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A little girl, seated within an open cardboard box wrapped in barbed wire, looks out past the camera. Above her, a schematized curtain of rosaries dangles, filling the empty space between the outline of the United States and the contours of Central America. This image, a detail from Sandra C. Fernández’s The Northern Triangle (2018), serves as the cover of art historian Tatiana Reinoza’s Reclaiming the Americas: Latinx Art and the Politics of Territory. As the Trump administration continues its assault on immigrant communities, Reclaiming the Americas looks at Latinx artists’ responses to the rise of racist xenophobia in… Full Review

In The Painter’s Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists Who Championed the American Revolution, Zara Anishanslin elegantly opens her book by recuperating the moment when Joseph Wright exhibited a portrait of his mother, Patience, at the Royal Academy in 1780. Patience is seen sculpting, in wax, the decapitated head of Charles I. Anishanslin muses on George III’s thoughts upon seeing the picture, as was the custom at RA openings, just as the American War was approaching its spiraling denouement. Did he quietly gasp, perhaps stroke his throat? Today, we would desperately wish to see that picture, but it… Full Review

The Egyptian gods enjoyed an extraordinary and enduring popularity in the Roman world. It is not only the impressive remains of their temples in Rome and Italy, but also the empire-wide spread of their worship, whose mark can be found virtually in every province, that bear witness to the devotion paid to Sarapis and Isis. The Greek East constitutes a particularly rich field of inquiry in this respect, as it yields a vast array of documents related to these cults across a long time span—evidence of how deeply embedded Egyptian deities were in the life of the local communities. The… Full Review

At a time when rethinking feminism was gaining momentum in Japan, what set out to be a single exhibition was split into two: Feminisms and Countermeasures Against Awkward Discourses: From the Perspective of Third Wave Feminism, which were notable for their focus on third-wave feminism. Takahashi Ritsuko, then a curator at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, initially proposed an exhibition that examined Japanese contemporary art since the 1990s from a feminist perspective. Takahashi was impressed by the attempt to reconstruct girly culture from feminism in photographer Nagashima Yurie’s “Bokura” no “onnanoko shashin” kara watashitachi no gārī… Full Review

Traveling from the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), LA to the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Chicago, by way of the Guggenheim Bilbao, Paul Pfeiffer’s Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom spans over twenty-five years of photography, video, and sound sculpture, foreshadowing questions of representation in the age of AI. Pfeiffer’s sizable retrospective arrives at a moment where populism, nationalism, and digitally mediated beliefs dictate the shape of American life. Mapping his own biographical, social, and psychological histories through mass spectacle and celebrity culture, the artist interrupts the symbolic capital of professional sports… Full Review

Southern/Modern: Rediscovering Southern Art from the First Half of the Twentieth Century, on view at the Mint Museum, offers a compelling account of the flourishing artistic environment in the Southern United States during the first half of the twentieth century. Historically, modernist art has largely been tied to the major centers of the United States and Europe. In recent decades, however, scholars have increasingly acknowledged the multiplicity of modernist impulses in the visual arts, emphasizing the powerful cross-currents of modernist practices that emerged concurrently across the globe, including within previously ignored geographies like the Global South. Yet, despite the… Full Review

With his thoughtful new book, Networks of Touch: A Tactile History of Chinese Art, 1790–1840, Michael J. Hatch draws attention to a neglected period of Chinese art history—that which falls between the faltering later years of the Qianlong emperor’s reign (1735–96) and the Opium Wars (1839–42, 1856–60). Focusing on a group of educated men who were associated with the influential scholar-official Ruan Yuan (1764–1849), Hatch examines how their common dedication to “evidential scholarship” (kaozheng xue) is manifest in art forms that range from calligraphy and painting to teapots and marble table screens. Hatch’s meticulous research into this… Full Review

Tourists snapping selfies on the Ponte Vecchio in Florence these days may be hard-pressed to say anything about the bridge other than that it’s “old”—appropriate, I suppose, given its name Ponte Vecchio (Old Bridge). Yet as Theresa Flanigan’s meticulous study of the bridge’s origins in The Ponte Vecchio: Architecture, Politics, and Civic Identity in Late Medieval Florence reminds us, the extant Ponte Vecchio is “the oldest surviving bridge in Florence, the only functional medieval bridge along the entire course of the Arno River, and one of the few remaining medieval examples of the urbanized or inhabited bridge type in all… Full Review

In the era of the second Trump administration, the United States, a settler colonial nation that from its foundation has been invested in the expansion of its power and reach across space and over peoples, is living in a moment of especially overt imperial rhetoric. From the president’s insistence on calling the “Gulf of Mexico” the “Gulf of America” to administrative ruminations over Canadian entrance into the union or seizing control of Greenland, the ongoing nature of American imperialism is apparent in word and deed. Importantly, these are not new developments tied only to the political party in power, nor… Full Review

In ancient China, mirrors were more than just reflective surfaces. They were decorative artifacts that showcased a range of fine patterns and designs, reaching a broad audience beyond the elite. They also exerted a strong impact on early design more broadly, particularly in the way that the decorative motifs that adorned their reverse sides were structured within banded spaces. Although bronze mirrors have been an important focal point in Chinese and Japanese scholarship, only article-length treatments of this subject exist in English. Bronze Mirrors in Ancient China: Artistry and Technique by Kin Sum Li, therefore, stands as the first full-length… Full Review