Recently Published Reviews

How do we tell the stories of domestic violence? Most domestic violence happens behind closed doors, as does most advocacy to assist survivors. Artist Carmen Winant’s installation brings documentation of abuse and advocacy together through a reconsideration of photographs, newspaper clippings, guidebooks, and other ephemera culled from the archives of Philadelphia-based organization Women in Transition and the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence. On the first floor of the installation are several collages. In one, Moon faces Demons (2022), Winant presents a group of sixteen photographs, each centered on a faded piece of construction paper then adhered together with blue tape… Full Review

Land art is back in the limelight. On September 2, 2022, Michael Heizer publicly unveiled his colossal City (1970–2022), which comprises a mile-and-a-half-long by half-mile-wide installation of mounds and depressions made of dirt, rock, and concrete in the Nevada desert. In recent contemporary art scholarship, many have looked to histories of Land art or earthworks from the late 1960s and 1970s to think through our current environmental crises and Heizer’s City seems remarkably timed for this discussion. How informed or invested were first-generation Land artists, particularly in the American West, in ecological issues? To what degree did their monumental or… Full Review

Light and vision have been considered central to the experience of Western modernity, from the rhetoric of illumination in the European Enlightenment to visual technologies that produced new subjectivities, public and private spaces, and modes of surveillance and control. Niharika Dinkar’s Empires of Light: Vision, Visibility and Power in Colonial India not only probes the ideology and materiality of light in modern empire building, but also turns to the shadows—the dark, mysterious, and uncivilized colony that “the empire of light and reason” (1) sought to illuminate and inscribe. Drawing upon a broad range of representational practices engendered by new visual… Full Review

In There Is No Soundtrack, Ming-Yuen S. Ma contends that contemporary media art challenges understandings of image and sound that privilege visuality. This visual bias, according to Ma, appears in art history, art criticism, media theory, and more broadly throughout the humanities. Even in the field of film and media studies, which has produced dedicated treatments of cinematic sound, “visual hegemony” and “ocularcentrism” persist (2, 5). Ma offers a corrective in his series of analyses that emphasize the aural dimension of artworks by Paul D. Miller (a.k.a. DJ Spooky, That Subliminal Kid), Tanya Tagaq, Chris Marker, Trinh T. Minh-ha… Full Review

The most influential publications in early modern image theory over the last thirty years have either positioned the work of art as imagining its own completion by a beholder or described the actual responses of the beholder in front of a work. John Shearman’s Only Connect . . .  Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance (1992) was an attempt to study period notions of spectatorship and the human imagination in order to reveal artistic “messages” embedded in Italian Renaissance paintings. David Freedberg’s The Power of Images (1989) looked beyond the confines of “high art,” untangling the psychological and… Full Review

This wonderful book provides a thoroughly researched and lavishly illustrated introduction to a set of illuminated world chronicle manuscripts made in Bavaria and Austria in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. The texts transmitted through these manuscripts are generally compilations from a variety of sources, including the world chronicles of Rudolf von Ems and Jans der Enikel, the Christherre-Chronik, and others, often brought together in a compilation traditionally attributed to “Heinrich von München” (although this name refers more to a textual tradition than to an actual individual) along with a great variety of other material. Author Nina Rowe adroitly… Full Review

Rebecca Peabody’s Consuming Stories: Kara Walker and the Imagining of American Race is the first monograph solely about Kara Walker’s work since Gwendolyn Dubois Shaw’s Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker (2004). To be sure, a dizzying amount of literature exists about Kara Walker and her creative output in book chapters, journal articles, and exhibition catalogs. With this in mind, Peabody’s sustained and thematic reading of Walker’s work is welcome, vital, and necessary because she introduces new ways of understanding Walker’s work by focusing on her literary influences. Peabody’s title is apt because Walker’s stories do consume the… Full Review

