Browse Recent Reviews

The shifting soil, the receding water, and the chirping birds—echoes of a landscape etched by the relentless passage of time—guide us through the small gallery where fragility becomes perceptible, taking up a sensory presence. This first work in the exhibition, Points of Confluence: In Between the Island and the Desert, is a sound collaboration between the artists in the two-person exhibition Muddy Terrains: Mariana Ramos Ortiz + Estephania González, featuring San Juan-based Mariana Ramos Ortiz and Phoenix-based Estephania González. In this show at the Arizona State University Art Museum, the transient and delicate nature of our environment is… Full Review

In a world dominated by climate crisis, trees matter. Gregory Bryda’s The Trees of the Cross: Wood as Subject and Medium in the Art of Late Medieval Germany lends historical perspective to our understanding of trees and what they mean to humanity. With a focus on wood as artistic material and medium in late medieval Germany, Bryda explains the polyvalency of arboreal imagery, sharing with us its secret cross-referencing language. Reflecting on the recursive relationship between nature and the Church prior to the Reformation, the author investigates how it was mediated by the wood of the cross, both depicted and… Full Review

In the last chapter of her brilliant book Each One Another: The Self in Contemporary Art, Rachel Haidu quotes at length Yvonne Rainer’s description of her desire to “render the shards of her own life” and incorporate “the new content” of personal feelings, which the choreographer saw as no less than markers of the uniqueness of a human being, into her work beginning in the early 1970s. Rainer elaborates, “On the one hand, this mindset can be characterized as a refusal of narrative and fixed meanings and a distrust of the “telling” and shaping strategies of fiction and history… Full Review

Jerrilynn Dodds’s Visual Histories from Medieval Iberia: Arts and Ambivalence makes a significant contribution to the study of medieval Iberian artistic practices, offering a nuanced reassessment of visual culture in a transcultural context. The book’s primary objective is to explore the fluid artistic interactions between Christians and Muslims on the Iberian Peninsula from the eighth to fourteenth centuries, rejecting rigid historiographical frameworks that impose artificial divisions between these groups. Instead, Dodds proposes an interpretive model grounded in ambivalence, recognizing the complex and often contradictory meanings embedded in artistic production that were simultaneously context-specific and enmeshed in global political and social… Full Review

As the title suggests, Is Art History? Selected Writings collects a representative array of academic articles, catalog essays, lectures, and reviews by the art historian Svetlana Alpers on a variety of topics well beyond her transformative contributions to the study of seventeenth-century Dutch art. Much to the credit of this edited collection, it compellingly demonstrates how her work on Dutch topics was part of a systematic reappraisal of art historical methodology with implications for early-modern painters from Diego Velázquez and Giovanni Battista Tiepolo to Jean-Simeon Chardin, as well as modern and contemporary artists such as Bradley Walker Tomlin, Catherine Murphy… Full Review

The objects of Mesoamerican art history are often asked to carry a heavy burden. Having survived any number of inhospitable contexts—the iconoclasm that supported Spanish imperial expansion, imperfect archival preservation, conditions of exchange that left works vulnerable, and other troubles besides—artworks gain a new status in Mesoamerican art history as exemplars of tradition, interpreted as representatives that meaningfully stand in for entire classes of objects now lost simply because they are the works that are known to scholarship. But what if these objects are less emblematic than we think they are—or what if they are best suited to speak only… Full Review

The tension between Indigenous sovereignty and the US government’s propaganda machinery during the Cold War is at the heart of Jessica Horton’s Earth Diplomacy: Indigenous American Art, Ecological Crisis, and the Cold War. Exploring how Indigenous artists engaged with the international exhibition circuit, Horton argues that displays of their work functioned as sites of both cultural erasure and subversion, wherein artists mobilized Indigenous epistemologies and iconographies to assert political and ecological sovereignty. By foregrounding the interrelation between Cold War aesthetic strategies and Indigenous diplomatic practices, Horton aligns with recent scholarship working to decolonize the art history of the Cold… Full Review

Sometimes the stars align: the assignment to review Elizabeth Carmel Hamilton’s Charting the Afrofuturist Imaginary in African American Art: The Black Female Fantastic arrived shortly after I had seen Blaque Orbit, an Afrofuturist film series offered by LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) and curated by Camm Harrison. A six-hour deep dive into Afrofuturistic visions from 1992 to 2022, the lineup featured works by several Black women artists, including Cauleen Smith and Martine Syms. While reading Hamilton’s book, Smith’s video The Fullness of Time (2008) came to mind, as it features Smith wandering through New Orleans three years after Hurricane… Full Review

Up close, glass bead, wire, and thread intermesh through squiggles and circles; at times, their translucency invites nearby light and shadows, and moments of the bare wall underneath to peek through. Step back, however, and you’ll notice figures. Towards the tapestry’s top are two seated figures, one in yellow, another in maroon. Towards the middle is a larger yellow figure, with facial features outlined in black thread next to another smaller mostly forest-green colored figure, encircled in gold. Seen at various vantages, Untitled Fairy Tale (from the Graphic Novel Series), 2019–20 invites the viewer to ask: who are these figures… Full Review

Nick Mauss and Angela Miller’s Body Language: The Queer Staged Photographs of George Platt Lynes and PaJaMa looks at the work of the influential photographer George Platt Lynes and PaJaMa, a collective formed in 1937 in New York City by the American artists Paul Cadmus, and Jared and Margaret French. Following in the footsteps of David Leddick’s Intimate Companions (2000), the authors trace the artistic, emotional, and sexual entanglements that connected these close-knit figures. The book is organized into two essays. The first authored by Mauss is dedicated to Lynes, and the second by Miller looks to PaJaMa’s collaborative work… Full Review