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

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Dora C. Y. Ching, Louise Allison Cort, and Andrew M. Watsky, eds.
Princeton: Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University in association with Princeton University Press, 2017. 336 pp.; 99 color ills. Cloth $75.00 (9780691177557)
Since its acquisition by the Freer Gallery of Art in 2009, the tea leaf storage jar known as “Chigusa” (Thousand Grasses) has generated much discussion and scholarship, including two exhibitions (Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, 2014, and Princeton University Art Museum, 2014­­–15), a symposium, two workshops, and two books. The present volume results from the symposium and workshops. While the earlier book, Chigusa and the Art of Tea (2014), also edited by Louise Allison Cort and Andrew M. Watsky, is made up of short essays that focus primarily on the object itself, Around Chigusa takes a different approach. The essays create… Full Review
October 26, 2018
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Jessica Keating
University Park: Penn State University Press, 2018. 184 pp.; 37 color ills.; 23 b/w ills. Cloth $69.95 (9780271080024)
Presented in Paris in 1739, Jacques de Vaucanson’s fabricated duck, one of the most renowned examples of an automaton, could not only flap its wings and move its beak but also eat and excrete. Later discovered to have been pre-stuffed with fake waste, it indulged the Enlightenment desire for engineered imitations that modeled the inner workings of living forms. Voltaire declared that the shitting bird was the only reminder of the glory of France. The history of automata in the early modern period often accentuates the writings of René Descartes and sets forth how anatomists, theologians, and social theorists sought… Full Review
October 24, 2018
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Linda Safran
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. 496 pp.; 20 color ills.; 149 b/w ills. Cloth $95.00 (9780812245547)
Italy, a relatively recently unified country, is often described as a patchwork of idiosyncratic regions. Even to this day, the food, customs, dialects, architecture, and terrain shift dramatically between neighboring villages, cities, and regions, Italians themselves proclaiming “campanilismo,” a competitive pride in their birthplace. By focusing on one particular region, Linda Safran gains a valuable insight into how one such distinctive identity emerged and developed in the Middle Ages. Some background to the region is essential for fully appreciating Safran’s study. The area known as Salento forms part of the present-day administrative region of Apulia: essentially the heel of the… Full Review
October 19, 2018
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Ezra Shales
London: Reaktion Books, 2017. 272 pp.; 70 b/w ills. Cloth $29.95 (9781780238227)
Ezra Shales’s The Shape of Craft derives its name as a pointed homage to George Kubler’s influential treatise, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (1962). Though he was an eminent Mesoamericanist, Kubler’s book had unusual reach and scope and was widely admired by modernists and practicing artists alike, including his former students at Yale, Sheila Hicks and Richard Serra. Clearly the work of an adroit and poetic storyteller, Shales’s book seeks to extend the lineage and framework for Kubler’s rejection of the art historical masterwork, thereby reordering the cultural hierarchy in favor of humanity’s humble origins… Full Review
October 15, 2018
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Patricia J. Fay
Series: Latin American and Caribbean Arts and Culture. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2017. 376 pp.; 122 color ills.; 16 b/w ills. Cloth $90.00 (9780813054582)
Patricia J. Fay’s book, Creole Clay: Heritage Ceramics in the Contemporary Caribbean, fills a void in the broad and diverse history of world ceramics. She does this by focusing our attention on an area of the world generally thought of as a vacation destination instead of a region rich in culture with complicated histories of colonialism, the African diaspora, slavery, hard-won independence, culture, and art, specifically ceramics. Fay deftly weaves the history of this region with the production of utilitarian objects. Her exploration of traditional techniques, raw materials, and the living potters who continue to create traditional ware, against the… Full Review
October 1, 2018
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Mireille M. Lee
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 382 pp.; 110 b/w ills. Hardcover $99.00 (9781107055360)
The study of the role of dress in ancient societies has seen a boom in recent years, absorbing new techniques in archaeology and approaches from “new dress history,” cultural studies, and theories of the body. Mireille Lee’s previous work has already been influential in putting Greek dress on the agenda, and this current volume offers new insights into dress as a communicative medium as well as synthesizing scholarship across a number of related subfields (gender, identity, ethnicity, sexuality, status, class, etc.). By taking Greek conceptions of the body as her starting point, Lee structures the volume by applying the layers… Full Review
September 28, 2018
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David Adjaye and Peter Allison
New York: Thames & Hudson, 2016. 400 pp.; 700 color ills. Cloth $50.00 (9780500343166)
This compact edition of David Adjaye’s exploration of Africa brings together in one volume the fruits of his eleven-year-long project to visit and visually document the capitals of the continent’s fifty-four countries. The front cover image of Adjaye, Africa, Architecture: A Photographic Survey of Metropolitan Architecture serves as a key to the intellectual and conceptual approach of the book: a map of Africa’s six climatic zones. This map, credited to his architectural practice Adjaye Associates, is referred to as both a terrain and political map. This captures well the essence of his approach and investigation, namely, the rich and complex… Full Review
September 26, 2018
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D. Medina Lasansky, ed.
Pittsburgh: Periscope, 2014. 640 pp.; 126 ills. Paperback $35.00 (9781934772256)
This collection of essays has attracted little attention since its publication in 2014, an oversight that should be remedied. Through nineteen essays and nine photo essays edited by D. Medina Lasansky, The Renaissance: Revised, Expanded, Unexpurgated places the early modern past and the postmodern present in dialogue with one another and examines the ways in which the Renaissance has been appropriated and received in Anglo-American popular culture. As Lasansky notes in the introduction, the Renaissance has never been more popular: from the video game Assassin’s Creed to Botticelli Olive Oil and The Da Vinci Code to the various televised incarnations… Full Review
September 24, 2018
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Franklin Sirmans and Yael Lipschutz, eds.
Exh. cat. New York and London: Prestel, Delmonico, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2015. 128 pp.; 80  color ills.; 24 b/w ills. Hardcover $39.95 (9783791354347)
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, June 7, 2015–January 3, 2016
Noah Purifoy: Junk Dada takes an in-depth look at the artistic and biographical journey of the under-recognized African American artist and activist, Noah Purifoy (1917–2004) and his large-scale installation and home environment, the Joshua Tree Outdoor Museum (1989–2004). This lush catalogue, richly illustrated with eighty photographs by Fredrik Nilsen, features insightful essays by Yael Lipschutz, art critic and archivist of the Noah Purifoy Foundation in Joshua Tree, California; Lowery Stokes Sims, curator emerita of the Museum of Art and Design, New York City, and former executive director of the Studio Museum in Harlem; and Kristine McKenna, the Los Angeles–based art… Full Review
September 20, 2018
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Diarmuid Costello
New York: Routledge, 2018. 166 pp.; 12 color ills.; 18 b/w ills. Paper $29.95 (9780415684491)
Diarmuid Costello’s book brings together an abundance of historical and analytical debates to make clear that the philosophy of photography is a delineated field in its own right. Although the title On Photography: A Philosophical Inquiry reflects Susan Sontag’s seminal book and may bring to mind Vilém Flusser’s attempt to single-handedly philosophize photography, it is in no sense similar to those approaches. Costello has gathered a rich corpus of philosophical thoughts on two questions: What is a photograph and what is photography? (7). Instead of resorting to a “cultural criticism” approach (embraced by thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, Sontag, Roland… Full Review
September 17, 2018
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