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The Gothic Screen contributes to the body of integrative studies of Gothic art and architecture with an examination of the monumental choir screen that stood between the liturgical choir and the nave and ambulatory. Not a comprehensive catalogue of Gothic screens, the book seeks to “expand our sense of what screens accomplished in their ecclesiastical setting,” which is here understood as “both the physical setting of the Gothic church and the social environment that the church shaped” (2). In this vein, Jacqueline Jung focuses attention on how a screen’s architectural design and sculptural program forged community and structured identity among… Full Review

Critics lamenting the sorry state of today’s built environment are legion. Only a few recognize that many of those responsible for this situation are members of a professional and academic establishment that emerged during the past quarter century, virtually controlling the discourse in the design professions throughout the world. Sarah Williams Goldhagen, a distinguished architectural historian who taught at Harvard for ten years and was the architecture critic at the New Republic for eight, begins her new book by suggesting that she is one of these enlightened few. In previous books about Louis Kahn’s monumental architecture and Moshe Safdie’s global… Full Review

The Danish-born immigrant, inventor, performer, and artist Thomas Wilfred (1889–1968) made art on his own terms, literally. He dubbed his brand of work Lumia, a neologism designed to break with the past and establish a new artistic genre consisting solely of moving electric-light displays. Fifteen of Wilfred’s works, dating from the 1920s to the 1960s, were painstakingly restored for this luminous, and illuminating, exhibition. Accompanied by a beautifully produced and informative catalogue, Lumia: Thomas Wilfred and the Art of Light offered a unique opportunity to be immersed in the work and ideas of an artist whose last retrospective was held… Full Review

EN MAS’: Carnival and Performance Art of the Caribbean was published in conjunction with the launch of a traveling group exhibition showcasing the work of nine contemporary artists, each from the circum-Caribbean or its diaspora: John Beadle, Charles Campbell, Christophe Chassol, Nicolás Dumit Estévez, Marlon Griffith, Hew Locke, Lorraine O’Grady, Ebony G. Patterson, and Cauleen Smith. The artists were commissioned to create performance works in public spaces in cities with active carnival traditions, from Nassau, Bahamas, and Port of Spain, Trinidad, to Notting Hill, London, and New Orleans, Louisiana. The catalogue features archival documentary traces of each performance using photographs… Full Review

Mona Hatoum: Terra Infirma at the Menil Collection, the artist’s first major solo exhibition in the United States in about two decades, presents an overview of Hatoum’s career in a nuanced yet direct manner. Hatoum’s work benefits from its quick metaphorical wit; however, this initial, deceptively easy clarity lingers and transforms into something else entirely, an experience underscored by the work’s placement throughout various rooms of the Menil Collection. Both artist and space offered the works for the viewer’s own interpretation, although attention to their specific historical and political context is frequently warranted by Hatoum. The majority of the exhibition… Full Review

On the occasion of the milestone exhibition Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art, organized by MoMA in 1940, critic, anthropologist, and cultural promoter Anita Brenner stated that the brilliant artistic scene that arose in Mexico in the early 1920s had reached its eclipse. For Brenner, as well as other influential voices from the arts field, the show at MoMA did not embody the true richness and complexity of two decades of intense artistic exploration in Mexico. Instead, it demonstrated how a series of avant-garde movements had become part of an institutional discourse. Other voices were less critical. Painter and anthropologist… Full Review

Beholding Christ and Christianity in African American Art, edited by James Romaine and Phoebe Wolfskill, offers a unified and underexamined perspective on artwork by late nineteenth- to mid-twentieth-century African American artists. Each of the fourteen chapters showcases a selected artwork by an individual artist, highlighting how “engagement with religious subjects, symbols, or themes can be an expression of an array of concerns related to racial, political, and socioeconomic identity” (3). From neoclassical sculptor Mary Edmonia Lewis, modernist painters Aaron Douglas, William H. Johnson, Jacob Lawrence, Archibald Motley Jr. and others, to self-taught artists like William Edmondson, the case studies… Full Review

Camille Billops and James V. Hatch are artists, educators, archivists, and activists who dedicate their lives to creating, teaching, collecting, and preserving art that reflects the experiences of the African diaspora. Pellom McDaniels III, curator of African American Collections at the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University, curated an exhibition and book based on the Camille Billops and James V. Hatch Archives and the James V. Hatch and Camille Billops Papers housed at the Emory University library. The exhibition and catalogue, both entitled Still Raising Hell: The Art, Activism, and Archives of Camille… Full Review

In Untitled (Mirror Girl) (2014), a young woman, voluptuous, luxuriating in her nudity, strikes a pose in front of her star-trimmed mirror. She holds her breasts in her hands to emulate a magazine spread, and she is stunning. An assortment of clothes and shoes decorate the floor beneath her, their colors and textures rhyming with the geometrical patterns across the rug and wallpaper. A cat sits quietly in the background, creating a collage effect—a technique Kerry James Marshall has used throughout his career. An eroticized charge emanates through the woman’s open gaze, and the conditions of the room, where surfaces… Full Review

Anna Dezeuze’s ambitious book Almost Nothing: Observations on Precarious Practices in Contemporary Art establishes a lineage for work from the 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s that engages with the issue of precariousness. Dezeuze compellingly argues that, beginning in the late 1950s, artists began to mine a conceptually fertile vein of lived experiences at the margins—whether actual or assumed. She understands the term “precarious” as established by the artist Thomas Hirschhorn—whose works of the 1990s and the following decade are considered in the book’s introduction and later chapters—as having to do with human actions and decisions and thus… Full Review