Recently Published Reviews

In August 2017, as white supremacists gathered in Charlottesville for the Unite the Right rally, a statue of Thomas Jefferson by the Jewish sculptor Moses Jacob Ezekiel (1844–1917) at the University of Virginia became an unlikely focal point as the crowds led chants including “Jews will not replace us.” While the immediate impact of this event was understood as a flashpoint in the racial tensions and resurgent nationalism that consumed the United States in 2020, it also exposed the antisemitism that has only intensified in the years since. In the political climate following the October 7 attacks and the subsequent… Full Review

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines active as an adjective characterized by action rather than by contemplation or speculation. My experience at Delilah Montoya: Activating Chicana Resistance began before I entered the gallery doors. Waiting in line to buy my ticket to the Albuquerque Museum of Art and History, I stumbled upon Claudia E. Zapata, curator, writer, and scholar of Chicanx Art, and their partner, Claudia Chapa, an award-winning opera singer. After introducing myself, they invited me to join their tour with Delilah Montoya. During our time with the artist, we found ourselves having to share her with fans, curious museum patrons… Full Review

Given the mongrel status of illustration—in practice, a fusion of image, text, and type—illustrated printed matter can prove daunting to critics and historians. Determinations of authorship, creative intent, and influence are often difficult, if not impossible, to establish. Perhaps for this reason, conventional accounts of the history of illustration have emphasized pictorial contributions to books and periodicals from the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Such materials are better preserved, and their contributors likelier to have been documented, than less literary, more ephemeral forms of print culture. Theresa Leininger-Miller and Kenneth Hartvigsen argue that contemporary surveyors of the field, whose coverage… Full Review

Books concerning disability are often, out of necessity, polemical. They point out physical and social obstacles encountered daily by those with disabilities to promote understanding and improve accessibility. In this regard, Amanda Cachia’s The Agency of Access: Contemporary Disability Art & Institutional Critique is no exception. Considering herself a “crip curator” and “advocate,” Cachia points out flaws in contemporary attempts to address accessibility in museums and galleries. Were it to end here, this would be an admirable undertaking and significant contribution to the field. Cachia’s intention, however, is to move beyond practical access to consider more expansive ways of thinking… Full Review

The Hereford Map, a large world map or mappamundi made for Hereford Cathedral shortly after 1300, is a dense network of over five hundred vignettes that depict historical and sacred sites, scenes, figures, flora, and fauna. A nearly inexhaustible bounty of iconography, both familiar and abstruse, it has invited and continues to stimulate many readings. To an already rich historiography can now be added the distinctive approach of Cartographies of Exclusion: Anti-Semitic Mapping in Medieval England, in which Asa Simon Mittman examines how the dehumanized depictions of Jews on the Hereford map and other contemporary English world maps evince the… Full Review

Criticism Without Authority: Gene Swenson’s and Jill Johnston’s Queer Practices is a book about “things that are not sure about what they are,” its author tells us in the opening line. The things in question are the writings of critic-authors Gene Swenson and Jill Johnston, through which Jennifer Sichel reconstructs a picture of the queer practices that shaped the avant-garde in New York City between the 1960s and the early 1970s. Swenson’s and Johnston’s work is unstable, failing the categories of both “criticism” and “art,” and thus demanding a counterstrategy to contend with their unmanageability. This monograph, then, practices art… Full Review

In After Caliban: Caribbean Art in a Global Imaginary, Erica Moiah James provides an insightful and timely contribution to contemporary art historical studies by arguing for an expanded dimensionality to our understanding of Caribbean creative modes that shatters narrow geographic and national delimiters. The book’s title refers to the character from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which, as James outlines in her introduction, has served as a tired trope to describe people of the Caribbean and a metaphor for the power relationship between colonizer and colonized as embodied by Caliban’s relationship to Prospero. As James argues, this is an outmoded, oversimplified, and… Full Review

