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The Prints of Jacob Lawrence, 1963–2000, showcased eighty-one prints by the master African American artist in a crowd-pleasing exhibition that provided a platform for one of the lesser-known parts of Lawrence’s extensive oeuvre. The screenprints, lithographs, etchings, drypoints, and single woodcut displayed in the show represented almost the entirety of Lawrence’s output as a printmaker and were brought together courtesy of the DC Moore Gallery in New York for this show at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art. While the images, most of which are large and colorful in the artist’s trademark graphic figurative style, are filled with the… Full Review

The critical reception of Martin Kippenberger's work is indiscernible from that of his persona. Kippenberger died of cancer in 1997 at the age of forty-four. But his myth lives on, carefully perpetuated by his peers and by a cohort of assistants who were involved in not only the production of his work but also the production of its meaning, and faithfully disseminated in the circulation systems that Kippenberger's work addressed or that became at times the work itself. (His reintegration of self-designed promotional material for exhibitions, like posters and announcement cards, into an ongoing output signals the importance he ascribed… Full Review

“Creating a world history of art is very difficult. But finding some way to understand all visual cultures is the most urgent task now facing art historians” (58). Urgency is an unusual accomplice to art-historical inquiry: what might prompt it now, and why should it require a “world history of art,” whatever that might be? David Carrier sees desired states of being such as world peace endangered by “the political struggles that threaten to destroy the very possibility of international cooperation” (xxvi). Academics, he believes, should respond to such threats by rethinking their disciplines as genuinely global projects. In a… Full Review

In recent decades, medieval and Renaissance textile scholarship has received greater recognition and appreciation by the art-historical community. One of the latest publications to add to this developing field is Lisa Monnas’s new book. One of the first things to note about this impressive volume is the abundant number of superb color images—they are truly breathtaking. Aside from the remarkable aesthetic attributes of the volume, Monnas’s detailed study investigates the cultural and artistic connections between silk textiles and fourteenth-, fifteenth- and sixteenth-century paintings in which silk fabrics are represented. In addition to relating extant textiles to the paintings, Monnas examines… Full Review

The device of figures framing a central mythological or non-mythological composition is a frequent phenomenon in Athenian vase painting. These spectators have been interpreted as stock characters, super-numeraries, aristocrats, or simply onlookers. In his innovative Vase Painting, Gender, and Social Identity in Archaic Athens, Mark Stansbury-O’Donnell examines the role of spectators on Athenian vases as “guides to the construction of social identity in sixth-century Athens” (11). Stansbury-O’Donnell bases his investigation on the assumption that the spectators “watch the action, not unlike a viewer of the vase” (2). He focuses not only on the identity of the spectators but also… Full Review

Stimulated by the availability of new technologies, the pedagogy of art history is in the midst of dramatic transformation. Until recently, college courses in the discipline were customarily illustrated using manually sequenced film transparencies extracted from local slide libraries. Now, nearly overnight, it seems, art history programs have all but abandoned that tried and true method in favor of PowerPoint presentations assembling digital files downloaded from shared image databases. Meanwhile, class meetings in brick and mortar settings are giving way to electronic communications among disparately located teachers and students participating in distance-learning courses. What are the implications of this upheaval… Full Review

Unlike their Mesoamerican counterparts, the inhabitants of Teotihuacan (50–750 C.E.) left no clear record identifying those responsible for developing the sophisticated urban plan of their great city-state; the presumed rulers who commandeered the power and authority to assemble the work force required to carry out the massive construction and artistic programs at Teotihuacan remain unnamed. Although recent excavations at the Pyramid of the Moon reveal high-status burials, there are as yet no clear portraits nor excavated remains that clearly locate specific rulers. Questions about the sociopolitical makeup of Teotihuacan and the identity of their leaders have long preoccupied Pre-Columbianists, yet… Full Review

“There could be no lord without vassals, nor vassals without a lord.” Penned in 1611 by Sebastián de Covarrubias, this deceptively simple sentence serves well to summarize the central argument of Michael Schreffler’s The Art of Allegiance: Visual Culture and Imperial Power in Baroque New Spain. Departing from recent studies that have interpreted seventeenth-century Mexican artworks as expressions of an emergent Creole patriotism, Schreffler offers an enlightening discussion of a series of secular images that reasserted the vicarious presence of the Spanish King in colonial Mexico. These images, Schreffler argues, embodied the sense of mutual dependence that existed in… Full Review

Sidi Ballo’s masterful performance on a June night in Mali in 1978 was for Patrick McNaughton “a galvanizing event” whose memory stayed with him for three decades and inspired his writing of this book. As he so aptly notes, not all Malian masquerade performers are created equal. I share with him that sentiment. I know from my own work in Mali that it is only a rare and exceptional artist whose performance reveals the full power of the masquerade and whose virtuosity can so decisively imprint its memory on those who experience it. McNaughton skillfully sets the scene in… Full Review

Rhetorically, New York City has long wielded artistic agency in postwar art. For instance, the metropolis apparently stole the idea of modern art away from Paris (according to Serge Guilbaut in How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985]) and subsequently named its own school of painters (The New York School). Despite this centrality, however, few scholars have rigorously investigated the complex interactions between artists and the city itself. In The Disappearance of Objects, Joshua Shannon tackles precisely this issue as it transpired in the crucial years of the early and mid-1960s… Full Review