Recently Published Reviews

In Cristelle Baskins’s recent monograph, Muley al-Hassan, the Hafsid king of Tunis (r. 1526–43) and vassal to Charles V (r. 1516–66), finally gets his due. Long eclipsed by hegemonic histories of his Habsburg contemporaries, Muley al-Hassan commands the center of Baskins’s narrative of cultural entanglement and territorial contestation in the early modern Mediterranean. But as Baskins signals in the text, the book aims to do more than recalibrate our understanding of the relationship between its titular protagonists, the Hafsids and the Habsburgs. As she traces Muley al-Hassan’s displacement, itineracy, and mythologization across the long sixteenth century, Baskins draws on transdisciplinary… Full Review

Amy Tobin’s Women Artists Together: Art in the Age of Women’s Liberation provides an important examination of artworks that emerged from debates among feminist artists across the US and UK during the 1970s. Richly researched, engagingly written, and compelling argued, Tobin makes clear the stakes of these historic works for contemporary feminist thought, placing her expertly chosen case studies in conversation with key past and present-day feminist writers throughout the book.  Focused on dialogues among artists of the Women’s Liberation Movement, Tobin offers a nuanced analysis of the challenges of feminist togetherness. Rather than broach “feminism” retrospectively, as a singular… Full Review

In a 1976 photograph, twenty-seven-year-old artist Željko Jerman kneels on the sidewalk in front of Belgrade’s Student Cultural Center (SKC), applying photo fixer to a large roll of photographic paper to write in stark, imperfect letters: “Ovo nije moj svijet” (“This is not my world”) in Croatian. The banner’s crude, handmade quality contrasts sharply with official messaging typical of public spaces, further highlighted by rough pieces of brick weighing it down. Soon displayed on the building’s façade before being promptly removed by gallery administration, the work raises provocative questions: What does this strange statement mean? How… Full Review

In Landscape and the Arts in Early Modern Italy: Theatre, Gardens and Visual Culture, Katrina Grant argues that the theatre exerted a significant but neglected influence on the design and experience of landscape in early modern Italy. In chapter one, Grant discusses the cliché that the arts of the seventeenth century were “theatrical” and suggests that if it is to have any value, this notion needs to be distinguished from modern ideas about the theatre and theatricality. Instead of platitudinous statements about the general “theatricality” of baroque works of art, and the simplistic categorisation of gardens according to the… Full Review

Younès Rahmoun: Here, Now, currently on view at the Smith College Museum of Art (SCMA), is the Moroccan artist’s first retrospective exhibition held in North America. True to Rahmoun’s multidisciplinary and expansive practice, Here, Now is comprised of four different installations on Smith College’s campus. Younès Rahmoun: Here, Now begins on the first-floor gallery of Smith College Museum of Art (SCMA), where visitors are introduced to Rahmoun’s artistic career and biography. One of the first sections in the gallery presents archival materials, such as sketches and notes in both Arabic and French, documenting Rahmoun’s artistic… Full Review

“Why in Seattle?” a reporter asked Ai Weiwei at the press conference. “Why not?!” he answered. This brief interaction stayed with me no less profoundly than the aura of the actual works representing Ai’s decades-long activism. A few weeks later, I began to demystify that “why not?!”: it could be only a matter of time before the sociopolitical climate changes dramatically even in the most liberal corners of the world, such as Seattle. In that sense, refreshing our collective memory through projects that expose the many forms of power abuse is, at the very least, something we should do. This… Full Review

How does one define an intervention? Through critical reflection and response or through rupture and renewal? In the words of scholars Jacqueline Francis, Jeanne Gerrity, and their contributors, an intervention should have all these qualities and more. Copublished by Sternberg Press and the California College of the Arts (CCA) Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, Is Now the Time for Joyous Rage? is the fourth annual edition of A Series of Open Questions. The publication weaves twenty-nine entries, including previously published book excerpts, commissioned media, art, and experimental projects, into a profound meditation on Black feminist ideologies, critical making… Full Review

