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Last year saw the publication of two excellent books about William Kentridge, the first of which accompanied an exhibition of his work, paired with that of fellow South African artist Vivienne Koorland, curated by Tamar Garb at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh. The three met in Cape Town the mid-1970s (Koorland painted Garb’s portrait in 1977), and it was Garb’s long relationship with Kentridge and Koorland that inspired her to curate the show. In the catalogue’s introductory essay, Garb expertly weaves together the shared themes the two artists explore in their work. She begins with a comparison of Koorland’s PAYS… Full Review

This catalogue of a relatively small but important exhibition at the Cornell Fine Arts Museum at Rollins College is devoted to depictions of black Africans and people of the African diaspora produced by Western European artists (British, French, Italian, German, Spanish, and Danish) between the mid-eighteenth century and the 1890s. The volume begins with a short, pithy introduction by David Bindman, the general editor of Harvard University Press’s Image of the Black in Western Art series. The rest of the catalogue was prepared by Adrienne L. Childs and Susan H. Libby, who have both written extensively in this particular field… Full Review

In Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Jacques Derrida theorizes the archive in terms of two conflicting forces: the pleasure principle (eros) and the death drive (thanatos). Through these antithetical terms, he suggests that archives are defined by a struggle over what they preserve or save and what they forget or destroy. This leads Derrida to define the “archivization” process as that which “produces as much as it records the event.”1 To some, beginning a review of Melissa Barton’s Gather Out of Star-Dust: A Harlem Renaissance Album with Derrida may seem incongruous, especially given that Barton makes no mention… Full Review

Ara Merjian’s commanding monograph, Giorgio de Chirico and the Metaphysical City: Nietzsche, Modernism, Paris, opens with a reading of Self-Portrait with Double, a picture de Chirico made in 1919, shortly before his epochal retour à l’ordre. In the painting, the artist sits beside a table in a perfunctory room, fixing the viewer with a sober, portentous stare and gesturing toward a marble slab held upright on the tabletop. True to the picture’s title, a ghostly doppelgänger looms in the space just behind his counterpart, its doughy face turned in profile, clasping empty air with an outstretched hand… Full Review

The art-historical literature on Italian Renaissance courts has traditionally been one of in-depth studies of individual court cities and specific artists. Alison Cole’s lucidly written book summarizes some of this literature for a general audience, focusing on the courts of Naples, Urbino, Ferrara, Mantua, and Milan during the fifteenth century. The work is a revised edition of the author’s 1995 book Virtue and Magnificence: Art of the Italian Renaissance Courts, expanded to reflect recent scholarship. Cole approaches her subject primarily from an art-historical perspective, highlighting the varieties of media, styles, and uses of art at court while presenting a… Full Review

Eight years after the first cases of AIDS came to light in the United States, and six years before combined antiretroviral therapy was introduced, the photographer Nan Goldin organized the exhibition Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing at Artists Space, New York. This event, an outcry from an East Village community besieged by the AIDS epidemic, is at the core of Sophie Junge’s detailed study Art against AIDS. Consequentially, the book does not open with an introduction but with installation shots of the 1989–90 exhibition. The photographs detail the sculptural works, paintings, photographs, collages, and drawings spread out within two spacious… Full Review

Muse: Mickalene Thomas Photographs is a ten-year retrospective of selections of Thomas’s paintings and photographs from 2001 to 2011. The book was the basis for the exhibition Muse: Mickalene Thomas Photographs and tête-à-tête presented at the Aperture Foundation Gallery in New York from January 28 to March 17, 2016. The large-format photograph on the book’s cover, Din, une très belle négresse #1 (2012), is a study in mustard, black, white, and gray of a portrait of a woman in front of a graphic floral print background. Her soft, rounded natural hairstyle compliments the circular shape of her shell pendant and… Full Review

Medieval reliquaries—metalwork and bejeweled objects housing the relics of saints—often inspire analyses predicated on theories of signs, meaning, and the relationship of text to visual matter. Reliquaries demand such modes of inquiry. They layer their signifying strategies, which range from enamel images to patterned jewel inlay to poetic inscription to crystal windows mediating the display of the enshrined relic. Because they participate in so many sign systems, relics and reliquaries attract interdisciplinary approaches, such as mine (2008) and Robyn Malo’s (2013), which lend the perspective of literary and textual studies to the signifying strategies of reliquaries, relics, and their attendant… Full Review

Suzanne Hudson’s contribution to the One Work series by Afterall (a research center of the University of the Arts London, located at Central Saint Martins) is focused on Night Sea, a painting by Agnes Martin (1912–2004) that Martin completed in 1963. The series is unique in its focus on the critical elaboration, by notable authors in the field, of individual works of art. Suzanne Hudson, associate professor of Art History and Fine Arts at the University of Southern California, has also written critical texts on painting, including Painting Now (2015) as well as Robert Ryman: Used Paint (2009). Additionally… Full Review

Between 1935 and 1944 the US Farm Security Administration and the Office of War Information (FSA-OWI) commissioned a collection of 170,000 photographs. Ostensibly a public relations project to promote Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s resettlement programs for poor farmers during the Great Depression, they are a record of rural life and economic anxieties that were mediated by an intervention of industrialized public services. Now these images, along with some later additions, are a digitized collection of photographs and metadata that have been archived by the Library of Congress (LoC). This collection is also the primary object of inquiry… Full Review