Recently Published Reviews

In Nakahira Takuma’s photobook For a Language to Come [Kitarubeki botoba no tame ni] (1970), a haunting diptych of photographs conveys flat, endless tire-track-covered sand that stretches out to a dark horizon under a blotted sky, as if capturing a terrain in the midst of battle. Art historian Bert Winther-Tamaki sensitively unpacks this image taken in 1965 on a human-made island in Tokyo Bay, to reveal the layers of horror and modernity that undergird its spectral form. The island was created from developmental desires both to dredge the bay of Tokyo to allow for the transit of larger vessels… Full Review

Curator and academic James Voorhies’s book Postsensual Aesthetics: On the Logic of the Curatorial asks how contemporary art exhibitions produce new knowledge when the modes of production surrounding these events have developed in complexity. Exhibitions now extend far beyond the gallery to include their broadcast on social media, publications of varying forms, and public programs (both in-person and virtual) surrounding these events. For Voorhies, this means that audiences now combine—and, crucially, expect—both sensual and cognitive experiences with art in order to learn and digest its content. Yet, traditional aesthetics still prioritizes the value of the viewer’s sensual experience with the… Full Review

Keith Haring’s journals (Penguin Books, 2010) open with the nineteen-year-old burgeoning artist hitchhiking across the Midwest. Before he moved to New York and enrolled in the School of Visual Arts, the kid from Kutztown, Pennsylvania followed the Grateful Dead, selling t-shirts, getting high, and seeing the country. In Minnesota he found a tree by the St. Croix River that he was “gonna come back to, someday” (2). After the Dead show in Minneapolis, he and his companion hitched a ride and ate in a bar on the North Dakota border surrounded by farmers who commented on Haring’s hair when he… Full Review

For Indigenous Pacific Islanders, the ocean is not a metaphor. Land and water are genealogically related to people, providing the physical and ancestral links that connect, rather than divide. This “Oceanitude” is a central framework for The Ocean on Fire: Pacific Stories from Nuclear Survivors and Climate Activists, in which author Anaïs Maurer investigates what she calls  (post)apocalyptic stories—both literary and visual—that offer strategies for mourning, healing, survival, and regeneration in the face of nuclear imperialism. Between the 1940s and 1980s, the French, US-American, and British militaries conducted nuclear bomb tests in Tahiti, the Marshall Islands, and Kiribati, among… Full Review

The New Public Art: Collectivity and Activism in Mexico since the 1980s edited by Maria Polgovsky Ezcurra examines a range of artistic-activist projects carried out in Mexico between 1985 and 2017. These were years of political and economic transformation and growing drug-related violence, bracketed by two major earthquakes in Mexico City. Especially since President Felipe Calderón’s initiation of a war on drugs in 2006, fear and violence have shut down public dialogue, historical memory, and possibilities for mourning. This volume explores practices that resist disenfranchisement and aim to strengthen social bonds, and ultimately, the public sphere.  Some of the artists… Full Review

Illuminating Metalwork: Metal, Object, and Image in Medieval Manuscripts by editors Joseph Salvatore Ackley and Shannon L. Wearing is the fourth volume in De Gruyter’s series Sense, Matter, and Medium. The book complements recent exhibitions and publications on the materials of medieval manuscript illumination, such as the Fitzwilliam Museum’s landmark Colour: The Art and Science of Illuminated Manuscripts (2016). Projects such as these have drawn on the expertise of scientists and conservators, guided, as the introduction here states, “by the conviction that a sustained incorporation of technical data deeply enriches the art historical project.” Ornamenting a manuscript with precious metals… Full Review

In the introduction to Brilliant Bodies: Fashioning Courtly Men in Early Renaissance Italy, Timothy McCall states that it is his intention to " . . . explore and interpret how [fifteenth-century Italian princes] . . . used art, spectacle, and especially clothing and adornment to reinforce and advertise power, and to seduce those who beheld them." McCall’s focus on aristocratic masculine dress is a significant addition to the growing literature on Renaissance male fashion. Central and unique to McCall’s argument is the assertion that quattrocento rulers such as Galeazzo Maria Sforza, Borso d’Este, and Alfonso d’Aragona purposefully attracted the… Full Review

