Browse Recent Reviews

Within the last decade, an influential generation of Black American women artists who came of age in the 1960s has received long overdue recognition in major museums across the United States. Retrospectives of Betye Saar (2015), Howardena Pindell (2018), Emma Amos (2021), Faith Ringgold (2022), and Elizabeth Catlett (2024), as well as the groundbreaking show We Wanted A Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85 (2017), have brought scholarly and popular attention to a cohort of artists whose legacy endures in modern and contemporary art of the US. The spotlight on this generation continues to shine with Vivian Browne: My Kind of… Full Review

Museum exhibitions on the material and visual culture of the Crusades may offer accessible means to engage with the complexities of medieval Europe’s interactions around the Mediterranean. By presenting objects and narratives from the Crusading era, exhibitions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Jerusalem 1000–1400: Every People Under Heaven (2016–17) bridge scholarly research and public understanding, making a distant and contested geography materially and imaginatively tangible. They reveal the religious, political, and artistic forces that shaped the Crusades while inviting reflection on how European perceptions of the Holy Land were constructed and preserved. Through such curation, these exhibitions demonstrate… Full Review

The cover of this enticing publication features a seemingly simple painting by Rufino Tamayo (1899–1991) in which two slices of watermelon are reduced to bold, red semicircles; like bright smiles greeting you at a restaurant door, they invite the reader to devour the chapters inside, each named for characteristic categories on a Mexican menu. This clever framing gestures nicely to the seductive entanglement of art and food in postrevolutionary Mexico, which is here explored and exposed by Lesley Wolff in Culinary Palettes: The Visuality of Food in Postrevolutionary Mexican Art—a series of dynamic case studies bridging food studies, visual… Full Review

The first work that visitors to The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture encounter is Roberto Lugo’s DNA Study Revisited (2022), a resin life cast of the artist’s body painted in four different patterns that index Lugo’s mixed Taino, Spanish, African, and Portuguese ancestry. Standing before the title wall of the exhibition, the work serves as a vibrant and enigmatic initial example of what it can mean to inscribe race on the body and how artists can engage with racial identity. Cocurated by Karen Lemmy, Tobias Wofford, and Grace Yasumura, The Shape of Power brings together more… Full Review

During the eighteenth century, correspondence emerged as the predominant medium of communication, enabling the maintenance of long-distance relationships and the formation of new intellectual networks. For artists and connoisseurs in particular, letters served as a crucial space for critical debates. The circulation of ideas and information encouraged the development of new research and stimulated publishing initiatives. In Italy—where the cultural landscape was defined by strong polycentrism—this phenomenon was especially evident. Even in smaller towns, scholars reconstructed local art histories and made visible painters, sculptors, and architects who were previously excluded from critical discourse. In Bergamo, Giacomo Carrara emerged as the… Full Review

In 1951, when the experimental composer John Cage visited an anechoic chamber, a scientific room engineered to absorb resonance, at Harvard University, his ensuing narrative of that experience would shape the discourse of sound and silence in the decades to come. Famously, Cage became aware of two tones persisting beneath the absolute silence: the pulse of his nervous system at work and his blood circulating.  Beneath the surface of supposed silence, a field of experience erupts. Cage would go on to describe silence as “all sound, all the time” (“Experimental Music,” in Silence: Lectures and Writings, Wesleyan University Press, 1961… Full Review

A little girl, seated within an open cardboard box wrapped in barbed wire, looks out past the camera. Above her, a schematized curtain of rosaries dangles, filling the empty space between the outline of the United States and the contours of Central America. This image, a detail from Sandra C. Fernández’s The Northern Triangle (2018), serves as the cover of art historian Tatiana Reinoza’s Reclaiming the Americas: Latinx Art and the Politics of Territory. As the Trump administration continues its assault on immigrant communities, Reclaiming the Americas looks at Latinx artists’ responses to the rise of racist xenophobia in… Full Review

In The Painter’s Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists Who Championed the American Revolution, Zara Anishanslin elegantly opens her book by recuperating the moment when Joseph Wright exhibited a portrait of his mother, Patience, at the Royal Academy in 1780. Patience is seen sculpting, in wax, the decapitated head of Charles I. Anishanslin muses on George III’s thoughts upon seeing the picture, as was the custom at RA openings, just as the American War was approaching its spiraling denouement. Did he quietly gasp, perhaps stroke his throat? Today, we would desperately wish to see that picture, but it… Full Review

The Egyptian gods enjoyed an extraordinary and enduring popularity in the Roman world. It is not only the impressive remains of their temples in Rome and Italy, but also the empire-wide spread of their worship, whose mark can be found virtually in every province, that bear witness to the devotion paid to Sarapis and Isis. The Greek East constitutes a particularly rich field of inquiry in this respect, as it yields a vast array of documents related to these cults across a long time span—evidence of how deeply embedded Egyptian deities were in the life of the local communities. The… Full Review

At a time when rethinking feminism was gaining momentum in Japan, what set out to be a single exhibition was split into two: Feminisms and Countermeasures Against Awkward Discourses: From the Perspective of Third Wave Feminism, which were notable for their focus on third-wave feminism. Takahashi Ritsuko, then a curator at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, initially proposed an exhibition that examined Japanese contemporary art since the 1990s from a feminist perspective. Takahashi was impressed by the attempt to reconstruct girly culture from feminism in photographer Nagashima Yurie’s “Bokura” no “onnanoko shashin” kara watashitachi no gārī… Full Review