component to the shape of art history itself. When the object of study is gone—inaccessible through deliberate destruction or the events of time—the art historian must confront this loss doubly: as evidence and as absence. The collection of essays in the compact and provocative book, Destroyed—Disappeared—Lost—Never Were, not only addresses this art historical problem as its central line of inquiry but it also reveals how, as editors Beate Fricke and Aden Kumler suggest, that ‘‘attending… Full Review

In Howardena Pindell: Reclaiming Abstraction, the first monograph devoted to the artist, activist, and MoMA curator, Sarah Louise Cowan focuses on Howardena Pindell’s paintings and collages made between the late 1960s and early 1980s, underscoring her forays into sculpture and video along the way. In doing so, Cowan traces the artist’s ambivalent exploration of modernist form. Teasing out Pindell’s alignment with and strategic revisions of all-over painting, the grid and surface treatments, Cowan ultimately unspools modernist grammar from the narrow, yet nevertheless dominant history of midcentury abstraction developed within mostly white male artistic enclaves. In turn, modernism as a… Full Review

In 1907, the Chicago heiress Hortense Mitchell Acton and her British husband, Arthur Acton, bought La Pietra, a Renaissance villa in the hills outside Florence, as a home where they might live surrounded by their growing art collection. Among the many treasures they gathered within its walls were eight sixteenth-century terracotta sculptures of religious subjects, examples of a type of decorative object commonly found within Florentine Renaissance homes. The works were made independently of one another by different artists and only assembled as a group by the Actons in the twentieth century. Nearly all stand under two feet high, and… Full Review

The paradox of Monochrome Multitudes is more than titular: Of multitudes there are many, as all but one of the galleries of the Smart Museum are taken up by this ambitious review of the outsized genre. Indeed, much of the work is not truly singular in color at all but tinted, toned, or shaded within a hue, if not outright multicolored. To account for the coming cacophony, we are made to understand at the outset that the exhibition aims to revisit “this notoriously hermetic art to reveal its creative possibilities and complicate its histories” without attempting a comprehensive survey. In… Full Review

Most people tempted by the title of this book probably know something about choir screens, especially those in Florence. We, as the author acknowledges, all owe a profound debt to Marica Hall’s work on Santa Croce and Santa Maria Novella, initially presented in Renovation and Counter-Reformation: Vasari and Duke Cosimo in Sta Maria Novella and Sta Croce (Oxford University Press, 1979). Her explanations for the dismantling of the screens in those two Florentine mendicant churches has shaped our collective understanding of Florentine tramezzi. Joanne Allen’s new book expands exponentially on that topic. She outlines the history, function, and meaning… Full Review

Curated by Carla Acevedo-Yates with Iris Colburn, Isabel Casso, and Nolan Jimbo, Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s–Today at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago presents the Caribbean diaspora not as a given, but as a framework for critiquing the homogenizing consequences of categories imposed upon its makers and their visual practices. As Acevedo-Yates declares in her catalog essay, Forecast Form seeks to “challenge the very legibility of so-called Caribbean art itself—what it is, how it looks, and who makes it” (24). Commencing its reframing of the Caribbean, the exhibition starts in the fourth-floor lobby with two large-scale… Full Review

This book examines the all too unusual case of the sculptor Luisa Roldán (1652–1706), who successfully navigated the challenges of being a woman artist in early modern Spain. The role of women in art throughout Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has been under-researched until recently. Spanish art too, has remained less well known or studied in the Anglophone world, compared with Italian art. Sculpture in Spain, which in this period was generally polychromed, has only lately begun to attract the attention it deserves. Catherine Hall’s book provides a welcome new contribution to all these fields. In it, she… Full Review

Author’s note: Historical terminologies of racial classification, including “Black” and “Coloured,” which were instantiated by the Population Registration Act of 1950, in South Africa, are used throughout Berger’s book so as not to erase the violence of policies enacted under apartheid. Maid in Uniform, a 1955 portrait of a Black South African domestic worker, is arguably one of the strongest works by painter Irma Stern (1894–1966). Dressed in the uniform typical of her profession, Stern’s defiantly unwilling subject purses her lips and crosses her arms; her eyes demur from the viewer. The maid’s expression signals the complex social relations… Full Review

What happens after the initial creative act? In her introduction to The Long Lives of Medieval Art and Architecture, Jennifer Feltman calls attention to the fact that art historical writing since Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects has typically prioritized the time of a work’s creation, and instead situates the case studies included in the edited volume in the time between then and now. The book makes the case that works we now label “medieval” are never exclusively so, as they have been transformed in later years, whether materially, semantically, or both. Overall, the collection… Full Review

David Ekserdjian describes his new and important book, The Italian Renaissance Altarpiece: Between Icon and Narrative, as a work of “almost demented ambition” (6). The description is apt. A thorough introduction, seven chapters, a conclusion, two appendices, and the usual scholarly apparatus adds up to just over 400 pages of tightly-packed, double-columned text. And that text sets out to provide an almost encyclopedic account of the most frequently produced type of art object in Renaissance Italy. Accordingly, the author references “well over a thousand” (61) works of art. These involve the whole of the Italian peninsula, date from circa… Full Review

Fourteen years after the University of Iowa’s art museum experienced a catastrophic flood, the museum has reopened—relocated in a new building on higher ground. In the summer of 2008, the rising Iowa River threatened not just the basement storage areas of the original building but even the art hanging on its walls, including Jackson Pollock’s Mural (1943) and one of the largest collections of African art in the nation. The museum staff, joined by professional art handlers and volunteers from across the state, had just six days to evacuate the building of 14,000 works of art. Ultimately the building was… Full Review