Recently Published Reviews

In their heyday in the second half of the twentieth century, museum catalogs of permanent collections of art from the ancient Americas fulfilled an indispensable role recording the appearances, whereabouts, and growing knowledge of objects in a then-nascent field. At the same time, they frequently aspired to portray a newly amassed collection as “encyclopedic” and posit its significance. Such catalogs—for example, Lee Parson’s Pre-Columbian Art: The Morton D. May and The Saint Louis Art Museum Collections, published in 1980—regularly commemorated major acquisitions from private collections and, as things of beauty themselves, were typically gifted to potential donors to solicit future… Full Review

Hidden in Plain Sight: Concealing Enslavement in American Visual Culture joins two trends broadening art history’s scope: exposing racial ideologies and analyzing popular art. While others have focused on antislavery imagery, Stephens opens new pathways by illuminating art that supported slavery in the United States, gaining access to unseen works, and researching manuscripts to understand the artists and their clients. For art historians, the book offers greater context for interpreting Southern art; for historians of slavery, it offers visual analysis often missing from studies of political culture. It provides a lay of the land and establishes key waypoints. At the… Full Review

This volume, L’iconographie du Bestiaire divin de Guillaume le clerc de Normandie, by Rémy Cordonnier provides an excellent introduction to the Divine Bestiary (Bestiaire divin, ca. 1210–11)) by Guillaume le clerc of Normandy, through the presentation of the complex textual tradition and an introduction of what is known of the author and the context. In his text, Guillaume explains that he translated Latin prose into French verse. Though originally from Normandy, Guillaume lived in England and was married with children. Working for patrons in the West Midlands, he wrote poetry, moral allegories, and exempla. The Bestiaire divin … Full Review

For anyone concerned with the Middle Ages (and beyond), Jerusalem represents a challenge and an almost inexhaustible source of inspiration. For centuries, the holy city has presented itself to the observer as a liminal space in which the symbolic, legendary, allegorical, and metaphorical dimensions are inextricably superimposed on perceptible reality and tend to overshadow it, to such an extent that any distinction proves useless and even senseless. If there is one constant in the history of Jerusalem, it is its ability to bewilder, puzzle, and thrill its observers, whether they be devout pilgrims of the times past or scholars trying… Full Review

Death’s Futurity: The Visual Life of Black Power highlights visual culture as a tool of anticapitalist and antiracist revolutionary struggle, and is a key methodological guide for those interested in the idea of art history after Black studies. Analyzing the lens-based and print media authored by the Black Panther Party (BPP) that embodied a Black radical aesthetic in the years 1969–1971, Sampada Aranke makes a forceful and convincing argument about how and why “the visual life of Black Power is activated through Black radical death” (4). The book explores a historic condition that has become more acute in… Full Review

Matthew Rarey’s Insignificant Things: Amulets and the Art of Survival in the Early Black Atlantic is the latest addition to scholarship on the knowledge produced by African individuals as they skillfully navigated the violent whims of enslavement and racial capitalism. Spanning the fourteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, Insignificant Things tracks an evolving, transatlantic discourse around bolsa de mandinga (translated literally as “mandinga pouch”): amulets with diverse materials contained within a fabric or leather pouch that were used for luck, love, and protection from personal violence. Across the Lusophone Atlantic, bolsas were employed ritualistically by many early modern subjects, but… Full Review

To visit Mexico City’s Plaza de la Constitución (better known as the Zócalo) today is to be immersed in an urban palimpsest spanning seven centuries. The north and east sides of this central plaza are occupied by the National Palace and Cathedral, from which the nation’s political and religious life has been administered since the Viceregal period. In the space between them, dancers and drummers wearing feathered headdresses and seed rattle anklets perform in front of the archaeological site and museum dedicated to the Mexica, or Aztec, Templo Mayor: the most significant ceremonial structure of Tenochtitlan, capital of the Aztec… Full Review

