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Jordana Moore Saggese’s Heavyweight: Black Boxers and the Fight for Representation is a valuable contribution to art historical literature devoted to examining racialized violence in the United States and the role of visual images in promoting and maintaining this violence.  The focus of her book is the representation of Black heavyweight boxers in the United States in visual culture—the illustrated press, photographic portraits, cabinet cards, prints, paintings, and so forth—from 1880 through 1910. Saggese examines how these representations contributed to the shaping, policing, and fetishizing of Black masculinity. She argues that their meanings were produced through visual conventions whose roots… Full Review

Since the New Negro Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s when Alain Locke and W.E.B. Du Bois were building a discourse on Black artistic production, scholars across disciplines have grappled with defining Black art beyond the commonsense that it is art made by people who happen to be Black. Or outside the terms that hail it for its presumed “authentic testimony, resistive politics, or reparative potential” (1): What is it? What does it do? What does it look like? What is its position within the aesthetic regime?  The answers to these and related questions are wide-ranging and not definitive, as… Full Review

In her debut monograph, Land into Landscape: Art, Environment, and the Making of Modern France, Kelly Presutti examines how landscape was integral to the development of French identity in the nineteenth century. At the heart of the book lies a paradox that Presutti explores: “despite numerous claims locating both abstract nationhood and individual rights in the land, for much of the nineteenth century, it was not clear what that land looked like or even how a national landscape was meant to appear” (1). Each chapter takes up a specific landscape type—mountains, coasts, forests, wetlands—chosen because they “were the subject… Full Review

The United States Geological Survey (USGS) defines landscapes as areas critical to economic development, as they supply natural resources and other goods and services essential to human needs. Similarly, traditional geographical studies have regarded landscapes as physical and objective entities, perceiving them as an external world that can be empirically accessed and analyzed. From the perspective of extractive industries, landscapes are transformed into territories—defined areas to be utilized and exploited. Fazal Sheikh’s exhibition, Fazal Sheikh: Thirst | Exposure | In Place, emphasizes viewing and understanding landscapes through a different lens. Sheikh’s work invites us to consider landscapes… Full Review

A growing body of scholarship has recently spotlighted modernist architecture in Southeast Asian cities at midcentury, a period marked by decolonization, rapid urbanization, and export-oriented industrialization. The transnational regime of urban renewal dramatically reshaped the built environment, often removing slums and displacing urban poor people from central districts across Asia. Amidst these sweeping changes, architects and planners embraced modernism as a tool for social transformation in newly independent nations, adapting its language to local contexts through innovative experimentation. Everyday Modernism: Architecture and Society in Singapore, coauthored by Jiat-Hwee Chang, Justin Zhuang, and Darren Soh, extends this important scholarship by… Full Review

Paula Modersohn-Becker: I am Me was the first American retrospective of the artist and as such, marked Modersohn-Becker’s ascending renown on this side of the Atlantic. Beyond dutiful historical redress, the exhibition’s curators, Jill Lloyd-Peppiatt and Jay Clarke, tapped into the momentum of a triumphalist apotheosis. At the Neue Galerie, across rooms dedicated to facets such as the nude, landscape, or works on paper (the drawings alone were worth the price of admission), the presentation followed a roughly chronological rhythm that, as nearly all treatments of Modersohn-Becker have, hew committedly to the artist’s biography. Quotations from her diaries and correspondence… Full Review

Tastemakers, Collectors and Patrons: Collecting American Art in the Long Nineteenth Century is an ambitious undertaking: a collection of a dozen contributions, including the introduction. Best described as a collection of case studies with each essay dedicated to a single collector or coherent group of collectors, this volume stands out for the ways in which it does not engage in much conjecture about why a person made a particular artistic decision. Often books dedicated to the history of collecting art in the United States—whether early contributions like Aline Saarien’s The Proud Possessors (1958) and Lilian B. Miller’s Patrons and Patriotism … Full Review

Editor’s Note: Following author Sarah Lewis’s decision to decapitalize the word "black,” this review retains the lowercase when referring to the racial category/ethnic group.                                                                  ********** In A Companion to American Art, published by Blackwell in 2015, I surveyed how scholars of American art had been approaching the critical study of race and visual representation since the late twentieth century. At the time, those approaches included either foregrounding or decentering race in interpretations of the work of black artists; speaking about race in relation to a broader range of (especially white-produced) artistic production; and even imagining “post-racial” art and art… Full Review

Few images, if any, are as iconic—even synecdochic—of life, culture, and politics in Renaissance Venice than Jacopo de’ Barbari’s monumental View of Venice. The Italian artist’s six-sheet woodblock print showcasing a bird’s-eye-view of the city and its lagoon was produced circa 1497–1500 with the support of the German publisher Anton Kolb. It stood as the largest print produced in Europe at the time (1.35 × 2.75 meters) whose magnitude and inventiveness were recognized by the Venetian government’s granting to Kolb of one of the earliest known copyright permissions for a printed image. Marveled by commentators since its inception for… Full Review

In Eternal Sovereigns: Indigenous Artists, Activists, and Travelers Reframing Rome, Gloria Jane Bell considers Indigenous cultural belongings held in Vatican Museums collections. As she turns attention to the stories they tell—and the Vatican’s efforts to silence them—she locates these possessions within a long history of Indigenous travelers with creative ties to Rome. The book traces these ties through discussions of prominent Indigenous artists, stolen Indigenous artworks, and the mobile, tenacious sovereignty they have maintained in the face of papal dominance. Bridging multiple disciplines including art history, material studies, and archival studies, Eternal Sovereigns suggests a “new, entangled, and unsettling”… Full Review