Concise, critical reviews of books, exhibitions, and projects in all areas and periods of art history and visual studies

Reviews in caa.reviews are published continuously by CAA and Taylor & Francis, with the most recently published reviews listed below. Browse reviews based on geographic region, period or cultural sphere, or specialty (from 1998 to the present) using Review Categories in the sidebar or by entering terms in the search bar above.

Recently Published Reviews

Delia Cosentino and Adriana Zavala
Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2023. 272 pp.; 64 color ills.; 25 b/w ills. $60.00 (9781477326992)
To visit Mexico City’s Plaza de la Constitución (better known as the Zócalo) today is to be immersed in an urban palimpsest spanning seven centuries. The north and east sides of this central plaza are occupied by the National Palace and Cathedral, from which the nation’s political and religious life has been administered since the Viceregal period. In the space between them, dancers and drummers wearing feathered headdresses and seed rattle anklets perform in front of the archaeological site and museum dedicated to the Mexica, or Aztec, Templo Mayor: the most significant ceremonial structure of Tenochtitlan, capital of the Aztec… Full Review
October 18, 2024
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Sherry C. M. Lindquist
1st edition . Routledge, 2024. 272 pp.; 13 color ills.; 71 b/w ills. Cloth $170.00 (9780367504526)
The book of hours, a type of devotional book that usually contains a collection of prayers, psalms, hymns, and other readings to be recited at specific hours of the day, is one of the most well-preserved artistic products from the late Middle Ages. These books have received extensive scholarly attention as complex cultural products that were often richly illuminated. The Book of Hours and the Body: Somaesthetics, Posthumanism, and the Uncanny is focused on illuminations in several books of hours that could have helped their users reflect on issues of embodiment, gender, being human, and the divine. The methodological framework… Full Review
October 9, 2024
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Katherine Smith and Jerry Philogene, eds.
Fowler Museum at UCLA, 2023. 160 pp.; 68 color ills.; 18 b/w ills. Cloth $50.00 (9780998044514)
Myrlande Constant: The Work of Radiance, an exhibition volume published for the eponymous show that ran at the Fowler Museum at UCLA in 2023, stands as a major contribution to the contemporary scholarship on the work of Haitian artists. Other examples over the past several decades published in conjunction with museum and gallery exhibitions include Pòtoprens: The Urban Artists of Port-au-Prince (2022), Haïti: deux siècles de création artistique (2014), Kafou: Haiti, Art and Vodou (2012), In Extremis: Death and Life in 21st Century Haiti (2012), and the disciplinary cornerstone of this era of scholarship, Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou (1995)… Full Review
October 7, 2024
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Erin Morton, ed.
Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2022. 360 pp.; 76 color ills. Paper CAD$55.00 (9780228010982)
Unsettling Canadian Art History, edited by Erin Morton, is a significant contribution to the fields of art history and Canadian studies. The book’s stated goal is “to offer antiracist, decolonial, feminist, and queer, trans, and Two-Spirit standpoints on histories of colonialism that violently formed the white settler state of Canada” (6). Morton states, in the preface, that she originally intended to write a single-authored book on the subject but recognized that “certain critiques must be collaborative ventures” (x). She reflects on her own positionality as a white settler academic and argues that, as a colonial discipline, Canadian art history… Full Review
October 2, 2024
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Oliver Moore
1st Edition. 310 pp.; 27 color ills.; 63 b/w ills. Paper $52.95 (9781032078991)
The question of “what is photography” is ineluctably tied to another question: “where is photography?" Similarly, for the history of photography in China, questions of photography’s points of origin, routes of circulation, as well as the direction of representational gazes have loomed large. Oliver Moore’s recent book Photography in China: Science, Commerce and Communication is no exception to these concerns, but it intends to provide a different approach: to “[explain] photography’s history from a Chinese viewpoint” (3). While this might seem to imply a nationalistic or cultural identity, what Moore refers to as “Chinese” is rather “several degrees of space”… Full Review
September 30, 2024
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Seattle Art Museum February 29–May 12, 2024.
If any single person is responsible for the momentum that contemporary Native American art is having at this moment it is Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (b. 1940, enrolled Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes). This is, at least, one of the central takeaways of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map, which traces five decades of Smith’s career as both one of the leading artists and influential curators of Contemporary Native American art. The retrospective is an exciting, nearly dizzying, display of Smith’s artistic oeuvre that provides a textural depth to the artist’s career for those familiar with her work while still being… Full Review
September 26, 2024
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Elizabeth Hill Boone
Austin: University of Texas Press, 2021. 264 pp.; 115 color ills.; 17 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (9781477321676)
Note from the Editor: To expand the journal’s accessibility, this review is being published in its original Spanish version followed by an English translation by Davis Sharpe and Nicole Halton.  Antes de la llegada de los europeos, muchos de los pueblos que habitaban el área cultural hoy conocida como Mesoamérica –entre los que sobresalen los Nahuas o Aztecas– solían emplear tiras de papel vegetal o de piel de animales plegadas en forma de biombo para registrar, a través de imágenes, conocimientos calendáricos y adivinatorios, cuentas catastrales y tributarias, genealogías, cantares y relatos históricos, entre otros muchos géneros más. Estos libros… Full Review
September 23, 2024
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Lauren Elkin
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023. 368 pp. Cloth $35.00 (9780374105952)
