Recently Published Reviews

Adele Nelson’s new book is a significant contribution to the literature on twentieth-century Brazilian art and culture. Brazil has been central to art historical research in the last two decades, and numerous scholars, both international and Brazilian, have turned their attention to the art produced in the immediate postwar period, a moment when the foundation of the São Paulo Bienal and a surge of museum building transformed the artistic landscape in the country. Nelson’s study is groundbreaking in several ways: it challenges the dominant narrative that the emergence and evolution of abstraction in Brazil was tied primarily to a quest… Full Review

After a searing year of fire and drought along Colorado’s Front Range, the one-person show, Clarissa Tossin: Falling from Earth, opened in June 2022 at Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) for a three-month run. The Brazil-born artist has built a collaborative research-focused practice from her base in Los Angeles that addresses connective tissue that links place, history, and aesthetics. Employing moving images, installation, and sculpture, she explores their alternative narratives in both built and natural environments of extractive economies. Whether reinserting figurative traditions and ritual practices of Mayan motifs in early twentieth-century Los Angeles architecture, as… Full Review

Over the last five years, solo exhibitions of leading Indigenous artists have moved into mainstream museums and galleries. In tandem, these artists’ works are finally appearing in permanent collection galleries in this country as recognition of the important dialogues Native American artists continue to raise for the field, particularly about the legacies of settler colonialism, the impacts of climate change, and the continued fight for Indigenous sovereignty. Artist Rose B. Simpson is part of this critical shift. Her sculptures are now on permanent view across the United States, from the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, to the Autry Museum… Full Review

Although architectural drawings were made before the Renaissance, the increasing availability of paper in late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Europe had a profound influence on the tools and processes of architectural design. Paper was economical, flexible, portable, and an efficient medium for capturing ideas quickly and for conveying elaborate and complex ideas about masses and volumes in visual terms. But architects did not abandon centuries-old tools overnight, and throughout the Renaissance, drawings continued to be made with a variety of media and for diverse purposes. Generations of modern historians, however, have given primacy to drawings on paper and have studied… Full Review

Inscribed across the top of a shin-high slab of stone in a shady corner of Seattle’s Volunteer Park are the words: “Set against a series of existing monuments built to honor war, purchase, transport, and forms of expansion we might otherwise call control, finally an opportunity not for waiting, but for repose.” Chloë Bass’s Soft Services, a project commissioned by the Henry Art Gallery and organized by Shamim M. Momim for the new Henry OffSite program, consists of fourteen stone “benches” installed throughout the 48.3 acre, Olmstead-designed park and two more located outside the museum’s entrance. The stones are… Full Review

Framed within the elegant glass architecture of Tadao Ando, the towering figure of Balzac (1897) welcomes visitors to the Clark. This first gallery serves as both the introduction and the conclusion to the show which occupies the museum’s dedicated exhibition galleries downstairs. In the background, a cut-out window on a red wall opens onto a large photographic reproduction of the 1954 unveiling of Balzac at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Immersed within MoMA’s posh crowd, visitors are invited to linger in a dedicated reading space and enjoy some historical people watching. The purchase of Rodin’s controversial sculpture… Full Review

Setting the stage, deep red curtains mark the entrance to Painted Cloth: Fashion and Ritual in Colonial Latin America. Thoughtfully curated by Rosario I. Granados, the Marilynn Thoma associate curator of the Art of the Spanish Americas, this exhibition highlights the significance of cloth in the Spanish Americas, where it was a marker of social identity and a key facet of religious ritual. The works in the exhibition are predominantly drawn from eighteenth-century Peru and New Spain and span a variety of media, from paintings, sculptures, and prints that include textiles in their subject matter, to material culture related… Full Review

There are enough cities in America named after Christopher Columbus that until I arrived in front of The Columbus Museum and saw the banners for the Alma Thomas exhibition, I was worried that I might have traveled to the wrong one. America’s history of brutality, about which the name Columbus whispers or screams depending on who you are, is so vast that it forever spins off little whorls of cruelty like this—another tributary of brutality passed by, soaked in, so one can get somewhere else. On the walk to the museum in what turned out to be the correct Columbus… Full Review

