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

Submission Guidelines

caa.reviews does not accept unsolicited reviews. Reviews are commissioned at the discretion of caa.reviews field editors and editorial-board members. Publishers, museums, and galleries may submit books, catalogues, and other review materials for consideration to: Publications Department, College Art Association, 50 Broadway, Floor 21, New York, NY 10004. Materials submitted for consideration will not be returned.

If you have been commissioned by a caa.reviews field editor to write a review, please follow these guidelines for preparing your text.

Format

Please use a standard word-processing program to format your review. You may use italics, boldface, and diacritics, but do not use HTML tags. Reviews will be accepted only as e-mail attachments.

Length

The average review is 1,500 words. If you expect to write a substantially longer or shorter review, please confirm this with your commissioning field editor and the editor-in-chief first.

Style

For general questions of style, see The Chicago Manual of Style, 16th ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). For spelling, refer to Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Webster’s Fourth, or Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary. CAA house style is based on these authorities, with some variations.

The following information must be provided at the beginning of the review:

  • your name, affiliation, and e-mail address
  • the total number of words
  • for exhibition reviews, please give the name of the institution where the exhibition was seen and the exhibition title; if applicable, please provide institution names and dates for other exhibition venues
  • if an exhibition catalogue is reviewed, please give bibliographic information as for book reviews
  • author’s name and complete title of book, with a colon between the main title and the subtitle; please provide information about edition or volume, if applicable
  • if the publication is part of a series, please provide the series title
  • place(s) of publication (if multiple places are listed, the U.S. location is preferred)
  • publisher(s)
  • date of publication
  • total number of pages in the book, including all front matter and illustrations that do not carry page numbers; if this information cannot be found in the book or on the jacket flap, it can usually be found on the publisher’s website
  • number of illustrations (color and/or black and white)
  • price (in U.S. dollars, euros, or other currency)
  • cloth or paper binding and ISBN number

Examples:

Mary Phillips, Assistant Professor, Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University, mphillips@princeton.edu

1,476 words

Gary Tinterow and Geneviève Lacambre. Manet/Velázquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, in association with Yale University Press, 2003. 608 pp.; 380 color ills.; 349 b/w ills. $75.00 (cloth) (0300098804)

If you are reviewing an exhibition catalogue, please provide the complete exhibition
schedule, including the institution name, location (city and state or city and country), and complete dates. The format is as follows:

Exhibition schedule: Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France, September 16, 2002–January 12, 2003; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, March 4–June 8, 2003

Please provide URLs to any primary research material in digital form that is cited in your article or for any links you would like incorporated in the text (e.g., museum, academic, or educational sites).

Because of the brief format of these reviews, footnotes and endnotes are not encouraged. Instead, please provide the city, publisher, and date in parentheses when citing a book or quoting a text other than the book or catalogue under review, following the cited material. If you must provide a footnote, it will be treated as an endnote and will be cross-linked between text and endnote. Footnote numbers should follow the end of a sentence.

Full names should be provided on first mention in the text; surnames thereafter (e.g., Marcel Duchamp, then Duchamp).

To cite material quoted from a review or catalogue, please provide the page number(s) of the quoted material in parenthesis following the end of the quote.

Schedule

A book review should be written within three months of receipt of a book. CAA asks that you return any book you decide not to review so that it may be reassigned. Exhibition reviews are considered part of the scholarly record and are not necessarily published prior to the closing of an exhibition unless arrangements are made with the commissioning field editor in advance.

Additional Information

All reviews published by caa.reviews are the exclusive property of the College Art Association. CAA grants reviewers the right to reprint their texts subsequently in any format, subject to giving proper credit to their original publication in caa.reviews. CAA also generally grants permission for reviews to be reprinted without charge provided proper credit is given to the author and the College Art Association.

If you have any questions, please contact the field editor who commissioned your review or the caa.reviews staff editor in the CAA Publications Department at caareviews@collegeart.org. Thank you for contributing to caa.reviews.