Browse Recent Book Reviews

Sarah M. Guérin’s French Gothic Ivories is the first major monograph on this topic since the seminal three-volume study by Raymond Koechlin, Les ivoires gothiques français (Picard, 1924). Guérin’s book is narrower in scope, focusing on religious ivory carvings produced in Northern France and Paris between ca.1230 and ca.1330, but it is much broader in its approach. It draws on a variety of historical disciplines—social and economic history, the history of liturgy, the history of theology and spirituality, the history of medicine, and literary history—to offer a new interpretation of the rise and expansion of Gothic ivory sculpture in its… Full Review

In the pantheon of Californian photography, the prints of Group f.64 occupy a special place: peppers, cabbage, and callas mingle, their abstract shapes testifying to the aesthetic potential of photography. Despite being created in the early 1930s—at the height of the Depression—the group’s crisp images of vegetal matter (and the occasional portrait) have long been denied political agency. Instead, members of f.64, including Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, and Konsuelo Canaga, were hailed as a vanguard collective that brought about the long-desired shift from painterly Pictorialism to straight photography. Adhering to the technical standards of their label—aperture setting f.64… Full Review

Setting out to accomplish the important work of historicizing—and in historicizing, theorizing—contemporary art in Southeast Asia, Iola Lenzi’s Power, Politics and the Street: Contemporary Art in Southeast Asia after 1970 is an ambitious attempt to weave together the art and history of the expansive and often unwieldy region. Power, Politics and the Street surveys five decades’ worth of artistic practice, from the 1970s to the 2020s, in Vietnam, Indonesia, Singapore, the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, and Myanmar, and historicizes it as “contemporary art in Southeast Asia.” In this sense, the book carries out an interwoven study: the historicization of contemporary… Full Review

In Grime, Glitter, and Glass: The Body and the Sonic in Contemporary Black Art, Nikki A. Greene offers a compelling contribution to the growing sonic turn in contemporary art and visual studies. This turn, emerging over the past two decades, reflects an increasing engagement with sound as both a creative medium and a critical framework for thinking through culture, history, identity, and representation. At the time of writing, I note Christine Sun Kim’s recent survey at the Whitney Museum of American Art; Jennie C. Jones’s minimalist stringed sculptures on the Metropolitan Museum of Art rooftop; Torkwase Dyson… Full Review

Why did Fluxus matter? Art history has found the question difficult to answer. Footnote to John Cage (arguably), prelude to conceptual and performance art (arguably), finishing school for latterly famous stars (Joseph Beuys, Nam June Paik), the movement had the bad fortune of slotting into a cavalcade of sixties neo-avant-gardes that would, within a few years, make its little boxes and smashed pianos look hopelessly quaint. Yet recently, a consensus has started to emerge—a surprising one. Fluxus was an imitation of midcentury business culture. More precisely, it was, briefly and dubiously, a copyright owned by George Maciunas, the protean figure… Full Review

In Performing Vulnerability: Risking Art and Life in the Burmese Diaspora, Emily L. Hue focuses on the moment when Myanmar artists leave a relatively enclosed domestic art community, by choice or force, and are ejected into a world where they must brace against forces that she terms “the humanitarian industry” (3) and “the art market” (8). Hue writes that freedom of expression “can be fleeting” in these new environments “yet artists still work in the spirit of manifesting more,” countering assumptions that freedom awaits in Global South to Global North migrations (186). She frames her impressive project through the… Full Review

In 2023, Zimbabwean-born art historian Barnabas Ticha Muvhuti became the first recipient of the ARAK Collection Art Writing Residency in Qatar, where he got to interact with the ARAK collection of modern and contemporary African art. Abbreviated as ARAK after the collector AbdulRahman Al Khelaifi, the collection is arguably the most comprehensive collection of African art in the Middle East. The ARAK Collection features more than five thousand artworks by over three hundred fifty artists from countries south of the Sahara and is currently located in Doha. Chronicles of the Road: Five Nations, Five Artists is the culmination of the… Full Review

There are many intersecting contemporary art worlds. We are prone to miss some of the most vital aesthetic, cultural, and political functions of artists and their work when we train our eyes exclusively on the glittering circuit of global biennials and fairs. Here, the recontextualization of “outsiders” among the ranks of blue-chip artists, curators, and critics often eclipses the efficacy of art’s place-based affiliations. Eugenia Kisin’s book, Aesthetics of Repair: Indigenous Art and the Form of Reconciliation, builds a compelling picture of a globally networked regional Indigenous art world from within. The Northwest Coast of her study is long… Full Review

Within the last decade, an influential generation of Black American women artists who came of age in the 1960s has received long overdue recognition in major museums across the United States. Retrospectives of Betye Saar (2015), Howardena Pindell (2018), Emma Amos (2021), Faith Ringgold (2022), and Elizabeth Catlett (2024), as well as the groundbreaking show We Wanted A Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85 (2017), have brought scholarly and popular attention to a cohort of artists whose legacy endures in modern and contemporary art of the US. The spotlight on this generation continues to shine with Vivian Browne: My Kind of… Full Review

Museum exhibitions on the material and visual culture of the Crusades may offer accessible means to engage with the complexities of medieval Europe’s interactions around the Mediterranean. By presenting objects and narratives from the Crusading era, exhibitions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Jerusalem 1000–1400: Every People Under Heaven (2016–17) bridge scholarly research and public understanding, making a distant and contested geography materially and imaginatively tangible. They reveal the religious, political, and artistic forces that shaped the Crusades while inviting reflection on how European perceptions of the Holy Land were constructed and preserved. Through such curation, these exhibitions demonstrate… Full Review