Writing on the decolonial turn in curatorial practice, curator Ivan Muñiz-Reed asks, “How are curators and art institutions positioned within the colonial matrix, and is it possible for them to restructure knowledge and power—to return agency to those who have lost it?” (Afterall, 2020) A possible response to this provocative question is proposed by Reinventing the Américas: Construct. Erase. Repeat. Organized by Idurre Alonso, this exhibition displays many of the Getty’s collections of European colonial-era engravings, etchings, lithographs, illustrated chronicles, and decorative objects depicting the Americas during the so-called Age of Discovery. The show’s twist is that it seeks… Full Review

This volume, featuring nine essays and an extensive introduction by its editors, stems from scholarly discussions hosted by the Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Written by a multidisciplinary group of established scholars affiliated with universities across the United States and Canada, this book attempts to shift the scholarly debate about postclassical Rome from the concepts of decline and renewal to those of continuity, adaptation, reuse, reconstruction, memory, and (creative) resilience—a concept highlighted in the introduction (25–26). In this endeavor, the volume is successful and should be of interest to those engaged with… Full Review

The typical monographic treatment of a building or a community begins with a discussion of the patron’s plan and then traces the construction and development of the site to completion. In some cases, the history of the building or community is traced through subsequent changes and adaptations, concluding with its present state—or its destruction. This book takes a somewhat different course, as it starts with the founding of a utopian community in 1814 by George Rapp and  a group of disaffected Lutherans from Württemberg in Germany who applied the name New Harmony (after their earlier Pennsylvania settlement) to their new… Full Review

The artful protagonists of The Moving Statues of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam are witty enchantments, products of active imaginations whose disappearance requires further imaginative action. Angela Vanhaelen brings to life the Amsterdam doolhoven, labyrinths attached to an array of entertaining displays that sprang up in the prosperous Dutch city beginning in the seventeenth century. This unprecedented study of a phenomenon unique to Amsterdam reveals a landscape of innovation, foreign-sourced artisanal knowledge, and moral edification pivoting around unexpected sites: early modern amusement parks that, along with taverns and inns, functioned as spaces for a cosmopolitan range of visitors to encounter astonishing works… Full Review

It is no exaggeration to deem Ringgold the consummate American artist. The retrospective Faith Ringgold: American People at the New Museum is a thrilling turn through nearly seven decades of artmaking. Curators Massimiliano Gioni and Gary Carrion-Murayari, with curatorial assistant Madeline Weisburg, staged over one hundred artworks in roughly chronological order. Invested in the artist’s range of material experimentation, American People is a celebratory and rigorous display of Ringgold’s practice that claims the entire three floors of exhibition space in the museum and a devoted reading room on the top floor. The exhibition is bracketed by two of the artist’s… Full Review

The past two decades have seen an explosion of interest in early twentieth-century Mexican visual culture and especially in photography, which has been the subject of a number of important books which include Esther Gabara’s Errant Modernism: The Ethos of Photography in Mexico and Brazil (Duke University Press, 2008), Roberto Tejada’s National Camera: Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), and Andrea Nobile’s Photography and Memory in Mexico: Icons of Revolution (Manchester University Press, 2010). Other recent books include discussions of photography in a larger context that also includes painting, design, and literature, such as Tatiana Flores’s… Full Review

In the subtitle of The Double: Identity and Difference in Art since 1900, curated by James Meyer at the National Gallery of Art (NGA), the terms “identity” and “difference” do not signal, as they often do, an exhibition organized around categories of gender, race, ethnicity, or nationality. Identity is instead presented as much more slippery and unstable. Through the figure of the double, Meyer proposes a capacious thematic for understanding twentieth- and twenty-first-century art, as well as how we know and relate to ourselves, others, and the world around us. An extraordinary selection of over 120 works… Full Review