Recently Published Reviews

In her illuminating new book, The History of a Periphery: Spanish Colonial Cartography from Colombia’s Pacific Lowlands, Juliet Wiersema shows us how a selection of manuscript maps and their accompanying archival documents simultaneously communicate the disjunctures and contradictions in the Spanish Crown’s colonizing project and, in some cases, reveal the agency, resilience, and resistance of the people they sought to subjugate and exploit. Principally among her aims, Wiersema demonstrates how these maps and documents together upend long-held assumptions about the Pacific Lowlands (located along the coastal border of present-day Colombia), also known as the Greater Chocó, a place commonly… Full Review

Hokusai: Inspiration and Influence is a sprawling, comprehensive look at Katsushika Hokusai’s career that probes beyond his famous wave. The exhibit makes a sustained argument that his artistic impact on Japanese and global art far exceeds any single image or print series. It builds context by combining Hokusai’s art with works by his master and students, his rivals and imitators, and modern Japanese and non-Japanese artists. However, the size and organization of the exhibit sometimes obscure the most salient arguments in favor of more deeply exploring Hokusai’s massive impact on Edo-era art and beyond. Hokusai is undoubtedly best known in… Full Review

The Political Body: Stories on Art, Feminism, and Emancipation in Latin America is the translation of an influential book originally published in Spanish as Feminismo y arte latinoamericano: historias de artistas in 2018 in Argentina. Since its publication, Andrea Giunta, a professor of art history at the University of Buenos Aires and curator of influential international exhibitions, has updated and expanded the book in six subsequent editions. Giunta frames the study as a complement to the wide-ranging and pathbreaking exhibition, Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985, which she cocurated with Cecilia Fajardo-Hill. In contrast to the one hundred twenty… Full Review

In this beautifully illustrated book, Finbarr Barry Flood and Beate Fricke explore ways to approach medieval objects in the absence of texts—the objects as archives. Often these objects have survived by chance (what the authors refer to as “flotsam,” 7–8), and the portable nature of many objects means that the histories of their production are obscured. Tales Things Tell is a masterclass in art-historical analysis and should serve as a model for anyone attempting to engage in global or transcultural art history. The book is divided into two parts and structured around six case studies: hanging censers, niello technology, coconut… Full Review

For four decades, María Magdalena Campos-Pons has created works that deftly interweave the particular and the expansive, utilizing her body, memory, and familial history as conduits to attend to transatlantic histories of diaspora and racial violence. Campos-Pons was born in 1959 in the Afro-Cuban province of Matanzas, Cuba as the descendant of enslaved African individuals and indentured Chinese laborers brought forcefully to the island. Since 1991, she has resided primarily in the United States, initially unable to return to Cuba for over a decade due to the US embargo. Her practice has centered on the journeys––both forced and forbidden—that are… Full Review

Ecocritical art history has expanded the range of questions we ask of visual art, moving beyond landscape studies to consider the ways in which artworks are entwined with ecology as well as with global systems of trade, colonialism, and enslavement. Two new books about depictions of nature in the United States during the nineteenth century beg to be considered in this light. While neither author adopts the label “ecocriticism,” and each pursues a radically different methodology, together their books reveal the complex relationship between humans and the environment in the antebellum era. Margaretta Markle Lovell’s Painting the Inhabited Landscape: Fitz… Full Review

An authoritative survey on predominantly African American art practices in the United States, Richard J. Powell’s Black Art: A Cultural History is now in its third edition, a remarkable feat that speaks to its staying power as a vital source in the field, classrooms, and libraries. It is evidence of an enduring commitment by Powell to sustain the means of analyzing cultural histories and works of art by minoritized artists, and the text’s reappearance gestures towards its contents as unsettled and evolving. Updated and expanded, Black Art participates in a contemporary atmosphere of renewed interest in Black culture and aesthetic… Full Review

Embroidering the Landscape: Women, Art and the Environment in British North America, 1740–1770 by Andrea Pappas is a fascinating study of large needlework landscapes from the mid to late colonial period carefully curated by the author for their narrative content in addition to their aesthetic and historical value. Rather than the samplers that readers might expect, Pappas focuses on the monumental overmantels that took pride of place in colonial homes, showcasing the adept needle skills of young girls and women. Such embroideries often originated from pattern books and predetermined designs, but the examples provided by Pappas diverge from this tradition… Full Review