What constitutes Korean photography? How do photographs of and in Korea shape national identity? Or perhaps more accurately, how are photography and the nation mutually constituted? And how might Korean photography intervene in the history of photography itself? The historiography of Korean photography brings forth a set of methodological issues that continue to shape the field of Korean art history at large. Demanding the construction of “Koreanness” in which a photograph must demonstrate its unique national and cultural authenticity, Korean photography is compartmentalized and perceived as a peripheral modernity that serves or catches up to Euro-American modernity. Two recent works… Full Review

In September 1934, the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), announced that it was staging The Making of a Museum Publication, an exhibition that displayed the entire production process of its own publications, step by step. From manuscript through to multiply-reproduced object, typeset and laid-out, printed and bound, the MoMA show not only reinforced the critical role of printed matter as a medium for display in a modern art museum but also ushered in a heightened sense of self-reflexivity in relation to the catalog as an object of art-historiographical attention. In the subsequent ninety years, the question… Full Review

Southeast Asia is a region of ambiguity and complexity. Existing countries in the region went through different historical transformations before coming into being with diverse linguistic heritages. There is no unified lingua franca. Although—on the surface—there is geopolitical unity (such as through ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations), art practitioners often struggle to establish cross-cultural understanding because of a lack of resources and knowledge about their neighboring countries. The Modern in Southeast Asian Art: A Reader is an attempt to establish such common ground. With the support of National Gallery Singapore, and Nanyang Technological University, Centre of… Full Review

The Art of Remembering: Essays on African American Art and History is a collection of essays written by Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw that address African American artists working in the United States from the end of the eighteenth century to today. Many of the essays are revised and expanded from previously published works and taken together demonstrate both the breadth and focus of Shaw’s scholarly and curatorial work over a twenty-year period: to challenge the discipline of art history for its exclusions, to grapple with the imperatives of history and representation in Black aesthetic practices, and to call for critical engagement… Full Review

In their heyday in the second half of the twentieth century, museum catalogs of permanent collections of art from the ancient Americas fulfilled an indispensable role recording the appearances, whereabouts, and growing knowledge of objects in a then-nascent field. At the same time, they frequently aspired to portray a newly amassed collection as “encyclopedic” and posit its significance. Such catalogs—for example, Lee Parson’s Pre-Columbian Art: The Morton D. May and The Saint Louis Art Museum Collections, published in 1980—regularly commemorated major acquisitions from private collections and, as things of beauty themselves, were typically gifted to potential donors to solicit future… Full Review

Hidden in Plain Sight: Concealing Enslavement in American Visual Culture joins two trends broadening art history’s scope: exposing racial ideologies and analyzing popular art. While others have focused on antislavery imagery, Stephens opens new pathways by illuminating art that supported slavery in the United States, gaining access to unseen works, and researching manuscripts to understand the artists and their clients. For art historians, the book offers greater context for interpreting Southern art; for historians of slavery, it offers visual analysis often missing from studies of political culture. It provides a lay of the land and establishes key waypoints. At the… Full Review

This volume, L’iconographie du Bestiaire divin de Guillaume le clerc de Normandie, by Rémy Cordonnier provides an excellent introduction to the Divine Bestiary (Bestiaire divin, ca. 1210–11)) by Guillaume le clerc of Normandy, through the presentation of the complex textual tradition and an introduction of what is known of the author and the context. In his text, Guillaume explains that he translated Latin prose into French verse. Though originally from Normandy, Guillaume lived in England and was married with children. Working for patrons in the West Midlands, he wrote poetry, moral allegories, and exempla. The Bestiaire divin … Full Review

For anyone concerned with the Middle Ages (and beyond), Jerusalem represents a challenge and an almost inexhaustible source of inspiration. For centuries, the holy city has presented itself to the observer as a liminal space in which the symbolic, legendary, allegorical, and metaphorical dimensions are inextricably superimposed on perceptible reality and tend to overshadow it, to such an extent that any distinction proves useless and even senseless. If there is one constant in the history of Jerusalem, it is its ability to bewilder, puzzle, and thrill its observers, whether they be devout pilgrims of the times past or scholars trying… Full Review