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In Visual Disobedience: Art and Decoloniality in Central America, Kency Cornejo surveys contemporary political art in Central American countries. The book includes analyses of forty artists and more than eighty works, underscoring the abundance and diversity of artistic experimentation in the region. The author reads these pieces through her concept of “visual disobedience,” a decolonial mode of resistance that posits art as a direct intervention in a specific sociopolitical reality. For Cornejo, these works embody a sensorial practice where the tactile, auditory, and visual coexist and are fundamentally motivated by love for the “damnés,”—the condemned, as put… Full Review

The intriguing title of Isabelle Tillerot’s monograph both piques curiosity and encapsulates the thesis that its text develops in detail. Deploying astute observations and subtle insight, this study follows the evolution of room decoration in seventeenth and eighteenth-century European, principally French royal and aristocratic dwellings. Its focus is on the close relationship between the ornamental designs of these spaces and the paintings embedded within them, projects that required the joint efforts of artists and artisans of varied specializations and status. Ultimately it asserts that the full flowering of rocaille—the author rejects the nineteenth-century term “rococo”—decor coincides with the adoption of… Full Review

Joining a growing number of publications that have sought to reexamine China’s socialist legacy, two new books examine the ways in which contemporary art practice and discourse reengaged the social and political commitments of the Maoist period (1949–76). Jennifer Lee’s Anxiety Aesthetics: Maoist Legacies in China, 1978–1985 focuses on the roughly eight years immediately following the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) to examine how artists and intellectuals reconfigured socialist aesthetics for the post-Mao era. In The Minjian Avant-Garde: Art of the Crowd in Contemporary China, Chang Tan looks to a later moment in the 1990s and early 2000s… Full Review

Michele Matteini’s The Ghost in the City: Luo Ping and the Craft of Painting in Eighteenth-Century China offers insight on the eighteenth-century artist Luo Ping’s (1733­–1799) position in the history of painting in China and sheds light on the intricate relationship between artist and patron. Known as one of the “Eight Eccentrics of Yangzhou,” Luo is primarily recognized for his unusual paintings of ghosts and his activities in the commercial city of Yangzhou. Luo Ping was introduced to audiences in Europe and the US through a 2009 exhibition that traveled between Museum Rietberg and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and… Full Review

One of the challenges with performance art is the exhibition and presentation of it. How do you capture the “liveness” of the live event in a stationary museum setting? Jeffrey De Bois, with Max Gruber, curators of Charles Atlas: About Time at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Boston, managed to do just that. Viewers are confronted with movement and the concept of time from the start of the exhibition to the very end. Meandering through a succession of rooms, viewers encounter a series of screens and labyrinths, and only pause near the end for a respite… Full Review

Sartorial Japonisme and the Experience of Kimonos in Britain, 1865—1914, explores the experience of kimono in Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Through the medium of painting, theatre, performance, dress, department stores, postcards, and drag, it examines the design, construction, dissemination, and reception of kimono as garments situated as a sartorial medium in the critical discourse of Japonisme. Approaching kimono as a unique space of transformation, the book includes the everyday experiences of kimono in Britain and of those people and spaces previously ignored or overlooked. Researched and written by Arisa Yamaguchi, assistant professor at the University of Tsukuba, it draws… Full Review

The Archaeology of Modern Worlds in the Indian Ocean is a collection of historical archaeological studies from various places around the Indian Ocean World. By bringing together specialists in Indian Ocean historical archaeology, the editors, Mark William Hauser and Julia Jong Haines, create space for us to see the long histories of connections, networks, exchanges, and globalization that have created the Indian Ocean World. They make a strong case for an Indian Ocean-centered historical archaeology of the region. This framework and the chapters that act as evidence for its effectiveness are presented as a corrective to the overrepresentation of the… Full Review

Meot: Korean Art from the Frank Bayley Collection at the Seattle Asian Art Museum, curated by Hyonjeong “HJ” Kim Han, celebrates Frank Bayley’s sustained admiration for Korean ceramics by framing his collection through the concept of meot—an aesthetic of balanced elegance that embraces imperfection. Presenting over sixty works spanning the Goryeo (918–1392) and Joseon (1392–1897) dynasties as well as contemporary reinterpretations, the exhibition reflects Bayley’s vision to capture Korean art’s evolution. While the exhibition gestures toward the layered complexities within Korean art, a more robust historical framework might better illuminate how shifting cultural values and aesthetic sensibilities influenced Korean… Full Review

In The Mobile Image from Watteau to Boucher, art historian and curator David Pullins masterfully interrogates the status of the image as an object in eighteenth-century French art. Exploring a trove of “image-objects”—defined by the material status and site of a visual image rather than its subject—the author seeks to shift our focus from artistic reception to material production. Responding to sociohistorical interrogations pioneered by Thomas Crow; the materialistic turn espoused by the scholarship of Ewa Lajer-Burcharth; serious inquiries into the decorative arts led by Katie Scott; the market-driven analyses of the late Hans Van Miegroet; and the critical… Full Review

In this compellingly argued book, Myth and Menagerie: Seeing Lions in Nineteenth-Century France, Katie Hornstein offers a new paradigm for integrating art history with animal studies: rather than considering animal representation as a theoretical or visual construct, we are asked to “see” lions as individual personages with their own perspectives, histories, and names. Whether the encounter between nineteenth-century people and lions occurred in the context of zoos and other public menageries; on ships bound from colonial Algeria to France; in the “taming” theatrics of the circus; or in lion-themed paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture, and photographs, human and leonine life were… Full Review