The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts’ iteration of Frida: Beyond the Myth, which originated at the Dallas Museum of Art, offered a compelling look at several key late works by Frida Kahlo. Works such as Still Life (Living Nature/Naturaleza Viva, 1952), Still Life with Parrot and Flag (1951), and Xibalba-Alado-Xólotl (ca. 1950) depict landscapes, assemblages of fruit, and even her pet dog exploding with a vivid animacy that calls for a rethinking of Kahlo beyond the typical biographical focus reserved for her. According to the exhibition organizers, Frida: Beyond the Myth is an attempt to get beyond… Full Review

Plaudits go to The Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas for presenting East of the Pacific: Making Histories of Asian American Art, an exhibition organized by the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University in California. Showcasing Asian American artists long neglected, overlooked, and summarily excluded from the annals of art history expands the museum-going public’s understanding of American art. The curatorial objective was to look at American art from a new perspective, one based on the contributions of immigrants who crossed the Pacific, instead of the prevailing art historical narratives that originate from Atlantic shores. Wall… Full Review

Over the past twenty years, definitive forms of relating, theories of relationality, and tribal relational frameworks have become touchstones for much of the scholarly work within Native American and Indigenous Studies. As the field has grown, so has the need to include theories and praxis around the metaphysical, cosmological, and speculative realms. Joseph M. Pierce provides a needed shift toward relational analysis of visual culture by drawing interdisciplinary connections across many fields. Pierce grounds analyses in the speculative to demonstrate Indigenous life not as a distant subject to be analyzed objectively, but as a means to draw relational care among… Full Review

In their landmark 2012 article Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang issued a warning to scholars across the humanities: invoking “decolonization” as a flexible metaphor for progressive intellectual reform risks draining the term of its demanding content. For Tuck and Yang, decolonization refers concretely to the repatriation of Indigenous land and life, and they argue that critical methodologies that decenter settler perspectives, however well-intentioned, may ultimately pursue objectives incommensurable with decolonization properly understood. It is against this intellectual backdrop that Is Byzantine Studies a Colonialist Discipline?: Toward a Critical Historiography, edited by Benjamin… Full Review

Speculative Light: The Arts of Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin is a welcome and timely anthology constituting the fruits of a three-day symposium held at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville in 2020, reflective of up-to-date research and analyses of the interconnected lives, art, and friendship between the painter Beauford Delaney and the famed writer James Baldwin. The symposium was timed to coincide with the exhibition Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin: Through the Unusual Door, curated by Stephen C. Wicks, one of several contributors to the volume. Before opening Speculative Light for assessment, I assumed that the essays would… Full Review

In The Art of Terrestrial Diagrams in Early China, Michelle H. Wang scrutinizes the earliest surviving corpus of Chinese maps, or terrestrial diagrams (ditu), excavated from fourth- to second-century BCE tomb sites including Zhongshan King Cuo’s mausoleum, Fangmatan, and Mawangdui. Challenging how they have been read in past scholarship, Wang argues that these early diagrams were not passive visual records of topography striving toward cartographic ideals of representational accuracy, but active graphic instruments that participated in processes of worldmaking. Whether serving functions of ritual planning, bureaucratic administration, military strategy, or the structuring of the afterlife, these diagrams organized spatial knowledge… Full Review

Heather A. Badamo’s Saint George between Empires examines the visual culture of Saint George in the Eastern Mediterranean and Caucasus region, focusing on the ways the saint became a figure of cross-cultural mediation. Badamo situates her study within the complex networks of exchange that shaped representations of George across Christian and Islamic communities navigating a large region characterized by religious and political plurality. The book asks how and why Saint George’s imagery assumed particular importance for various confessional communities navigating pluralistic political and religious environments. At its core, the study addresses how images participated in practices of communal self-fashioning in… Full Review

In Lumen: The Art and Science of Light, 800–1600, astronomy and celestial light intertwine to illuminate medieval and modern artworks, focusing upon diverse ways light and material form entice and elevate the senses. Adopting a comparative approach, the catalog juxtaposes medieval manipulation, response, inspiration, and engagement with light for Christian, Islamic, and Jewish medieval artists, as well as curates a carefully selected cluster of contemporary comparanda in three discrete interventions: “Part One, Astral Light,” “Part Two, Light and Vision,” and “ Part Three, Aura and Performance.”  In “Part One,” the co-organizers define the parameters of their subject, adducing key… Full Review