Recently Published Reviews

The Comitán Valley: Sculpture and Identity on the Maya Frontier expands the scope of Classic Maya art beyond the now-familiar canon based on sites from the Guatemalan Peten, Yucatan, and Belize. The Comitán Valley, located in the Mexican state of Chiapas, is on the western edge of the continuous distribution of Maya societies. Covering four distinct settlements, Caitlin Earley provides the first regional-scale examination of sculpture from the area, showing how the frontier location fostered diverse developments that explored different potentials within Classic Maya culture. Each chapter provides clear illustration of the known sculptures, their settings, and comparisons with thematically… Full Review

Lisa E. Bloom’s Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetics: Artists Reimagine the Arctic and Antarctic is a sequel. In 1993, Bloom published Gender on Ice: American Ideologies of Polar Expeditions, which examined the construction of heroic male subjectivity vis-à-vis people seeking to reach the North and South Poles during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A prescient work, Gender on Ice, located thematic overlaps involving gender, race, empire, nation, science, and environment that remain current topics in the academy three decades later, so why is there a need for the sequel? There are two ways to… Full Review

In the second installment of the Robert E. Meyerhoff and Rheda Becker Biennial Commission at the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA), artist Raúl de Nieves (b. 1983) bathes the lobby in colored light. The central feature of the public exhibition is a twenty-seven-paned window that spans the length of the building’s east facade. The Mexico-born, Brooklyn-based sculptor hand-crafted the panels from everyday materials like tape and sheets of acetate to recreate the look of stained glass. Monumental in size and dazzling in effect, the installation presents a series of vignettes, each depicting creatures that reappear frequently in de… Full Review

Four, slim volumes covered in soft, matte black paper set inside the recess of a black, rectangular box, Louise Nevelson’s Sculpture: DRAG, COLOR, JOIN, FACE tangibly announces its subject. Julia Bryan-Wilson’s study focuses on the sculpture for which Nevelson is best known: monochromatic found-object wood assemblages, frequently consisting of modular (if not always movable), rectangular, “shadowbox” reliefs, which Nevelson built continuously from the early 1950s until her death in 1988. If this “signature” visual language brings to mind some of the central tenets of Euro-American modernism (for instance, the grid, abstraction, individualism), Bryan-Wilson argues that the colors… Full Review

For the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Tree and Serpent: Early Buddhist Art in India exhibition of South Asian art, an array of one hundred forty breath-taking major works dated ca. 200 BCE to 400 CE made their way across the world, perhaps never to be seen again in the US during our lifetimes. The Tree and Serpent curator John Guy centered the exhibition on the art that arose from the first lived tradition of Buddhism in the world. The exhibition shifted our understanding of early South Asian art in two critical ways—first, away from Buddha images as bodily representations to… Full Review

Blue velvet lines the nécessaire made of bois de violette and mahogany. The contents consist of two small teacups and a teapot imported from Asia, a sugar pot, a gold box for tea leaves, a crystal flask, and two teaspoons. This exquisite service for two, which packages intimacy, luxury, and convenience in semiprecious materials, embodies the values of the Regency. Between 1715 and 1723, France was governed from Paris by the owner of this nécessaire, Philippe II d’Orléans, the nephew of Louis XIV and the granduncle of the minor king Louis XV. The subject of a recent exhibition and… Full Review

Books can be many things. In Penned & Painted: The Art and Meaning of Books in Medieval in Renaissance Manuscripts they are the central feature, sign, and iconographic motif in illuminated manuscripts. In this beautifully produced volume, Lucy Freeman Sandler takes the prevalent pictorial phenomenon of book-images in manuscripts and thematically unpacks it into a wide-ranging study. She includes representations of books that are open or closed, rolls (representing written words), and scrolls (representing oral speech), forming a compelling study of book-images in medieval and Renaissance manuscripts through various contexts of donation, destruction, and use. Sandler writes that the idea… Full Review

Jean-François Lyotard is probably mostly known to the general reader for The Postmodern Condition, which sparked a debate that still goes on today even though the term “postmodernism” seems to have lost much of its appeal. His writings, however, cannot be subsumed under this heading, as if constituting a program: they trace a sinuous line that blurs divisions between genres, refuses institutional boundaries, and displays many twists and turns. Kiff Bamford and Magaret Grebowicz’s Lyotard and Critical Practice contains a series of original essays as well as selections from Lyotard’s writings providing us with multiple approaches to Lyotard’s work… Full Review

