Concise, 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.

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 Microsoft Word to format your review. You may use italics, boldface, and diacritics, but do not use HTML tags. Reviews will be accepted only as email attachments.

Length

Reviews are not to be longer than 1,500 words. If two books or two exhibitions are being reviewed, the text may contain up to 2,000 words.

Style

For general questions of style, see The Chicago Manual of Style, 17th edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). For spelling, refer to Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th edition.

CAA also implements an in-house style guide for consistency across its publications. While the guide is primarily a reference for copyeditors and proofreaders, authors are welcome to consult the style sheet if they desire guidance on formatting titles of works, the spelling of certain terms, and so on. To access the CAA Publications Style Guide, click here.

Content

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

  • your name, affiliation, and email address
  • the total number of words

For book reviews:

  • please provide the author’s name and the complete title of the 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 US 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)
  • cloth or paper binding and ISBN number
  • price (in US dollars, euros, or other currency)

For exhibition reviews:

  • please give the exhibition title, the name of the institution where the exhibition was seen, and exhibition dates; please also provide any other institution names and dates if the exhibition traveled/will travel
  • if an exhibition catalog is reviewed, please also give bibliographic information as for book reviews

Example:

Mary Phillips, Assistant Professor, Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University, mphillips@princeton.edu
 
1,476 words
 
Hero, Hawk, and Open Hand: American Indian Art of the Ancient Midwest and South. Art Institute of Chicago, November 20, 2004–January 30, 2005; Saint Louis Art Museum, Saint Louis, Missouri, March 4–May 30, 2005
 
Richard F. Townsend, ed. Hero, Hawk, and Open Hand: American Indian Art of the Ancient Midwest and South. Exh. cat. Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, in association with Yale University Press, 2004. 288 pp.; 320 color ills.; 120 b/w. $34.95 (paper) (9780300106015)


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, caa.reviews does not use footnotes or endnotes. Instead, when citing a book or quoting a text other than the book or catalog under review, please provide the publisher and date in parentheses following the cited material, like so: (Yale University Press, 2004), as well as the page number, if applicable.

To cite material quoted from the book or catalog under review, please provide the page number(s) of the quoted material in parentheses following the end of the quote, like so: (24).

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

Book reviews will be accompanied by a small image of the book’s cover. Exhibition reviews may include an installation shot taken at the venue. Please use this format for exhibition image captions:


Dior: From Paris to the World, installation view, Denver Art Museum, 2018–19 (photograph © Rebecca Grant; provided by Denver Art Museum)
 
The Jeweled Isle: Art from Sri Lanka, installation view, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2018–19. Architectural panels depicting demons, nature deities, and attendants, late 17th or early 18th century, opaque watercolor on wood (photograph by the author)


Schedule

A book review should be written within three months of receipt of a book, then sent to your field editor for comments. After your field editor submits the final text to CAA for copyediting, you will receive your edited text for approval in approximately two months. 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 CAA. 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 CAA.

If you have any questions, please contact the field editor who commissioned your review, or Sally Knapp, Publications and Programs Editor, at sknapp@collegeart.org. Thank you for contributing to caa.reviews.