In Pierrot and His World: Art, Theatricality, and the Marketplace in France, 1697–1945, Marika Takanishi Knowles investigates how art, theater, and commerce converge through a shared aesthetic of performance and surface display, enabling the negotiation of social identities. According to Knowles, a distinct dynamic emerges at the tail end of the seventeenth century, a “marketplace of theatricality as a form of social address” (2). The figure of Pierrot crystallizes this dynamic over the two and a half centuries covered by the book, a continuity all the more striking in this figure’s adaptability to shifting variables across time and historical… Full Review

Alice Tilche’s Adivasi Art and Activism: Curation in a Nationalist Age is an anthropological study of museums and religious conversion movements as disciplinary techniques and resources that variously shape the lives of subjects amidst ongoing conditions of marginalization and dispossession in an Indigenously inhabited region in contemporary India. Drawn from research conducted over 2005–2017 in the western Indian state of Gujarat, home to approximately 8.9 million subjects who self-identify as Adivasi and/or Tribal, the book focuses on the Chhota Udaipur district, where Rathava Adivasis constitute the dominant Tribal community. Here, Tilche tracks how Indian discourses of Indigeneity articulated by non-Adivasi… Full Review

On the east choir screen of Bamberg Cathedral, sculpted pairs of men are framed by carved arches. Though their bodies twist and their garments whirl with heavy pleats, the pairs always manage to face each other. Identified as the apostles on the south side of the choir screen and their Old Testament forebears, the prophets, on the north side, these sculpted men seem to be locked in eternal conversations, suggested by both their hand gestures and their accompanying banderoles. Amongst these twenty-four figures, however, one pair is shown with gently parted lips, an additional detail to suggest they are speaking. … Full Review

Amber Musser’s Between Shadows and Noise: Sensation, Situatedness, and the Undisciplined is a shadow without an originary object—a sourceless cacophony. Musser’s two previous monographs— Sensational Flesh (2014) and Sensual Excess (2018)—established her as a preeminent thinker of and against dialectics: in her oeuvre, she makes it clear how this structure of thinking moves relentlessly forward and also produces, in its movement, a linearization of logic and sense that conforms to (and ultimately produces) a liberal humanist version of subjectivity. Between Shadows and Noise builds on her previous studies both formally and argumentatively. The monograph investigates a series of works that… Full Review

The subtitle of Vincent Valdez’s mid-career retrospective at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Just a Dream . . . , summons a disenchanting fall to reality. It is a phrase one may invoke to create emotional distance from potential disappointment—“It’s just a dream”—or to downplay such disappointment after the fact—“It was just a dream.” But devoid of a preceding subject and verb, the phrase remains referentially and temporally enigmatic. Like Valdez’s art, it looks simultaneously to the past, present, and future. Moreover, the would-be trivializing finality of the fragmentary statement is deferred by an ellipsis. These three dots deny the comfort… Full Review

The shifting soil, the receding water, and the chirping birds—echoes of a landscape etched by the relentless passage of time—guide us through the small gallery where fragility becomes perceptible, taking up a sensory presence. This first work in the exhibition, Points of Confluence: In Between the Island and the Desert, is a sound collaboration between the artists in the two-person exhibition Muddy Terrains: Mariana Ramos Ortiz + Estephania González, featuring San Juan-based Mariana Ramos Ortiz and Phoenix-based Estephania González. In this show at the Arizona State University Art Museum, the transient and delicate nature of our environment is… Full Review

In a world dominated by climate crisis, trees matter. Gregory Bryda’s The Trees of the Cross: Wood as Subject and Medium in the Art of Late Medieval Germany lends historical perspective to our understanding of trees and what they mean to humanity. With a focus on wood as artistic material and medium in late medieval Germany, Bryda explains the polyvalency of arboreal imagery, sharing with us its secret cross-referencing language. Reflecting on the recursive relationship between nature and the Church prior to the Reformation, the author investigates how it was mediated by the wood of the cross, both depicted and… Full Review

In the last chapter of her brilliant book Each One Another: The Self in Contemporary Art, Rachel Haidu quotes at length Yvonne Rainer’s description of her desire to “render the shards of her own life” and incorporate “the new content” of personal feelings, which the choreographer saw as no less than markers of the uniqueness of a human being, into her work beginning in the early 1970s. Rainer elaborates, “On the one hand, this mindset can be characterized as a refusal of narrative and fixed meanings and a distrust of the “telling” and shaping strategies of fiction and history… Full Review