Browse Recent Book Reviews

Unknowingly, many of us have likely come into contact with some of the primary products of China’s Dafen village: handmade oil paintings, which resemble Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers (1888) and other “masterworks,” that hang in hotels, restaurants, and homes, and are sold online and in souvenir shops, galleries, and chain stores around the world. Located in Shenzhen, a megacity across from Hong Kong and the People’s Republic of China’s first Special Economic Zone, Dafen has heretofore been known mostly to outsiders—if at all—through sensationalist news coverage. Winnie Won Yin Wong’s Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade not only… Full Review

The Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) has engaged the public through its online and social media presence and by producing and collaborating on exhibitions and books that showcase visual and audio materials from its collections since 2007. Much of this material is from the Earl W. and Amanda Stafford Center for African American Media Arts (CAAMA), a physical and virtual center that collects, promotes, and preserves African American visual and aural culture. The museum’s new multi-volume book series, Double Exposure, is a welcome means of sharing selections from CAAMA’s photography collection of over… Full Review

This ambitious study originated in 2007 as Mantha Zarmakoupi’s Oxford University DPhil thesis. Several years of further research have allowed her to develop her ideas and deepen her bibliographic research on the archaeology and architecture of Roman villas and the cultural life that villas framed. She aims, in brief, to examine “the ways in which Romans conceptualized the architectural design of luxurious villas in order to accommodate a life of educated leisure in the countryside” (1). In doing so she recapitulates and extends a now-familiar narrative of the ideology, architecture, and social functions of such establishments, a narrative based on… Full Review

The conviction and vitality with which Shannen L. Hill explores visual culture as an agent of change shaped by Black Consciousness (hereafter, BC) and embodied in ideas and images of its leading advocate, Stephen Biko, took me back to late 1980s South Africa when I, a bright-eyed freshman, optimistically threw myself into the student liberation movement at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. There I and others designed, printed, and carried protest posters informed by an aesthetic that Hill traces to late 1960s BC student activism. At the time I was unaware of the historical roots of this visual… Full Review

The title of Tom Nickson’s impressive and beautifully illustrated monograph, Toledo Cathedral: Building Histories in Medieval Castile, cleverly highlights the dual agenda of his ambitious study of the Spanish cathedral. As a book dedicated to a single work of architecture, it endeavors to untangle the complicated and often tacitly accepted building history of the cathedral’s construction from the early thirteenth through late fourteenth centuries. In so doing, Nickson reveals how the cathedral’s most influential patrons and clergymen also “built” its histories. These histories have been layered upon the immense cathedral, creating a sort of palimpsest that is best understood… Full Review

Textiles are key to understanding the past. From sartorial practice to divisions of labor and patterns of trade, textiles serve as historical documents that often reveal as much about the people who produced and wore them as they do about those who collected, traded, copied, or admired them. African Textiles: The Karun Thakar Collection is a step toward documenting a significant private collection of textiles that shows potential for increasing our understanding of this important object of material and visual culture. The collector, Karun Thakar, provides an introduction to the book that offers some insight into his collecting practice while… Full Review

In spring 2014, the Metropolitan Museum of Art presented a groundbreaking exhibition of early Hindu and Buddhist artworks from Southeast Asia. Aptly titled Lost Kingdoms: Hindu-Buddhist Sculpture of Early Southeast Asia, the exhibition brought together treasures from nearly thirty institutions and collections across nine different countries, many of which had never before traveled outside their country of origin. Carefully grouped, juxtaposed, and emplaced in the Metropolitan’s galleries, the artworks revealed striking similarities and intriguing departures from Indian prototypes. Examining long-distance networks, regional developments, and local adaptations, Lost Kingdoms sought new ways of understanding how, and why, Indian ideas and… Full Review

Stephen Sheehi’s The Arab Imago: A Social History of Portrait Photography, 1860–1910 focuses on the social history of indigenous photography in the Ottoman World between 1860 and 1910. The book redresses the lack of critical attention to local photography, analyzing the production, performance, exchange, circulation, and display of photography in Ottoman Egypt, Lebanon, and Palestine. Sheehi pursues in-depth research and analysis of both visual and written primary sources by local practitioners, most of whose names are known only to a small number of researchers. The book is an ambitious and theoretically challenging study, a significant and original work of social… Full Review

When the Spanish mendicant orders built the first monastery complexes of the Yucatan Peninsula on top of extant pre-Columbian towns, temples, and ceremonial centers, one of their aims was to take possession of indigenous sacred space, appropriate its inherent sacredness, and reuse it to establish the Catholic faith in the New World. In Maya Ideologies of the Sacred: The Transfiguration of Space in Colonial Yucatan, Amara Solari examines the city of Itzmal in Yucatan as an example in order to illustrate how this project was heavily influenced, even challenged, by deep-rooted Maya traditions and conceptions of space. The indigenous… Full Review

I have been carrying around Jennifer Tyburczy’s Sex Museums: The Politics and Performance of Display for months now, and have received, understandably, quite some attention for it. I have been reading it on my morning commute to work on the train, sitting in cafes and parks with it, and, most notably, have been often seen with it at work, much to the amusement of my students. Not only do people have a lot to say about the title, but the cover image furthers the book’s seductive allure. It features the dorsal view of a person in front of Gustave Courbet’s… Full Review