Recently Published Reviews

The study of the role of dress in ancient societies has seen a boom in recent years, absorbing new techniques in archaeology and approaches from “new dress history,” cultural studies, and theories of the body. Mireille Lee’s previous work has already been influential in putting Greek dress on the agenda, and this current volume offers new insights into dress as a communicative medium as well as synthesizing scholarship across a number of related subfields (gender, identity, ethnicity, sexuality, status, class, etc.). By taking Greek conceptions of the body as her starting point, Lee structures the volume by applying the layers… Full Review

This compact edition of David Adjaye’s exploration of Africa brings together in one volume the fruits of his eleven-year-long project to visit and visually document the capitals of the continent’s fifty-four countries. The front cover image of Adjaye, Africa, Architecture: A Photographic Survey of Metropolitan Architecture serves as a key to the intellectual and conceptual approach of the book: a map of Africa’s six climatic zones. This map, credited to his architectural practice Adjaye Associates, is referred to as both a terrain and political map. This captures well the essence of his approach and investigation, namely, the rich and complex… Full Review

This collection of essays has attracted little attention since its publication in 2014, an oversight that should be remedied. Through nineteen essays and nine photo essays edited by D. Medina Lasansky, The Renaissance: Revised, Expanded, Unexpurgated places the early modern past and the postmodern present in dialogue with one another and examines the ways in which the Renaissance has been appropriated and received in Anglo-American popular culture. As Lasansky notes in the introduction, the Renaissance has never been more popular: from the video game Assassin’s Creed to Botticelli Olive Oil and The Da Vinci Code to the various televised incarnations… Full Review

The title of Figuring History, an exhibition of twenty-six large-scale works by Robert Colescott (1925–2009), Kerry James Marshall (b. 1955), and Mickalene Thomas (b. 1971), signals at least two of the show’s significant themes. Both terms have double meanings. “History” refers to people and events of the past as well as to the history of art. “Figuring” indicates both the representations of the human figure and the artists’ attempts to “puzzle out the place and meaning of those figures” (39) in historical and art historical narratives. Employing different strategies, all three artists grapple with figures in history and histories… Full Review

Noah Purifoy: Junk Dada takes an in-depth look at the artistic and biographical journey of the under-recognized African American artist and activist, Noah Purifoy (1917–2004) and his large-scale installation and home environment, the Joshua Tree Outdoor Museum (1989–2004). This lush catalogue, richly illustrated with eighty photographs by Fredrik Nilsen, features insightful essays by Yael Lipschutz, art critic and archivist of the Noah Purifoy Foundation in Joshua Tree, California; Lowery Stokes Sims, curator emerita of the Museum of Art and Design, New York City, and former executive director of the Studio Museum in Harlem; and Kristine McKenna, the Los Angeles–based art… Full Review

Diarmuid Costello’s book brings together an abundance of historical and analytical debates to make clear that the philosophy of photography is a delineated field in its own right. Although the title On Photography: A Philosophical Inquiry reflects Susan Sontag’s seminal book and may bring to mind Vilém Flusser’s attempt to single-handedly philosophize photography, it is in no sense similar to those approaches. Costello has gathered a rich corpus of philosophical thoughts on two questions: What is a photograph and what is photography? (7). Instead of resorting to a “cultural criticism” approach (embraced by thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, Sontag, Roland… Full Review

In her microhistory of Yanhuitlan, a town in the rugged Mixteca Alta of Oaxaca, Mexico, Alessia Frassani complicates our understanding of the collaborative and enduring interchange of indigenous and European constituencies in New Spanish society. Although historians attempting to reconstruct the dynamics of an ancient, multiethnic community often discover that their evidence is random and scarce, the documentation of Yanhuitlan, in stone, wood, and paper, is fortuitously consistent. Exploiting this ample data, Frassani explores not only the built environment, primarily in Yanhuitlan’s impressive Dominican monastery (convento) and its still splendid interior, but also the relevant archival material, ranging… Full Review

