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The contributors to the exhibition catalogue Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video agree: a mid-career retrospective of Weems’s work has been long deserved. Henry Louis Gates Jr. notes in the book’s foreword that Weems is best known as a visual and verbal rhetorician, a narrator of history, and one who uses photography and video to ask hard questions about identity and American culture. These aspects of Weems’s work provide the book’s contributors with an analytical foundation from which to explore the African American artist’s varied practice. Consequently, editor Kathryn E. Delmez and authors Gates, Franklin Sirmans, Robert… Full Review

Scramble for the Past: A Story of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, 1753–1914 and Ottoman Painting: Reflections of Western Art from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic are timely additions to a flourishing discourse on the instruments of modernity within the larger history of Ottoman visual culture. In a tightly edited and richly illustrated volume of sixteen essays, Scramble for the Past situates the practice of archaeology in the empire as a continual tug-of-war played out in global and local arenas of politics, science, and culture. The essays destabilize prevailing hegemonic narratives to make space for and locate Ottoman… Full Review

The Hakuhō period (ca. 650–ca. 710) has tended to be treated as a time of transition overshadowed by its preceding Asuka and succeeding Nara periods; indeed, its time span and even existence independent of the Asuka and Nara are controversial. Nevertheless, the corpus of small gilt-bronze Buddhist sculpture, a genre of art pieces characteristic of this era, shows an extremely rich variety in style. Donald F. McCallum’s Hakuhō Sculpture is the first book-length publication exclusively devoted to gilt-bronze Buddhist sculpture from the Hakuhō period. McCallum examines the stylistic evolution of Hakuhō sculpture and reassesses its artistic achievement; he argues that… Full Review

Emanuel Mayer’s ambitious The Ancient Middle Classes: Urban Life and Aesthetics in the Roman Empire, 100 BCE–250 CE is divided into two distinct methodological parts. The first (chapters 1–3) is a synthesis of significant trends in the economic history of the Roman imperial period that emphasizes the abundant presence of a prosperous mercantile class across the Roman Empire. Adopting Max Weber’s definition of the middle class as a well-defined group that “shared cultural traits as well as economic opportunities” (18), Mayer proceeds to collect a wealth of archaeological evidence to demonstrate that ancient cities were dominated by production-oriented commercial classes… Full Review

There is no other way of making sensuous man rational except by first making him aesthetic. (Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Twenty-third Letter) In 2002, Jacques Rancière published an essay in the New Left Review discussing Schiller’s famous fifteenth letter from On the Aesthetic Education of Man (Jacques Rancière, “The Aesthetic Revolution and Its Outcomes,” New Left Review 14 [March/April 2002]: 133–51). Written in 1795, just after the French Revolution had turned to Terror, Schiller tried to resolve the discrepancy between nature and cultural refinement, positing that the human need to play can bridge… Full Review

The Florentine Codex, also known as the Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España (1576–77), is unrivaled in its centrality to an understanding of the contact period of central Mexico. Although it has been amply appreciated and studied since the late nineteenth century, its ongoing ethnographic, linguistic, and historical utility cannot be overstated. The Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún spearheaded the encyclopedic colonial project in collaboration with a team of indigenous scribes and painters. His final edition has a richly laden content recorded in three modes: Spanish, Nahuatl (the Aztec language), and an extraordinary array of images that constitute a… Full Review

At major Maya cities of the eighth century, surfaces of buildings and monuments undulated with images of nobles performing ritual gestures, often amid cosmological frameworks. Springing feathers and bulging ornaments patterned the surfaces, invading the blocks of hieroglyphic texts that framed them. These complex visual phenomena were given a degree of consistency in two principal ways. Maya artist-scribes expressed the semantic congruence between art and writing with an aesthetic focus on calligraphic line that distinguished Maya art and architecture from that of other contemporary Mesoamerican societies (Adam Herring, Art and Writing in the Maya Cities, A.D. 600–800: A Poetics of… Full Review

Monumental stone sculpture, a ubiquitous art form throughout Mesoamerica, is among the most distinctive material features in various Pre-Columbian cultures. Unsurprisingly, stone monuments have traditionally received considerable attention from Mesoamerican scholars in a variety of disciplines. Despite this privileged position in Mesoamerican cultural history, few previous studies have tackled issues related to the function and meaning of monumental stone sculpture in the critical Preclassic period, a time of dramatic social and political transformation, and even fewer have attempted to link the art-historical study of formal transitions in sculptural programs to the anthropological consideration of sociopolitical processes. In Sculpture and… Full Review

Mughal painting is no stranger to the museum gallery, or to the exhibition catalogue. Persian Miniature Painting (London: Oxford University Press, 1933), the publication that followed the seminal 1931 exhibition of Persianate art held at Burlington House, London, featured entries for paintings by the sixteenth-century Mughal masters ‘Abd al-Samad and Mir Sayyid ‘Ali, as well as for two folios from the large-scale Hamzanama (Book of Hamza) manuscript produced for Emperor Akbar (r. 1556–1605). Mughal painting really came into its own decades later, thanks in large part to The Grand Mogul: Imperial Painting in India: 1600–1660 (Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine… Full Review

Camera Constructs is a brimful compendium packed with a rich variety of relational investigations into photography, architecture, and urban space. The book enters a field that has grown considerably since the mid-1980s, when architectural historians heeded Marshall McLuhan’s (and other media theorists’) dictums and began to study architecture and its media, and architecture as medium, with a new seriousness. From early groundbreaking studies to more recent focused treatments, the media content of architecture has been laid bare in written text; Alison and Peter Smithson, neo-avant-garde groups like Archigram and Superstudio, and a range of postmodern architects laid similar cards on… Full Review