Didi-Huberman and the Image by Chari Larsson is the first book-length study in English of the work of French philosopher and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman, with a focus on his theories about images. Given the fact that Didi-Huberman has written over fifty books in a career spanning four decades and that he is one of the most well-known French theorists of images, such a study is long overdue. In French, German, and Spanish art history and visual studies, Didi-Huberman’s work is an established reference point, awarded with prestigious accolades such as the Adorno Prize. That his work has never received… Full Review

Out of Breath is a critical study of the significance and politics of breathing, guided throughout by explorations of breath and air in contemporary art. A slender book of just ninety-six pages, written in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, it is as much an essay about the political implications of humanity’s dependence on a shared substrate of air, and air’s implication in global injustice and violence, as a study of art history or criticism. But by the same token, it is also an incisive example of how contemporary art can lend itself to being treated as theory or as… Full Review

The title of Shana Klein’s book, The Fruits of Empire: Art, Food and the Politics of Race in the Age of American Expansion, promises a great deal. Each part of the title could be a book in and of itself, and as the author writes “traverses many different disciplines and subject areas” In some ways, this volume succeeds and in other ways falls short. As American painted depictions of fruit ostensibly serve as the primary focus, there are too few illustrations and little in-depth discussion of these pictures. Selecting paintings of five different fruits to illustrate American expansion and… Full Review

Adrián Gorelik’s La grilla y el parque: Espacio público y cultura urbana en Buenos Aires first appeared in print nearly a quarter century ago, in 1998, but the persistence of Eurocentricity within the disciplines of art and architectural history have delayed its translation and, thus far, limited its reach to primarily Latin Americanist circles. Now, thanks to the translation efforts of Natalia Majluf, it is available in English in paperback and as a free e-book from Latin American Research Commons (LARC). The Grid and the Park: Public Space and Urban Culture in Buenos Aires, 1887–1936 is the first… Full Review

This ambitious and at times quite astonishing book aims at a radical new interpretation of the six poesie that Titian, at the height of his powers and fame, prepared for Philip II from approximately 1553–62. The six paintings of the cycle present narratives of the mythological gods, with a focus on the interaction between gods and mortals. The book is divided into three separate sections. Part I sets out the goals and background of the commission, emphasizing the dynastic ambitions of Charles V and how this is developed in earlier Habsburg imagery. Part II contains individual chapters on each of… Full Review

Author’s note: I do not italicize words in ‘ōlelo Hawai‘i (the Hawaiian language) for two reasons: doing so perpetuates the “otherness” of Indigenous languages that were nearly rendered extinct as a result of colonialism—including ‘ōlelo Hawai‘i, which was effectively banned in 1896—but also because Hawaiian and English are both official languages in the State of Hawai‘i. Hardly innocuous nomenclature, “Pacific Century” suggests a multifocal battle waged across overlapping fronts, from geopolitics to economics, ideology to culture. The phrase evokes competing sentiments, some celebratory and others apprehensive, themselves indicative of the tension between place-based exhibition making and global art spectacle. Such… Full Review

The subject of Deborah Kahn’s probing book is the way in which narration in eleventh-century France manifested social and political power in Christian kingdoms—in particular, the outward display of a saint’s life in figurative stone sculpture on one church’s exterior. The outstanding contribution of this book is its close reading of the vita of an obscure saint, Eusice, written by Letaldus of Micy (fl. ca. 990s–1020s) and printed here in Appendix I (with full transcription and facing English translation by Steven Burges with Bailey Benson). Kahn interprets the sculpted figural reliefs at Selles-sur-Cher through saintly visions and striking anti-Jewish characterizations… Full Review

In the introduction to The Pencil of Nature (1844), British inventor William Henry Fox Talbot tells the origin story of “photogenic drawing.” While honeymooning, he attempted to sketch Lake Como with the aid of a camera lucida. But his “faithless pencil” left only traces of the refracted landscape; the marks were “melancholy to behold.” As if updating Pliny’s tale of art originating with the tracing of a lover’s shadow, Talbot resolved to fix nature’s phantasmagoric images. In 1841, he patented the calotype, the first paper-based chemical photographic process. Unlike its popular French competitor, the metal-based daguerreotype, the calotype process… Full Review