Concise, critical reviews of books, exhibitions, and projects in all areas and periods of art history and visual studies

Browse Recent Book Reviews

Andrea E. Frohne
New York State Series. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2015. 435 pp.; 12 color ills.; 55 b/w ills. Paperback $49.95 (9780815634300)
The mutual imbrications of race, space, and visuality that are a shared preoccupation of art history, cultural studies, critical theory, media studies, and anthropology come into disturbingly vivid relief in the story of the colonial-era cemetery whose long-buried past and recent transformation into the first national monument to memorialize US slavery form the subjects of Andrea Frohne’s fascinating book, The African Burial Ground in New York City: Memory, Spirituality, and Space. Over the course of the eighteenth century, over 15,000 deceased African Americans, slave and free—perhaps as many as 20,000, according to some estimates—were interred throughout roughly 6.7 acres… Full Review
December 10, 2018
Thumbnail
Marian Bleeke
Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2017. 216 pp.; 4 color ills.; 43 b/w ills. Cloth $99.00 (9781783272501)
In Motherhood and Meaning in Medieval Sculpture: Representations from France, c. 1100–1500, Marian Bleeke’s goal is to explore what medieval sculptures “have to say about medieval women’s experiences of motherhood” (1). She asserts that “these sculptures become sites where medieval women could consider their own maternal experiences and the meanings those experiences held for them” (3). In this study, the author makes a powerful case for exploring the potential experiences and perspectives of those people who have limited presence in the medieval textual record—a rather large, but decidedly understudied portion of the medieval population. It remains a shortcoming… Full Review
December 7, 2018
Thumbnail
Diana Bullen Presciutti
Visual Culture in Early Modernity. New York: Routledge, 2015. 284 pp.; 8 color ills.; 115 b/w ills. Hardcover $112.00 (9781472457653)
Diana Bullen Presciutti’s Visual Cultures of Foundling Care in Renaissance Italy is a sharply focused look at the figurative imagery deployed by hospitals caring for orphaned and abandoned children. Hospitals in Renaissance Italy have long been a subject of research: John Henderson’s The Renaissance Hospital: Healing the Body and Healing the Soul (2006) is a recent example of broad treatment, and Il mercante, l’ospedale, i fanciulli: La donazione di Francesco Datini, Santa Maria Nuova e la Fondazione degli Innocenti (eds. Stefano Filipponi, et al., 2010) is an example of specialized institutional studies. Historians have sought to chart the emergence of… Full Review
December 6, 2018
Thumbnail
Sonal Khullar
Oakland: University of California Press, 2015. 368 pp.; 84 color ills.; 20 b/w ills. Cloth $60.00 (9780520283671)
In her innovative and elegant book, Worldly Affiliations: Artistic Practice, National Identity, and Modernism in India, Sonal Khullar reconstitutes the history of modernism in India as nimble artistic negotiations between present and past, East and West, crafts and fine arts, and individual and nation. Through Edward Said’s notion of “affiliation,” she pushes the history of art worlds beyond the bounds of the nation-state, education, or media to revive “the worldly conditions, or social and political horizons, of cultural production” (14). By attending to artists’ mediations, she models a new theory of writing art history. Khullar examines four canonical artists—Amrita… Full Review
December 4, 2018
Thumbnail
Nnamdi Elleh
New York: Routledge, 2017. 350 pp.; 214 b/w ills. Hardcover $165.00 (9781472465290)
Abuja, Nigeria—the capital city of Africa’s most populous nation—was master planned from the ground up in the last forty years in the shadow of a gigantic rock outcrop (Aso Rock) near the geographic center of the country. Other than these scant details, few in or outside of Nigeria know much else about what is one of the continent’s most powerful cities. Nnamdi Elleh has begun to address this long-overlooked space, in this work on the city’s architecture. The result is a book packed with material, but one organized in such a way that readers may struggle to sort through it. … Full Review
December 3, 2018
Thumbnail
James E. Young
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2018. 256 pp.; 115 color ills. $29.95 (9781625343611)
Over the past thirty years, James E. Young, who recently retired from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has studied and written on modern memorial art, most notably that devoted to the Holocaust. For much of his career, he held a joint appointment in English and Judaic studies at that university, and also served as the founding director of its Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies. Over this time, Young has become a significant scholar in each of these fields. In three important books and countless essays, he continues to demonstrate the importance of cultural artifacts to the field of… Full Review
November 30, 2018
Thumbnail
Surekha Davies
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. 380 pp.; 60 b/w ills. Cloth £21.99 (9781107036673)
During the Renaissance, illustrated maps became important epistemological tools for Europeans seeking information about the inhabitants of the Americas. Surekha Davies’s Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters considers the relationship between a variety of written and illustrated sources (travel accounts, costume books, encyclopedias, and prints) and maps. The book demonstrates how the latter visually synthesized—in one place—“ethnographic knowledge” that ultimately functioned to justify European colonialism, expansion, and enslavement of indigenous peoples. Addressing the period from roughly 1492 to 1650, and having considered some two thousand maps and atlases, primarily made and consumed in… Full Review
November 29, 2018
Thumbnail
Deborah Willis and Natasha L. Logan, eds.
Exh. cat. New York: Aperture, 2015. 268 pp.; 280 color ills. Paperback $29.95 (9781597113359)
Brooklyn Museum, New York, January 13–July 15, 2012
The questions that black males are asked each day by white America (or world consumers of blackness) are often debilitating in their reduction of our complex capacities and our ideologically inspired identities: questions that only scratch at the surface of a humanity forged by the depth of our roots, struggle, and emergent culture. These questions do not sincerely ask but seek to define the very nature of who we are. But, the questions that black males ask other black males are questions about soul searching; questions that begin to dismantle the myths and misconceptions that have evolved around race and… Full Review
November 28, 2018
Thumbnail
Elizabeth Morán
Latin American Studies: Art and Visual Studies. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016. 156 pp.; 27 b/w ills. Paperback $24.95 (9781477310694)
Elizabeth Morán’s Sacred Consumption is a study of the place of food in Aztec ritual. The foods examined by Morán were ephemeral, and the performances that characterized ceremonial life in Tenochtitlan and its provinces are similarly elusive in the archaeological record. Fortunately for scholars, indigenous artists, often directed by European friar missionaries, created manuscript paintings that represent elements of Aztec ritual. These illuminated books constitute the primary visual evidence for Morán’s study, though a few works of preconquest stone sculpture are discussed as well. Reading these images in light of colonial-period texts leads to a wide range of assertions about… Full Review
November 27, 2018
Thumbnail
Jane Chin Davidson and Sandra Esslinger, eds.
London: Routledge, 2017. 196 pp.; 20 color ills. Cloth $149.95 (9781138656826)
In the edited volume Global and World Art in the Practice of the University Museum, scholars Jane Chin Davidson and Sandra Esslinger share several essays that trace the role of university museums in developing new ways of thinking about art within a larger, global context. This framework acknowledges the complexity of contemporary geopolitical and social interfaces and how these affect the production and reception of works of art. Occasioned by the fiftieth anniversary of the Fowler Museum UCLA, the book focuses on the museum’s relationship with the University of California Los Angeles as a means for grounding the… Full Review
November 21, 2018
Thumbnail