Browse Recent Book Reviews

What constitutes Korean photography? How do photographs of and in Korea shape national identity? Or perhaps more accurately, how are photography and the nation mutually constituted? And how might Korean photography intervene in the history of photography itself? The historiography of Korean photography brings forth a set of methodological issues that continue to shape the field of Korean art history at large. Demanding the construction of “Koreanness” in which a photograph must demonstrate its unique national and cultural authenticity, Korean photography is compartmentalized and perceived as a peripheral modernity that serves or catches up to Euro-American modernity. Two recent works… Full Review

In September 1934, the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), announced that it was staging The Making of a Museum Publication, an exhibition that displayed the entire production process of its own publications, step by step. From manuscript through to multiply-reproduced object, typeset and laid-out, printed and bound, the MoMA show not only reinforced the critical role of printed matter as a medium for display in a modern art museum but also ushered in a heightened sense of self-reflexivity in relation to the catalog as an object of art-historiographical attention. In the subsequent ninety years, the question… Full Review

Southeast Asia is a region of ambiguity and complexity. Existing countries in the region went through different historical transformations before coming into being with diverse linguistic heritages. There is no unified lingua franca. Although—on the surface—there is geopolitical unity (such as through ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations), art practitioners often struggle to establish cross-cultural understanding because of a lack of resources and knowledge about their neighboring countries. The Modern in Southeast Asian Art: A Reader is an attempt to establish such common ground. With the support of National Gallery Singapore, and Nanyang Technological University, Centre of… Full Review

The Art of Remembering: Essays on African American Art and History is a collection of essays written by Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw that address African American artists working in the United States from the end of the eighteenth century to today. Many of the essays are revised and expanded from previously published works and taken together demonstrate both the breadth and focus of Shaw’s scholarly and curatorial work over a twenty-year period: to challenge the discipline of art history for its exclusions, to grapple with the imperatives of history and representation in Black aesthetic practices, and to call for critical engagement… Full Review

In their heyday in the second half of the twentieth century, museum catalogs of permanent collections of art from the ancient Americas fulfilled an indispensable role recording the appearances, whereabouts, and growing knowledge of objects in a then-nascent field. At the same time, they frequently aspired to portray a newly amassed collection as “encyclopedic” and posit its significance. Such catalogs—for example, Lee Parson’s Pre-Columbian Art: The Morton D. May and The Saint Louis Art Museum Collections, published in 1980—regularly commemorated major acquisitions from private collections and, as things of beauty themselves, were typically gifted to potential donors to solicit future… Full Review

Hidden in Plain Sight: Concealing Enslavement in American Visual Culture joins two trends broadening art history’s scope: exposing racial ideologies and analyzing popular art. While others have focused on antislavery imagery, Stephens opens new pathways by illuminating art that supported slavery in the United States, gaining access to unseen works, and researching manuscripts to understand the artists and their clients. For art historians, the book offers greater context for interpreting Southern art; for historians of slavery, it offers visual analysis often missing from studies of political culture. It provides a lay of the land and establishes key waypoints. At the… Full Review

This volume, L’iconographie du Bestiaire divin de Guillaume le clerc de Normandie, by Rémy Cordonnier provides an excellent introduction to the Divine Bestiary (Bestiaire divin, ca. 1210–11)) by Guillaume le clerc of Normandy, through the presentation of the complex textual tradition and an introduction of what is known of the author and the context. In his text, Guillaume explains that he translated Latin prose into French verse. Though originally from Normandy, Guillaume lived in England and was married with children. Working for patrons in the West Midlands, he wrote poetry, moral allegories, and exempla. The Bestiaire divin … Full Review

For anyone concerned with the Middle Ages (and beyond), Jerusalem represents a challenge and an almost inexhaustible source of inspiration. For centuries, the holy city has presented itself to the observer as a liminal space in which the symbolic, legendary, allegorical, and metaphorical dimensions are inextricably superimposed on perceptible reality and tend to overshadow it, to such an extent that any distinction proves useless and even senseless. If there is one constant in the history of Jerusalem, it is its ability to bewilder, puzzle, and thrill its observers, whether they be devout pilgrims of the times past or scholars trying… Full Review

Death’s Futurity: The Visual Life of Black Power highlights visual culture as a tool of anticapitalist and antiracist revolutionary struggle, and is a key methodological guide for those interested in the idea of art history after Black studies. Analyzing the lens-based and print media authored by the Black Panther Party (BPP) that embodied a Black radical aesthetic in the years 1969–1971, Sampada Aranke makes a forceful and convincing argument about how and why “the visual life of Black Power is activated through Black radical death” (4). The book explores a historic condition that has become more acute in… Full Review

Matthew Rarey’s Insignificant Things: Amulets and the Art of Survival in the Early Black Atlantic is the latest addition to scholarship on the knowledge produced by African individuals as they skillfully navigated the violent whims of enslavement and racial capitalism. Spanning the fourteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, Insignificant Things tracks an evolving, transatlantic discourse around bolsa de mandinga (translated literally as “mandinga pouch”): amulets with diverse materials contained within a fabric or leather pouch that were used for luck, love, and protection from personal violence. Across the Lusophone Atlantic, bolsas were employed ritualistically by many early modern subjects, but… Full Review