Outliers and American Vanguard Art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, offers an ambitious study of the significance of self-taught art to the production of mainstream US American artists. The expansive exhibition presents more than 250 works by 84 artists and is organized around three historic periods that, argues its curator Lynne Cooke, saw a surge in formal support for objects made beyond the conventional bounds of the art world: 1924–43, 1968–92, and 1998–2013. Outliers and its accompanying catalogue present an original and compelling account of US American art, bringing together many rarely exhibited artworks in illuminating… Full Review

Gustave Kahn’s characterization of Symbolism as “the exteriorization of the Idea” is usually explained as the Symbolists privileging the imagination over a naturalistic art practice that reproduced the visible world. In Nature’s Experiments and the Search for Symbolist Form, Allison Morehead reorients this quotation and Symbolist art itself toward science, specifically the experimental method. One of the crucial arguments in Nature’s Experiments is that even as positivism was being widely critiqued at the end of the nineteenth century, experimental methodology was gaining authority as a mode with which to realize not only scientific truths, but also truths about the human… Full Review

The edited volume, as a scholarly format, has proliferated in recent years but is too seldom celebrated. Its demands—principally brevity when it comes to individual essays—and its overall capaciousness produce texts and experiences of discovery this reviewer cherishes. When it comes to the topic of sociability, moreover, there could scarcely be a more appropriate form of presentation. If all books are social—collaborations linking author, editor, copyeditor, indexer, designer, printer, and so on—multiauthored volumes seem explicitly sociable. Frequently emerging from conference panels or colloquia, they are traces and performances of conversation and of groups coming together around a common purpose, to… Full Review

Paper Promises: Early American Photography, curated by Mazie M. Harris, assistant curator of photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum, offered fascinating insight into the little-known history of early paper photography in the United States. Although the processes for producing metal daguerreotypes and paper photographs were introduced simultaneously in America, negative-positive paper photography was slow to catch on, despite the ostensible benefits of its reproducibility. Harris accounts for this fact in the financial history of the antebellum period arguing that the medium’s feared potential to create counterfeit currency stymied its adoption in the United States. After Andrew Jackson dismantled the… Full Review

And then there was color. In short, this is the theme of Laura Kalba’s fascinating study, Color in the Age of Impressionism: Commerce, Technology, and Art, which chronicles the explosion of vivid (and often artificial) colors in everyday life in late nineteenth-century France. Explaining the science and technology behind the making of both new as well as more saturated traditional colors, the book traces the many experiential and epistemic shifts that attended consumers’ willing acceptance of a more colorful environment. In the process, the book shows that our modern assumptions surrounding color—including its vibrancy and ubiquity in daily life—owe… Full Review

Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century’s Most Photographed American has already received admiring reviews in the New York Times, Washington Post, New Yorker, and New Republic among other media outlets. The 2015 book by John Stauffer, Zoe Trodd, and Celeste-Marie Bernier is worth returning to here for what it offers specifically to artists and art historians. Pulling together extensive images of and writings by Frederick Douglass, many never before published, Picturing Frederick Douglass is a treasure trove for several fields, including photography history and practice, art histories of the African diaspora, and histories of American… Full Review

Jonathan Alexander became aware of the lack of a survey in English of Italian Renaissance illumination while preparing the groundbreaking exhibition The Painted Page: Italian Renaissance Book Illumination 1450–1550, held in London and New York in 1994–95 (exh. cat., 1994). He took up the challenge equipped not only with a profound knowledge of painting in Italian books, but also an extraordinary background in manuscript studies. He has published essential monographs and catalogues on art and manuscripts of the ninth through sixteenth centuries from many areas of Europe and brings to this survey his experience in addressing a myriad critical issues… Full Review

Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power offers an expansive view of the depth and breadth of American art in the heady, dizzying years of black activism between 1963 and 1983. While the book accompanies the exhibition of the same name, it is less of an exhibition catalogue and more of a compendium of micro histories, essays, reflections, images, and memories of one of the most dynamic periods in the history of American art. A period when the politics of blackness drove a new generation of artists and spawned a flourish of creative advances, artistic alliances… Full Review