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For at least twenty centuries before the European invasions of the 1500s, artists from the Pre-Columbian cultures of Mesoamerica and the southwestern United States elaborated a wide range of elite objects with mosaic tesserae, including human and animal skulls, scepters, knife handles, diadems, pectoral ornaments, masks, disks, plaques, and jewelry for the ear, nose, and lips. Maya, Mixtec, Aztec, and Ancestral Puebloan artists fashioned the tesserae from a variety of culturally significant materials, including jade, turquoise, iron oxides, and many types of marine shell. Both native accounts and modern research have shown that these materials were selected primarily for their… Full Review

For nigh on fifty years, it has been fashionable to denounce mid-century urban renewal projects, as well as the planners and politicians who brought them into being. Even as the bulldoze-and-build movement reached its zenith in the 1960s, many Americans began to develop posthumous nostalgia for quaint, tumbledown neighborhoods that were rent asunder to make way for superblocks, highways, and modernist behemoths. This widespread sentiment gave rise to a cottage industry of screeds against urban renewal. Happily, the invective of a previous generation is now being displaced by more judicious analyses. To that end, architectural historian Elihu Rubin's … Full Review

Pamela A. Patton’s Art of Estrangement: Redefining Jews in Reconquest Spain makes an important contribution to the already rich field of medieval art and Jewish-Christian relations. Scholars such as Bernhard Blumenkranz, Michael Camille, Ruth Mellinkoff, Heinz Schreckenberg, Sara Lipton, Debra Higgs Strickland, Mitchell Merback, Vivian Mann, Nina Rowe, Herbert Kessler, and David Nirenberg, among others, have examined the ways in which Christian art expresses perceptions of Jews and Judaism.[1] As Patton points out, these studies focus primarily on northern European art. Patton expands the scope of this current scholarship by demonstrating that Iberian Christian imagery incorporated, altered, or resisted northern… Full Review

Over the last twenty-five years, meals constructed by artists as art have flourished through a range of itinerant arts initiatives in public and private spaces and become recent programmatic mainstays in galleries and museums around the world, giving the impression that these works are a contemporary trend. Yet, in the 1930s the Italian Futurists generated a body of work about food that predated these artist projects—opening a restaurant, La Taverna del Santopalato (Tavern of the Holy Palate), in Turin, Italy, for example, that was forty years ahead of Food, the restaurant founded in New York by Gordon Matta-Clark, Caroline Goodden… Full Review

Glenn Willumson’s Iron Muse: Photographing the Transcontinental Railroad begins with a discussion of a photograph by Andrew Joseph Russell titled East and West Shaking Hands at Laying Last Rail (no. 227) (1869), also known as Meeting of the Rails, Promontory, Utah, 1869. The photograph features workers and executives from the Central Pacific Railroad and the Union Pacific Railroad celebrating the completion of the transcontinental line. Willumson starts by analyzing how Russell’s photograph is often reproduced as historical illustration, but its original context is rarely considered. To read the image as symbolic of technological superiority and the triumph of national… Full Review

There is a kind of fatigue in recent literature on photography. The ritual of declaring a ubiquitous abundance of photographic images, both historical and contemporary, is usually accompanied by a compulsion to address this situation and a requirement to analyze them. But how, in what framework, and to what ends? Understanding photography as a journey, as a set of “itinerant languages,” is one way to respond to this challenge. The Itinerant Languages of Photography, edited by Eduardo Cadava and Gabriela Nouzeilles, offers itself as the product of a double voyage of conferences and workshops in different locations… Full Review

Selfies, Instagram feeds, photo tagging: whatever value we may have once placed on the privacy of our photographs seems gone forever. The incorporation of digital cameras into cell phones has created this condition, launching us into a post-camera, post-print era where we press the button and a messaging service does the rest. The “rest” is to render instantly our private moments into public documents that can be neither reversed nor regulated. As many critics of new media have proclaimed, it is the end of photography as we once practiced it and the end of privacy as we once felt it… Full Review

Evolutionary approaches positing seamless and irreversible transitions from one medium to another continue to exert a significant hold over the history of art. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the study of nineteenth-century printed images, a field still under the powerful sway of Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Photography and film are held to triumph not only over painting, with its aura of uniqueness, but even over the reproductive techniques that preceded them. Burin engraving, it seems, was eclipsed by the first stirrings of technological modernity, while lithography was but a fleeting… Full Review

It is strangely difficult to consider what is meant by street photography, both for those who write about it and for the photographers for whom the street is their location and, to varying degrees, their subject. This is due in large part to the remarkable success of a genre that is most often championed through reference to its so-called “greats”—photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Harry Callahan, and Garry Winogrand—and, more tellingly still, through a familiarity and popularity that has seen it become the stock and trade of photography blogs and image-sharing sites. Much of this popularity is predicated on a… Full Review

Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin’s Holy Bible takes the form of a King James facsimile, complete with tissuey paper and gilt edges. Opening the book reveals photographs printed as if pasted over the text, with evocative scriptural phrases underlined in red. A crimson pamphlet in the back bears the essay “Divine Violence” by philosopher Adi Ophir, which argues that the biblical God regulated humanity through catastrophic violence, and that with the rise of law and the nation state, this power shifted to the human realm. This very human condition is manifested in the compelling documentary photographs, chosen by the artists… Full Review