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The conviction and vitality with which Shannen L. Hill explores visual culture as an agent of change shaped by Black Consciousness (hereafter, BC) and embodied in ideas and images of its leading advocate, Stephen Biko, took me back to late 1980s South Africa when I, a bright-eyed freshman, optimistically threw myself into the student liberation movement at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. There I and others designed, printed, and carried protest posters informed by an aesthetic that Hill traces to late 1960s BC student activism. At the time I was unaware of the historical roots of this visual… Full Review

The title of Tom Nickson’s impressive and beautifully illustrated monograph, Toledo Cathedral: Building Histories in Medieval Castile, cleverly highlights the dual agenda of his ambitious study of the Spanish cathedral. As a book dedicated to a single work of architecture, it endeavors to untangle the complicated and often tacitly accepted building history of the cathedral’s construction from the early thirteenth through late fourteenth centuries. In so doing, Nickson reveals how the cathedral’s most influential patrons and clergymen also “built” its histories. These histories have been layered upon the immense cathedral, creating a sort of palimpsest that is best understood… Full Review

Textiles are key to understanding the past. From sartorial practice to divisions of labor and patterns of trade, textiles serve as historical documents that often reveal as much about the people who produced and wore them as they do about those who collected, traded, copied, or admired them. African Textiles: The Karun Thakar Collection is a step toward documenting a significant private collection of textiles that shows potential for increasing our understanding of this important object of material and visual culture. The collector, Karun Thakar, provides an introduction to the book that offers some insight into his collecting practice while… Full Review

In spring 2014, the Metropolitan Museum of Art presented a groundbreaking exhibition of early Hindu and Buddhist artworks from Southeast Asia. Aptly titled Lost Kingdoms: Hindu-Buddhist Sculpture of Early Southeast Asia, the exhibition brought together treasures from nearly thirty institutions and collections across nine different countries, many of which had never before traveled outside their country of origin. Carefully grouped, juxtaposed, and emplaced in the Metropolitan’s galleries, the artworks revealed striking similarities and intriguing departures from Indian prototypes. Examining long-distance networks, regional developments, and local adaptations, Lost Kingdoms sought new ways of understanding how, and why, Indian ideas and… Full Review

Stephen Sheehi’s The Arab Imago: A Social History of Portrait Photography, 1860–1910 focuses on the social history of indigenous photography in the Ottoman World between 1860 and 1910. The book redresses the lack of critical attention to local photography, analyzing the production, performance, exchange, circulation, and display of photography in Ottoman Egypt, Lebanon, and Palestine. Sheehi pursues in-depth research and analysis of both visual and written primary sources by local practitioners, most of whose names are known only to a small number of researchers. The book is an ambitious and theoretically challenging study, a significant and original work of social… Full Review

When the Spanish mendicant orders built the first monastery complexes of the Yucatan Peninsula on top of extant pre-Columbian towns, temples, and ceremonial centers, one of their aims was to take possession of indigenous sacred space, appropriate its inherent sacredness, and reuse it to establish the Catholic faith in the New World. In Maya Ideologies of the Sacred: The Transfiguration of Space in Colonial Yucatan, Amara Solari examines the city of Itzmal in Yucatan as an example in order to illustrate how this project was heavily influenced, even challenged, by deep-rooted Maya traditions and conceptions of space. The indigenous… 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

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