The book of hours, a type of devotional book that usually contains a collection of prayers, psalms, hymns, and other readings to be recited at specific hours of the day, is one of the most well-preserved artistic products from the late Middle Ages. These books have received extensive scholarly attention as complex cultural products that were often richly illuminated. The Book of Hours and the Body: Somaesthetics, Posthumanism, and the Uncanny is focused on illuminations in several books of hours that could have helped their users reflect on issues of embodiment, gender, being human, and the divine. The methodological framework… Full Review

Myrlande Constant: The Work of Radiance, an exhibition volume published for the eponymous show that ran at the Fowler Museum at UCLA in 2023, stands as a major contribution to the contemporary scholarship on the work of Haitian artists. Other examples over the past several decades published in conjunction with museum and gallery exhibitions include Pòtoprens: The Urban Artists of Port-au-Prince (2022), Haïti: deux siècles de création artistique (2014), Kafou: Haiti, Art and Vodou (2012), In Extremis: Death and Life in 21st Century Haiti (2012), and the disciplinary cornerstone of this era of scholarship, Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou (1995)… Full Review

Unsettling Canadian Art History, edited by Erin Morton, is a significant contribution to the fields of art history and Canadian studies. The book’s stated goal is “to offer antiracist, decolonial, feminist, and queer, trans, and Two-Spirit standpoints on histories of colonialism that violently formed the white settler state of Canada” (6). Morton states, in the preface, that she originally intended to write a single-authored book on the subject but recognized that “certain critiques must be collaborative ventures” (x). She reflects on her own positionality as a white settler academic and argues that, as a colonial discipline, Canadian art history… Full Review

The question of “what is photography” is ineluctably tied to another question: “where is photography?" Similarly, for the history of photography in China, questions of photography’s points of origin, routes of circulation, as well as the direction of representational gazes have loomed large. Oliver Moore’s recent book Photography in China: Science, Commerce and Communication is no exception to these concerns, but it intends to provide a different approach: to “[explain] photography’s history from a Chinese viewpoint” (3). While this might seem to imply a nationalistic or cultural identity, what Moore refers to as “Chinese” is rather “several degrees of space”… Full Review

If any single person is responsible for the momentum that contemporary Native American art is having at this moment it is Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (b. 1940, enrolled Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes). This is, at least, one of the central takeaways of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map, which traces five decades of Smith’s career as both one of the leading artists and influential curators of Contemporary Native American art. The retrospective is an exciting, nearly dizzying, display of Smith’s artistic oeuvre that provides a textural depth to the artist’s career for those familiar with her work while still being… Full Review

Note from the Editor: To expand the journal’s accessibility, this review is being published in its original Spanish version followed by an English translation by Davis Sharpe and Nicole Halton.  Antes de la llegada de los europeos, muchos de los pueblos que habitaban el área cultural hoy conocida como Mesoamérica –entre los que sobresalen los Nahuas o Aztecas– solían emplear tiras de papel vegetal o de piel de animales plegadas en forma de biombo para registrar, a través de imágenes, conocimientos calendáricos y adivinatorios, cuentas catastrales y tributarias, genealogías, cantares y relatos históricos, entre otros muchos géneros más. Estos libros… Full Review

Upon completing the opera The Wreckers, British composer Ethel Smyth proselytized theaters across Europe to perform the work. It was staged in a German translation at the New Theater in Leipzig in 1906. Three years later, her friend and conductor Thomas Beecham produced it for His Majesty’s Theater in London. In 1958, Beecham published a short text to mark the centenary of Smyth’s birth. Despite his admiration for her work, he described the composer as “a stubborn, indomitable, unconquerable creature” (“Dame Ethel Smyth (1885–1944”), The Musical Times, 1958, 365).  Smyth is one of the hundreds of “creatures” included in Lauren… Full Review

Greeting the visitor to Beyond Hope: Kienholz and the Inland Northwest in a gallery of Washington State University’s Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art is a wall-mounted assemblage featuring a black-and-white photograph of elderly figures in their Sunday best moving into a starkly empty field surrounded by high hills. The sepia-toned stain of liquid resin applied across the image enhances the sense of time past and the idea that it represents a fragile memory of a momentous change in the lives of the people depicted. Titled The Returning (1976), the landscape recalls the open rolling hills of the Palouse region of… Full Review