Within the ever-expanding literature produced at the intersection of art and the health humanities, The Medicine of Art offers a thoughtful reframing of familiar people and places in which disease is not a disjuncture, but a point of connection, community, and intense artistic inquiry. Looking beyond the clinic, Elizabeth Lee argues that fin-de-siècle artists confronted with serious illness found a kind of relief in creative practice that period medicine could not offer. Her book skillfully interlaces extensive archival work with diverse perspectives from art historians, scholars of cultural and medical history, and theorists including Arthur Frank, Susan Sontag, Katherine Ott… Full Review

The significance of James Van Der Zee (1886–1983) to the history of photography and to the story of Black life and culture in the twentieth century is immense. And yet, as Emilie Boone elucidates in her sterling book, A Nimble Arc: James Van Der Zee and Photography, there is much about the artist’s prodigious and probing practice that beckons further consideration. Some of what has made it difficult to narrate Van Der Zee’s extraordinary artistic achievements tidily, Boone observes, is the sheer length of his career, which spanned more than eight decades, from 1900–83. That his images shuttle between… Full Review

In 2018, Ittai Weinryb published an article in Speculum entitled “Hildesheim Avant-Garde: Bronze, Columns, and Colonialism.” Its primary objects of study were the famous bronze doors and the less well-known, but equally impressive, bronze column made around the year 1000 for Bishop Bernward of Hildesheim. Many of the arguments of this important article were adumbrated in its title. Weinryb used the term avant-garde in its double sense: 1) the extended one, familiar to art historians, to describe forward-looking artistic production; and 2) the original, more literal military sense, to refer to front-line shock troops. This literal meaning was crucial to… Full Review

In her book The Painting Master’s Shame: Liang Shicheng and the Xuanhe Catalogue of Paintings, Amy McNair demonstrates the breathtaking rise of eunuch officials under Emperor Huizong’s reign (r. 1100–26), and their involvement in art production and management. She argues that the renowned Xuanhe Catalogue of Paintings (1120), referred to as the Catalogue was not authored or directed by Emperor Huizong but by his powerful eunuch Liang Shicheng (ca. 1063–1126). An important inventory for third- through twelfth-century paintings held in the palace storehouses, the Catalogue classifies 6,396 paintings into ten subject categories, adding explanatory prefaces and 231 artists’ biographies… Full Review

For historians of East European art, who have long labored to fill gaps in the historical record left by loss or disregard, the publication of compelling new information in Alexandra Chiriac’s recent book, Performing Modernism: A Jewish Avant-Garde in Bucharest, will be most welcome. Chiriac not only provides newly uncovered material on design and theater in interwar Romania that corrects long-held assumptions, but also enriches the chronicle of Jewish and women’s contributions to the avant-garde with fresh insights. Chiriac establishes her position at the outset: bringing design and theater into the foreground enlarges the arena of avant-garde activity and… Full Review

You would be forgiven for thinking that the image on the back cover of Aleksandr Rodchenko: Photography in the Time of Stalin was included there by mistake. The photograph—a 1933 snapshot of two logs floating in a stagnant pool of water—is not what we associate with Rodchenko’s camerawork. Quite the opposite, in fact. Rodchenko was, by both his own assertions and scholarly consensus, a photographer committed to capturing Soviet technocracy in all its fast-paced, forward-looking dynamism. There must have been a mix-up in the design studio, then, for this monograph to emerge emblazoned with an image of pond life on… Full Review

A little over ten years ago, I received two crib quilts made and gifted by family members at a baby shower celebrating my first-born daughter, Abigail. There were many “oohs” and “ahhs” from family and friends, as they knew the quilts were carefully made with love and joy for the baby’s arrival. Several years prior, I had directed and produced a documentary called The Skin Quilt Project, which recounted African American quilters and scholars telling of the transformative power of the African American quilt tradition across the United States, including in Gee’s Bend, Alabama. African American quilters in the… Full Review