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Déborder la négritude, despite its compact format, is a trove of rigorous scholarship and a pleasure to read, with striking visual representations of Dakar and its artistic milieu. Edited by Mamadou Diouf and Maureen Murphy, the book offers a series of reflections on the intertwining of art and politics in relation to négritude and the enduring impact of President Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906–2001). As a poet, philosopher, and statesman, Senghor made his mark in Senegal and abroad through his intellectual prowess and political agenda, two distinct legacies that became deeply intertwined over the course of his multifaceted career. In… Full Review

Focusing on art forms often seen as mechanical and austere, the exhibition Moving Vision: Op and Kinetic Art from the Sixties and Seventies at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art (OKCMOA) offered a surprisingly humanistic and sensual take on those two closely related movements. The time is ripe for reevaluation of Op and Kinetic art, which were frequently dismissed by critics of their day due to the perception of the art’s easy consumption, coziness with industry and popular culture, and superficiality (one critic derided Op art as “empty spectacle,” for example). The OKCMOA exhibition countered that assessment by… Full Review

Within the cult of the Virgin Mary, representations of the Virgin and her miracles in medieval sculpture and painting highlight and reinforce her intercessory powers for devotees. Anna Russakoff’s book Imagining the Miraculous adds to studies of Marian iconography through a focus not on the miraculous objects themselves, but rather on the representations of miraculous images in manuscript illuminations. The illuminations studied are found in thirteenth- to fifteenth-century vernacular French manuscripts containing Marian miracles, including Gautier de Coinci’s Miracles de Nostre Dame, the anonymous Vie de Pères, Jean de Vignay’s Miroir historial, the anonymous Ci nous dit, … Full Review

In the late 1750s a Parisian publisher brought out a luxury edition of Jean de La Fontaine’s fables, with engravings based on drawings by the great animal painter Jean-Baptiste Oudry. Oudry’s design for the fable “The Lion Beaten by the Man” shows a lion in conversation with a group of astonished men in turbans in front of an unstretched canvas hung from a tree depicting a human wrestling a lion into submission. In the accompanying text, the “real” lion remarks that the painter has deceived his human patrons: “We would have in truth prevailed / if my colleagues knew how… Full Review

“Europe is literally the creation of the Third World. The wealth which smothers her is that which was stolen from the underdeveloped peoples.” This is of course Frantz Fanon’s famous (and perhaps overquoted, but here I am repeating that sin anyway) diagnosis from The Wretched of the Earth (English translation from Grove Press, 1963, 102). A few sentences earlier Fanon names “Latin America, China, and Africa” as key sites from which “Europe has stuffed herself inordinately with the gold and raw materials of the colonial countries.” Two years later, parallel formational geopolitics were explored in the first two books of… Full Review

In Vital Voids, Andrew Finegold opens, tongue in cheek, by saying that his book is “about nothing.” He then demonstrates—convincingly, and in engaging prose—that the sustained analysis of holes provides insight into the ways in which ancient Mesoamericans conceived of cavities as teeming with vital energies or pregnant with the possibility of emergence. Nothing truly was something for ancient Mesoamericans, but arriving at this conclusion requires skilled art historical analysis on the part of Finegold. Finegold employs a range of methodologies that takes the reader from objects and history to myth, symbolism, and ideology. He begins by contemplating the… Full Review

One gratifying consequence of an increasingly expansive, antiracist art history is the reframing of conventional subfields, allowing us to see familiar artworks with a fresh eye. Yet as Katherine Jentleson claims in her taut, well-argued Gatecrashers: The Rise of the Self-Taught Artist in America, the subfield, or even just the label, of so-called self-taught art has always made simple categorization difficult and continues to do so, as artists trained in settings beyond academic institutions gain more visibility. Recent high-profile exhibitions such as “Great and Mighty Things”: Outsider Art from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection (2013), Outliers and American… Full Review

This compendium offers a wide-angle view of the life and work of activist and writer Jane Jacobs (1916–2006). The volume, edited by Jesper Meijling and Tigran Haas, consists of fifteen chapters interspersed with carefully selected full-page images drawn from both Jacobs’s work and wider contexts. Through these images and the short, provocative essays, the book asks the reader to reconsider the work of Jacobs in a contemporary context in relation to how we read and understand cities. Beyond a eulogy or simple celebration, therefore, the texts suggest fresh insights, open up new questions, and develop an original set of critiques. … Full Review

After Hope is a groundbreaking exhibition that rethinks not only the importance of contemporary video art in Asia but also the premises and goals of its exhibition site, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, whose main focus is traditional Asian art. The physical installation of the show comprises a six-and-a-half-hour loop of fifty-four videos and an “ephemera wall” of texts and images contributed by the artists. While the physical installation of the exhibit runs through December 31, 2021, a thought-provoking program of working groups, workshops and events, and a continually updated digital platform, afterhope.com, have been organized since… Full Review

How welcome it is to read a book, manifestly about fin-de-siècle Symbolism, whose ambitions are to parse communication itself. Andrei Pop’s A Forest of Symbols: Art, Science, and Truth in the Long Nineteenth Century traces allied concerns among artists, scientists, philosophers, and mathematicians about the incommensurability of private thought and public expression and the symbol as an agent within those realms. The book argues that Symbolism arose from crises of confidence in knowledge production in Western philosophy and the sciences. While this is not a new claim, the insight that Pop offers is that Symbolism may be understood as a… Full Review