Concise, critical reviews of books, exhibitions, and projects in all areas and periods of art history and visual studies

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Antonia Fondaras
Series: Brill's Studies on Art, Art History, and Intellectual History, Volume: 308/42. Brill, 2020. 370 pp.; 60 color ills. Hardback € 143.00 (9789004401143)
Presiding majestically over a large and often lively piazza in Florence’s Oltrarno neighborhood, the Basilica di Santo Spirito is one of the most harmonious of all the city’s churches. The early Renaissance architect Filippo Brunelleschi designed it for a community of Augustinian Hermits and, even though the church remained unfinished at his death in 1446 and was completed not entirely to his specifications thereafter, it bears his strong imprint. Recalling early Christian basilicas, the Latin-cross church has a flat-roofed nave supported by Corinthian columns that spring from rounded arches. The creamy white intonaco walls are minimally articulated with pietra serena… Full Review
January 11, 2023
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Claire Grace
Cambridge, MA: October Books, 2022. 432 pp.; 29 color ills.; 84 b/w ills. Paper $40.00 (9780262543521)
In the 1980s, New York City was marked by a series of crises including the AIDS epidemic, gentrification, crumbling infrastructure, and the ascent of neoliberal politicians whose attacks social welfare made the compound emergency faced by residents of the city all the more dire. This complex of social and economic devastation emerged with renewed skepticism about the artist’s capacity to disturb prevailing power structures alongside an interrogation of the role of art making in relation to more conventional types of activism. As Gran Fury put it in a 1988 poster advertising The Kitchen’s winter performance program, when it came to… Full Review
January 4, 2023
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Michelle Millar Fisher and Amber Winick
Exh. cat. MIT Press, 2021. 344 pp.; 125 color ills. Cloth $44.95 (9780262044899)
Mütter Museum, Philadelphia, PA, May 8, 2021–April 30, 2022; Center for Architecture and Design, Philadelphia, PA, September 10–November 14, 2021; Mass Art Museum (MAAM), Boston, June 11–December 18, 2022
It is by design that many of the artworks in the Designing Motherhood exhibition and the chapters in the accompanying catalog originate from personal experience. After all, the embodied experience of birth, as either birthing or birthed people (or both), is one we all share. Yet the “things that make or break our births” have, thus far, received little attention—sometimes in their public recognition, occasionally in their design. The Designing Motherhood curators, design historians Michelle Millar Fisher and Amber Winick, felt we needed a “public reckoning with the designs that, for better or worse, shape experiences for all of us”… Full Review
December 21, 2022
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Carolyn Yerkes and Heather Hyde Minor
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020. 240 pp.; 193 color ills. Cloth $65.00 (9780691206103)
Among recent contributions to Piranesi studies, Piranesi Unbound occupies a special place as a volume clearly aligned with the “material turn" of art history. The coauthors, experts on architectural drawings and prints, are implicitly and productively critical of the canonical type of art historical research, concentrating specifically on what classical art history has regarded as parerga—the technical, material, and economic aspects of artistic production. Utilizing variegated forms of writing, Yerkes and Minor draw the reader into the experience of a close study of individual material objects. From one chapter to the next, the narrative is liable to be interrupted… Full Review
December 14, 2022
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Colin McEwan and John W. Hoopes, eds.
Washington, DC and Cambridge, MA: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection and Harvard University Press, 2022. 806 pp.; 1066 color ills.; 172 b/w ills. Cloth $95.00 (9780884024699)
Colin McEwan and John W. Hoopes, eds.
Washington, DC and Cambridge, MA: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection and Harvard University Press, 2022. 512 pp.; 25 color ills.; 107 b/w ills. Cloth $75.00 (9780884024705)
In pre-Columbian art history, the Andes and Mesoamerica command almost all the scholarly attention. These more heavily studied geographical zones are outnumbered by the neglected ones—the Antilles, Isthmo-Colombia, and Amazonia-Orinokia, or AIAO for short. Is it simply the absence of monumental ruins, as some have suggested, that causes art historians especially to relegate these regions to the margins or is it the relative lack of archaeology on which we can rely? In fact, archaeologists have been excavating and accumulating data in these areas for well over a century and, over that period, some parts of the AIAO were not as… Full Review
December 7, 2022
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Stephen Houston, ed.
Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2021. 192 pp.; 67 color ills.; 49 b/w ills. Cloth $50.00 (9781606067444)
From the 1940s until the 1990s, and especially in the 1960s and 1970s, all major and most minor archaeological sites from the Maya culture were plundered to meet the demands of the international art market. To name a few examples, Richard E. W. Adams recounts that starting in 1976 the deep jungle Maya city of Río Azul was targeted by an intense looting operation that eventually employed up to eighty diggers (Río Azul: An Ancient Maya City, 1999, 5). Von Euw and Graham recorded that in 1975, more than fifty looters trenches were dug at the site of… Full Review
November 30, 2022
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Tina M. Campt
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021. 232 pp.; 78 color ills.; 33 b/w ills. Cloth $29.95 (9780262045872)
Scholarship on the theory of the gaze explores the power dynamic within the act of looking and being looked at. The male gaze, the racist gaze, and the colonial gaze are analytical concepts that help us understand how representation is implicated in the construction of gendered and racialized hierarchies and systems of control. They also reveal how subjects resist visuality’s capture through processes of self-representation and aesthetic defiance. Tina M. Campt’s A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See offers a profound reconceptualization of the politics of visibility and spectatorship within contemporary art. The book features nine artists who work… Full Review
November 23, 2022
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Gropius Bau, Berlin, November 26, 2021–March 13, 2022
Zanele Muholi presented the full breadth of the South African artist’s work to date. Muholi’s photographic practice attends to the Black LGBTQIA+ community and addresses sexual politics, racial violence, self-affirmation, and lesser-known histories. Originating at Tate Modern, the exhibition is an international feat, curated by Tate’s Yasufumi Nakamori and Sarah Allen with Gropius Bau’s Natasha Ginwala. In a video interview, Muholi opens with the statement, “What matters most is content—who is in the picture and why are they there?” In Zanele Muholi, the curators echo the artist’s sentiment, as Muholi’s photographic and multimedia series unfold throughout Gropius Bau’s ten… Full Review
November 18, 2022
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André Dombrowski, ed.
Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2021. 640 pp.; 152 b/w ills. Cloth $185.00 (9781119373896)
Author’s note: This article capitalizes the movement of Impressionism only when transcribing a quotation or with deliberate emphasis in discussing the book’s definition of the movement. In its goals to transport readers “to the moment in history when Impressionism made beholders alert and uncomfortable” (7) and to offer a springboard for future inquiries, André Dombrowski’s edited volume Companion to Impressionism succeeds. Its thirty-four essays dive into single-object studies, scrutinize critical reception, and integrate transnational examples with a diverse set of methodological tools to analyze impressionism’s imbrications of the objective and subjective, the perceptual and the sensual, in rendering a world… Full Review
November 16, 2022
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Shigeko Kubota, Mayumi Hamada, Mihoko Nishikawa, Azusa Hashimoto, and Midori Yoshimoto
Tokyo: Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 2021. 256 pp.; 131 color ills.; 65 b/w ills. Paper ¥3410.00 (9784309291413)
Niigata Prefectural Museum of Modern Art, March 20–June 6, 2021; National Museum of Art, Osaka, June 29–September 23, 2021; Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, November 13, 2021–February 23, 2022
The exhibition Viva Video! The Art and Life of Shigeko Kubota was the first large-scale survey exhibition since Kubota’s career survey at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York, in 1991, and this catalog—recipient of the 2021 Ringa Art Encouragement Prize—attests to the extent that interest and research on her work has progressed. The reevaluation of women artists has been proceeding apace throughout the world. Designated the “mother of video art,” Shigeko Kubota has been a particular subject of reconsideration and was recently honored with an important focused exhibition Shigeko Kubota: Liquid Reality at the Museum of Modern… Full Review
November 9, 2022
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