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Browse Recent Book Reviews
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)…
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October 7, 2024
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…
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October 2, 2024
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”…
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September 30, 2024
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…
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September 23, 2024
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
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
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…
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September 9, 2024
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
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…
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September 4, 2024
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…
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August 28, 2024
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