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The exhibition We Chat: A Dialogue in Contemporary Chinese Art took its name from the popular social-media app in China, giving space and voice to ten artists born after the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76). These artists are some of China’s “Millennials” (known also as the “Me Generation,” and successors of what might be called the “Mao Generation”), who were of single-digit age during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest-turned-massacre. Self-reflective and uninhibited by conventional social constructions of the past, the artists and their work suggest a new art history in the making. As a generation, they are similar to… Full Review

I have been carrying around Jennifer Tyburczy’s Sex Museums: The Politics and Performance of Display for months now, and have received, understandably, quite some attention for it. I have been reading it on my morning commute to work on the train, sitting in cafes and parks with it, and, most notably, have been often seen with it at work, much to the amusement of my students. Not only do people have a lot to say about the title, but the cover image furthers the book’s seductive allure. It features the dorsal view of a person in front of Gustave Courbet’s… Full Review

The exhibition Nari Ward: Sun Splashed at the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) is the first mid-career retrospective of the Jamaica-born artist, and it includes over two decades of his work. It overlapped with Firelei Báez: Bloodlines, a smaller solo exhibition of primarily paintings and drawings by the Dominican Republic-born Báez, a former student of Ward’s. Both artists live and work in New York City—Ward in Harlem and Báez in Brooklyn. Curator Diana Nawi installed Ward’s diverse oeuvre across three galleries. The works in the first gallery all dealt loosely with issues of inclusion, immigration, American… Full Review

James Baldwin in Turkey: Bearing Witness from Another Place is based on nearly thirty images of James Baldwin by Sedat Pakay, a renowned photographer and documentary filmmaker who first met Baldwin when Pakay was a young student at Robert College (now part of Boğaziçi University) in Istanbul. The photographs were originally showcased in an exhibition at the Northwest African American Museum in Seattle in 2012. The collection comprises a foreword, several essays by novelists, biographers, and scholars who knew Baldwin intimately or intellectually, a poem by Michael Harper, and an interview with Pakay. The book’s back jacket features a… Full Review

Megan E. O’Neil’s Engaging Ancient Maya Sculpture at Piedras Negras, Guatemala and Alexander Parmington’s Space and Sculpture in the Classic Maya City introduce elements of time and space in discussing how Maya art and architecture operated and expressed meaning. Both scholars take up the topic of the built environment during the Late Classic Period (seventh to ninth century CE) and anchor their analyses to sites near the Usumacinta River (O’Neil studies Piedras Negras in Petén, Guatemala, while Parmington examines Palenque in Chiapas, Mexico). Both authors focus on viewer experience as an essential feature of the ways art and architecture construct… Full Review

The history of art in early modern Europe would be unthinkable without Antwerp. And yet until quite recently, Antwerp was a place that nobody talked much about. Scholarship on the southern Netherlandish city (now part of Belgium) long remained the province of local historians, the indefatigable Floris Prims notable among them. And while first Pieter Paul Rubens and then Pieter Bruegel the Elder met with increasing art-historical interest following Belgium’s assertion of independence in 1830, a dogged nationalistic approach to their oeuvres meant that the city in which they lived and worked did not generate much attention in its own… Full Review

The topic of remediation has recently come to the forefront of academic study across disciplines ranging from TED talks to symposia merging African art and media studies. It is within this vein that Delinda Collier examines the complexities of remediation in both form and content in Repainting the Walls of Lunda: Information Colonialism and Angolan Art. The text centers its discussion of the varied intricacies of analog and digital media by tracking Chokwe mural and sand (sona) arts and symbolism through numerous iterations dating from the 1950s until the early 2000s. With each example, Collier discusses the… Full Review

What is the truth in painting, and what is truth in reality? Revolving around the learned Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), Malcolm Bull’s Inventing Falsehood, Making Truth: Vico and Neapolitan Painting brings us to Naples in the early eighteenth century, offering an analysis of painting and art theory in correlation with the philosophical concepts and insights of Vico’s work on these matters. Vico was educated in rhetoric and law and taught as a professor of rhetoric while writing a series of books, including the groundbreaking New Science (first edition published in 1725, revised in 1730, with a third revised edition published posthumously… Full Review

Until recently, extensive thematic exhibitions on the Florentine maniera have been confined to Italian and, more specifically, Tuscan institutions. Elsewhere in Europe, however, the last few years have seen a reanimated interest in Mannerism: the latest, in the spring of 2016, was the large-scale exhibition Maniera: Pontormo, Bronzino and Medici Florence at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt. Organized by Bastian Eclercy—chief curator of Italian, French, and Spanish painting at the museum—the show focused on Florence as epicenter of “European Mannerism” in the pivotal period between the 1510s—when the Medici’s return to power coincided with the emergence of a new generation… Full Review

This book about aristocratic nuns and convent patronage offers an interesting characterization of a resulting corpus of “seductive images” of “profane subjects and sensuous forms” in the context of what Giancarla Periti calls “courtly conventual culture” (1). The idea of the courtly convent interior is a clever one, and it certainly provides a touchstone for investigations into patrician nuns, their motivations, their artists, and the visual and perhaps didactic functions of such imagery in Renaissance convents. The trouble is that examples of such courtly conventual culture are not terribly widespread in Renaissance Italy. Periti is therefore compelled to devote most… Full Review