Upon completing the opera The Wreckers, British composer Ethel Smyth proselytized theaters across Europe to perform the work. It was staged in a German translation at the New Theater in Leipzig in 1906. Three years later, her friend and conductor Thomas Beecham produced it for His Majesty’s Theater in London. In 1958, Beecham published a short text to mark the centenary of Smyth’s birth. Despite his admiration for her work, he described the composer as “a stubborn, indomitable, unconquerable creature” (“Dame Ethel Smyth (1885–1944”), The Musical Times, 1958, 365).  Smyth is one of the hundreds of “creatures” included in Lauren… Full Review
September 18, 2024
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Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art WSU, March 26–June 29, 2024
Greeting the visitor to Beyond Hope: Kienholz and the Inland Northwest in a gallery of Washington State University’s Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art is a wall-mounted assemblage featuring a black-and-white photograph of elderly figures in their Sunday best moving into a starkly empty field surrounded by high hills. The sepia-toned stain of liquid resin applied across the image enhances the sense of time past and the idea that it represents a fragile memory of a momentous change in the lives of the people depicted. Titled The Returning (1976), the landscape recalls the open rolling hills of the Palouse region of… Full Review
September 16, 2024
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Caitlin Frances Bruce
Austin: University of Texas Press, 2024. 304 pp.; 32 color ills.; 67 b/w ills. (9781477327678)
In Voices in Aerosol: Youth Culture, Institutional Attunement, and Graffiti in Urban Mexico, Caitlin Frances Bruce engages in an extended ethnographic case study of graffiti culture in León, Mexico from the mid–1990s to 2018. Through the framework of attunement, Bruce structures the book around themes of frisson, noise, harmonization, amplification, resonance, and susurration to examine the shifts in attitudes towards graffiti in relation to the sociopolitical circumstances of early twenty-first century León. Terminology is paramount to this framing: the book begins with a glossary that defines terms in writing culture, and Bruce consistently uses “graffiti” rather than “street art” to… Full Review
September 11, 2024
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David Hopkins and Disa Persson, eds.
1st edition . Routledge, 2023. 216 pp.; 6 color ills.; 41 b/w ills. $136.00 (9781032284996)
David Hopkins and Disa Persson, the editors of Contagion, Hygiene, and the European Avant-Garde, open their volume with a contradiction central to cultural modernism: while nineteenth-century scientific medicine revolutionized understandings of germs and disease, holding out the promise of a healthier, more hygienic future, urban industrial life was also by its very nature a breeding ground for disease with its crowded cities, polluted skies, and dirty streets. The possibilities of a sanitized society were held in check, in other words, by the realities of an environment that had never been filthier. The fact that by the late nineteenth century… Full Review
September 9, 2024
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Katie Scott and Hannah Williams
Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2024. 374 pp.; 140 color ills.; 50 b/w ills. $60.00 (9781606068632)
As every art historian and material culture historian knows, the most basic objects— those that we encounter during the course of our lives—are central elements to our being, and the same held true for the French eighteenth-century artist. It is this question of the relationship between the artist and the objects they owned that drives Katie Scott and Hannah Williams’ study into the world of the artist’s things in their book, Artists’ Things: Rediscovering Lost Property from Eighteenth-Century France. To the delight of eighteenth-century specialists—and this book does assume knowledge of the primary actors and institutions of the Parisian… Full Review
September 6, 2024
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Christine Ross
Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2022. 424 pp.; 23 color ills.; 55 b/w ills. Cloth $38.00 (9780262047395)
Art for Coexistence: Unlearning the Way We See Migration is a deeply researched book that mobilizes ideas from philosophy, political theory, critical refugee studies, and other areas to assess the rhetorics of recent prominent artworks responding to a global surge of migration into Europe and the US in the last decade and a half. These artworks show migration to be a “dark coexistence” between “citizens-on-the-move” and those of affluent countries, appealing to audiences to transform this relation into a “luminous” one (8, 15). Christine Ross argues that art has responded to contemporary so-called migration crises by producing a series of… Full Review
September 4, 2024
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Karl Kusserow, ed.
Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2023. 304 pp.; 150 color ills. $45.00 (9780691236018)
Picture Ecology: Art and Ecocriticism in Planetary Perspective is a collection of essays that came out of a symposium held at Princeton University dedicated to the Princeton University Art Museum’s exhibition, Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment, organized in 2018–19 by Karl Kusserow and Alan Braddock. The catalog accompanying that exhibition and Braddock’s other editorial venture with Christoph Irmscher, A Keener Perception: Ecocritical Studies in American Art History (2009), form two major anchor points in the field of ecocritical art history, to which Picture Ecology is a ready addition. While these previous volumes focused on the art of the United… Full Review
August 28, 2024
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Nadja Millner-Larsen
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2023. 288 pp.; 4 color ills. Paper $35.00 (9780226824246)
From the outset, Nadja Millner-Larsen’s Up Against the Real: Black Mask from Art to Action mobilizes categories tied to 20th-century avant-gardism, populating the siege against the division between art and life with a wide array of radical characters and groups from heterogeneous backgrounds. As Millner-Larsen suggests, what most of them have in common is a “minor” status in the histories of the avant-garde after 1945 (14–15), but whose practices and redefinitions of the social role of art point to crucial contacts and thresholds between aesthetics and politics often not found in the discussions surrounding the “major” avant-gardes of the period… Full Review
August 26, 2024
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