Recently Published Reviews

In Vital Voids, Andrew Finegold opens, tongue in cheek, by saying that his book is “about nothing.” He then demonstrates—convincingly, and in engaging prose—that the sustained analysis of holes provides insight into the ways in which ancient Mesoamericans conceived of cavities as teeming with vital energies or pregnant with the possibility of emergence. Nothing truly was something for ancient Mesoamericans, but arriving at this conclusion requires skilled art historical analysis on the part of Finegold. Finegold employs a range of methodologies that takes the reader from objects and history to myth, symbolism, and ideology. He begins by contemplating the… Full Review

One gratifying consequence of an increasingly expansive, antiracist art history is the reframing of conventional subfields, allowing us to see familiar artworks with a fresh eye. Yet as Katherine Jentleson claims in her taut, well-argued Gatecrashers: The Rise of the Self-Taught Artist in America, the subfield, or even just the label, of so-called self-taught art has always made simple categorization difficult and continues to do so, as artists trained in settings beyond academic institutions gain more visibility. Recent high-profile exhibitions such as “Great and Mighty Things”: Outsider Art from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection (2013), Outliers and American… Full Review

This compendium offers a wide-angle view of the life and work of activist and writer Jane Jacobs (1916–2006). The volume, edited by Jesper Meijling and Tigran Haas, consists of fifteen chapters interspersed with carefully selected full-page images drawn from both Jacobs’s work and wider contexts. Through these images and the short, provocative essays, the book asks the reader to reconsider the work of Jacobs in a contemporary context in relation to how we read and understand cities. Beyond a eulogy or simple celebration, therefore, the texts suggest fresh insights, open up new questions, and develop an original set of critiques. … Full Review

After Hope is a groundbreaking exhibition that rethinks not only the importance of contemporary video art in Asia but also the premises and goals of its exhibition site, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, whose main focus is traditional Asian art. The physical installation of the show comprises a six-and-a-half-hour loop of fifty-four videos and an “ephemera wall” of texts and images contributed by the artists. While the physical installation of the exhibit runs through December 31, 2021, a thought-provoking program of working groups, workshops and events, and a continually updated digital platform, afterhope.com, have been organized since… Full Review

How welcome it is to read a book, manifestly about fin-de-siècle Symbolism, whose ambitions are to parse communication itself. Andrei Pop’s A Forest of Symbols: Art, Science, and Truth in the Long Nineteenth Century traces allied concerns among artists, scientists, philosophers, and mathematicians about the incommensurability of private thought and public expression and the symbol as an agent within those realms. The book argues that Symbolism arose from crises of confidence in knowledge production in Western philosophy and the sciences. While this is not a new claim, the insight that Pop offers is that Symbolism may be understood as a… Full Review

Samuel van Hoogstraten’s Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der schilderkonst: Anders de zichtbaere werelt (1678) is one of the most important sources for Dutch seventeenth-century art practice and art theory. The book has been frequently mined by art historians to support interpretative arguments on a variety of subjects, but few scholars have read Van Hoogstraten’s magnum opus cover to cover. The original text is difficult to understand, even for those well trained in seventeenth-century Dutch, due to its idiosyncratic vocabulary, highbrow writing style, and the abundance of quotations from antique and early modern sources. Jan Blanc’s Introduction à la haute… Full Review

Ever since his Kant after Duchamp (1996), Thierry de Duve has proved himself to be one of the most insistent Kantians today. Quite appropriately, the cover of his recent book, Aesthetics at Large, Volume 1: Art, Ethics, Politics, shows us a button telling us that “Kant Got It Right.”  De Duve’s Kant, however, is not the one who, in the wake of Jean-François Lyotard’s proposed reading, might be taken to suggest that the sublime holds the key to the momentum of the avant-garde; rather, he is the one who aspired to produce a theory of sensus communis as the… Full Review