Standard narratives on medieval art focus on Western Europe and conventional stylistic and geo-chronological categories of early medieval, Romanesque, and Gothic; the latter associated with “later medieval art.” Medieval art in and of Eastern Europe is habitually tied to Christian Orthodoxy, identified with Byzantine art, and considered a separate research arena with its own categories: Early, Middle, and Late Byzantine periods, associated with prominent rulers, so also known as Justinianic, Komnenian, and Palaeologan periods. Medieval art of the Slavs is frequently isolated within the narratives about the arts of current nation-states. Wider narratives customarily examine the art of the Slavs… Full Review

Brazilian landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx is well known for his groundbreaking production of tropical gardens and public landscape projects within the history of modern Brazilian architecture. Still, he also had an essential role as an activist for environmental preservation. Catherine Nordenson’s book, Depositions: Roberto Burle Marx and Public Landscapes under Dictatorship, is a crucial contribution as it reveals Burle Marx’s systematic role as a government councilor defending cultural and environmental preservation. While working on emblematic landscape architecture projects and having a good political transit, the architect used his social position to denounce deforestation and threats to the natural… Full Review

In 2002, Leo Steinberg donated 3,648 prints from his collection to the Blanton Museum. In a talk there the following year he succinctly said why prints were so important for the study of early modern art: “I had escaped graduate school and was discovering that, for the art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, prints were the circulating lifeblood of ideas." That statement provided curator Holly Borham with an inspired title for this richly illustrated and illuminating catalog that so well describes the work of prints in Steinberg’s writing and thinking about art. The lecture, eventually published in an essay… Full Review

Released nearly contemporaneously and with substantial overlap in their corpora, the two volumes under review, Maggie Popkin’s Souvenirs and the Experience of Empire in Ancient Rome and Kimberly Cassibry’s Destinations in Mind: Portraying Places on the Roman Empire’s Souvenirs share similar agendas—to take seriously the portable, small-scale representations of popular sights and pastimes that recur in the material record of the Roman Empire. Despite these similarities, Popkin and Cassibry take different approaches in achieving their goal and consequently offer distinct yet complementary insights. Popkin’s Souvenirs opens with an introductory chapter establishing key terms and methodological frameworks. The book then proceeds… Full Review

Charles V never rode his horse into the 1547 battle of Mühlberg. Instead, he spent his time during that conflict on a litter suffering from gout. But Titian’s triumphal equestrian portrait of the king betrays no hint of weakness—physical or otherwise. The monarch sits aloft on a decorous steed, clad in armor, serenely looking beyond the picture plane. He exerts complete control over his horse, his body, and, of course, the spiritual purity of his kingdom (Mühlberg was a decisive victory over Protestant rebels). Politics and religion obliquely congeal in this homage to the king’s might. Nevertheless, it remains a… Full Review

The South American Dream at the Pérez Art Museum in Miami (PAMM) is a dynamic and colorful exhibition that explores history, memory, and the South American identity through the lens of Brazilian artist Marcela Cantuária’s work. Through five immersive, multimedia artworks, which seamlessly blend painting, textiles, and ceramics, Cantuária examines the multifaceted concept of the South American dream, including environmental consciousness, political struggle, and faith. This installation curated by Jennifer Inacio, was commissioned by PAMM, challenging Cantuária to adapt her work to the high ceilings of the exhibition space and to consider her work in relation to… Full Review

Oser La Liberté, translated as “Dare Freedom,” is an extraordinary exhibition on the centuries-long fight against slavery in France and its colonies. Sponsored by the Centre des monuments nationaux (CMN) and the Fondation pour la mémoire de l’esclavage, and organized by Florence Alexis, a curator, activist, and daughter of Haitian novelist Jacques Stephen Alexis, it is installed in the crypt of Paris’s Panthéon, a building that was conceived as a church but transformed during the Revolution into a “temple of liberty” and a burial ground for “great men.” The most extraordinary thing about Oser La Liberté may… Full Review