Georges Seurat’s monumental A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884, Art Institute of Chicago) hung alongside paintings by Camille Pissarro and newcomer Paul Signac at the last Impressionist exhibition. Those who visited in May 1886 encountered a new painterly mode called “néo-impressionisme” as defined by Félix Fénéon. With their pointillist technique, Neo-Impressionists applied tight dabs of unblended paint, rather than employing the push-and-pull of the gestural, colorful strokes of the Impressionist painters. Complementary hues—red lake and viridian green, for example—appear side by side in pointillist imagery. These painters believed that those dabs of color mixed optically so that… Full Review

In the late 1710s the French and English governments sought to tackle their respective national debts by promoting share trading in state-controlled joint stock companies: the French Compagnie d’Occident (Company of the West), also known as the Mississippi Company, and the English South Sea Company. In 1720 spectacular rises in share prices spread from the French to the English and eventually to the more diversified Dutch financial markets. Each of these bull markets was soon followed by a dramatic collapse in the value of shares. Together these three “bubbles” generated the first international stock market crash and ushered in the… Full Review

El arte antes de la historia: Para una historia del arte andino antiguo (Art before history: For a history of ancient Andean art) is an ambitious edited volume emerging out of an equally ambitious 2016 conference. The conference, co-organized by the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú and University of California, Berkeley, brought together a diverse group of international scholars in Lima for three days. The book features essays that emerged from talks presented at the conference, and also integrates additional essays by a few authors who did not participate in the 2016 events. The goal of the volume is to… Full Review

Co-organized by Maine’s Portland Museum of Art and Atlanta’s High Museum of Art, David Driskell: Icons of Nature and History surveys almost seven decades of Driskell’s art practice across painting, printmaking, and collage. Curator Julie L. McGee gathered lesser- and well-known works created between 1953 and 2011 with a keen interest in highlighting David Driskell (1934–2020) as an artist, a lifelong occupation eclipsed at times by his outsize influence as a scholar of American and African American art. The inimitable Driskell inhabited a colorful life as a groundbreaking art historian, curator, professor, and collector dedicated to chronicling artists of African… Full Review

Context always matters in the perception and reception of art, but in the case of annual or biennial exhibitions designed to take the pulse of a particular place at a particular time, context is crucial. Made in L.A. 2020: a version was, through no fault of its own, vexed in this regard. Between the show’s organization and its opening to the public, delayed by nearly a year, the political and social landscape of Los Angeles and the nation as a whole shifted radically with the killing of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and too many others, the rise of the Black… Full Review

Throughout the entire text of Eloquent Bodies, we encounter Jacqueline E. Jung’s tactile, sensual delight in sculpture and her awareness of the role played by the viewer’s presence in space. Her study fits well with the flourishing world of sensory studies, yet is still deeply invested in the exploration of the cultural production of art. Although she presents a study of objects by analyzing their “presence effects,” Jung retains a deep commitment to their “meaning effects.” Her analysis also brings us into contact with the work of many scholars, including the pioneers who first brought the sculptures to our… Full Review

As viewers enter Carolina Caycedo’s solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago, they are greeted by a sculptural ofrenda, or offering, that suspends in absolute stillness from the ceiling. Composed of vibrantly colored fishing nets that stack to form a conical-shaped tent or skirt, the sculpture Limen (2019) welcomes viewers with the scent of fresh flowers that hang almost at their feet. Reminiscent of the Mexican marigolds seen in Día de los Muertos altars, red, yellow, and orange flowers rest on a wooden gold-panning bowl suspended from the sculpture, evoking the greed of colonial… Full Review

With the global turn in early modern studies, more and more work has been done to understand better the artistic exchanges between distant lands. Questions of taste and appropriation and explorations of how art objects functioned as diplomatic gifts have been probed, though mostly with a Eurocentric focus. Italy has, in many of these studies, maintained its (anachronistic) primacy as artistic interlocutor with the world, and Florence (and, by necessity, the Medici) its identity as the umbilicus mundi of early modern art. This persists, despite the fact that other areas in and beyond Italy had more political, social, and artistic… Full Review