Recently Published Reviews

Since its acquisition by the Freer Gallery of Art in 2009, the tea leaf storage jar known as “Chigusa” (Thousand Grasses) has generated much discussion and scholarship, including two exhibitions (Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, 2014, and Princeton University Art Museum, 2014­­–15), a symposium, two workshops, and two books. The present volume results from the symposium and workshops. While the earlier book, Chigusa and the Art of Tea (2014), also edited by Louise Allison Cort and Andrew M. Watsky, is made up of short essays that focus primarily on the object itself, Around Chigusa takes a different approach. The essays create… Full Review

Presented in Paris in 1739, Jacques de Vaucanson’s fabricated duck, one of the most renowned examples of an automaton, could not only flap its wings and move its beak but also eat and excrete. Later discovered to have been pre-stuffed with fake waste, it indulged the Enlightenment desire for engineered imitations that modeled the inner workings of living forms. Voltaire declared that the shitting bird was the only reminder of the glory of France. The history of automata in the early modern period often accentuates the writings of René Descartes and sets forth how anatomists, theologians, and social theorists sought… Full Review

There should be some irony in the fact that in much of the English-speaking world this past year’s run of major art museum exhibitions commemorating the centenary of the 1917 Russian Revolution exceeded that honoring the quincentennial of the 1517 Protestant Reformation. Why the god that failed rather than the one that won? That the revolution tended toward iconogenesis and the reformation toward iconoclasm is not insignificant, neither is the fact, as the Russian exhibitions have been quick to remind us, that the old revolutionary dream of freedom, equality, and reason still gurgles in the deeper recesses of many of… Full Review

Italy, a relatively recently unified country, is often described as a patchwork of idiosyncratic regions. Even to this day, the food, customs, dialects, architecture, and terrain shift dramatically between neighboring villages, cities, and regions, Italians themselves proclaiming “campanilismo,” a competitive pride in their birthplace. By focusing on one particular region, Linda Safran gains a valuable insight into how one such distinctive identity emerged and developed in the Middle Ages. Some background to the region is essential for fully appreciating Safran’s study. The area known as Salento forms part of the present-day administrative region of Apulia: essentially the heel of the… Full Review

Ellen Tani’s Second Sight: The Paradox of Vision in Contemporary Art at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art was a striking exhibition that brought together a diverse array of artworks engaging issues of visibility and invisibility in poetic and literal ways. Works by Robert Morris, Bill Anastasi, Richard Serra, Félix González-Torres, Glenn Ligon, Lorna Simpson, Nyeema Morgan, and Shaun Leonardo (to name just some of the contemporary artists of various generations in the show) “problematiz[e] the deeply interwoven history of vision . . . knowledge,” and power (1). Tani showed new aspects of these creators’ oeuvres, foregrounding the tactile and… Full Review

Ezra Shales’s The Shape of Craft derives its name as a pointed homage to George Kubler’s influential treatise, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (1962). Though he was an eminent Mesoamericanist, Kubler’s book had unusual reach and scope and was widely admired by modernists and practicing artists alike, including his former students at Yale, Sheila Hicks and Richard Serra. Clearly the work of an adroit and poetic storyteller, Shales’s book seeks to extend the lineage and framework for Kubler’s rejection of the art historical masterwork, thereby reordering the cultural hierarchy in favor of humanity’s humble origins… Full Review

At 3:15 a.m. in the early morning of July 23, 1967, members of the vice squad of the Detroit police department raided the second-floor apartment located at 9125 Twelfth Street. This after-hours drinking parlor, or “blind pig,” was a well-known establishment to patrons and police alike. As a familiar watering hole, the site served its black middle-class patrons when other segregated spaces in downtown Detroit would not, yet its illicit status provoked many raids, including nine in the preceding twelve months. While previous incidents may have yielded fines, minor arrests, or increased bribery dues, on this muggy July morning, the… Full Review

Cult of the Machine: Precisionism and American Art is one of the year’s major exhibitions. It was organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco to be shown at the de Young Museum before traveling to the Dallas Museum of Art. The exhibition takes a new look at the American painters who, in the years after World War I, developed an art expressive of American modern life by making use of the flattened, geometric, simplified forms of European modernism. Cult of the Machine places Precisionism against a wide variety of art forms; the 126 works shown in San Francisco… Full Review

At the independent museum 516 Arts in downtown Albuquerque, an exhibition looks at Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria through themes of climate change, global weather patterns, colonial essentialism, Caribbean commodification, nationalism, Afro-Caribbean identity, bankruptcy, and local resiliency on the unincorporated US territory. Puerto Rico: Defying Darkness collects paintings, installations, videos, photographs, and multimedia works by sixteen Puerto Rican artists from the island and locations across the US mainland, including Albuquerque. Curator Josie Lopez uses Naomi Klein’s book The Battle for Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes on the Disaster Capitalists as a frame for the exhibition, illustrating the tension between outside corporate… Full Review

Patricia J. Fay’s book, Creole Clay: Heritage Ceramics in the Contemporary Caribbean, fills a void in the broad and diverse history of world ceramics. She does this by focusing our attention on an area of the world generally thought of as a vacation destination instead of a region rich in culture with complicated histories of colonialism, the African diaspora, slavery, hard-won independence, culture, and art, specifically ceramics. Fay deftly weaves the history of this region with the production of utilitarian objects. Her exploration of traditional techniques, raw materials, and the living potters who continue to create traditional ware, against the… Full Review

The study of the role of dress in ancient societies has seen a boom in recent years, absorbing new techniques in archaeology and approaches from “new dress history,” cultural studies, and theories of the body. Mireille Lee’s previous work has already been influential in putting Greek dress on the agenda, and this current volume offers new insights into dress as a communicative medium as well as synthesizing scholarship across a number of related subfields (gender, identity, ethnicity, sexuality, status, class, etc.). By taking Greek conceptions of the body as her starting point, Lee structures the volume by applying the layers… Full Review

This compact edition of David Adjaye’s exploration of Africa brings together in one volume the fruits of his eleven-year-long project to visit and visually document the capitals of the continent’s fifty-four countries. The front cover image of Adjaye, Africa, Architecture: A Photographic Survey of Metropolitan Architecture serves as a key to the intellectual and conceptual approach of the book: a map of Africa’s six climatic zones. This map, credited to his architectural practice Adjaye Associates, is referred to as both a terrain and political map. This captures well the essence of his approach and investigation, namely, the rich and complex… Full Review

This collection of essays has attracted little attention since its publication in 2014, an oversight that should be remedied. Through nineteen essays and nine photo essays edited by D. Medina Lasansky, The Renaissance: Revised, Expanded, Unexpurgated places the early modern past and the postmodern present in dialogue with one another and examines the ways in which the Renaissance has been appropriated and received in Anglo-American popular culture. As Lasansky notes in the introduction, the Renaissance has never been more popular: from the video game Assassin’s Creed to Botticelli Olive Oil and The Da Vinci Code to the various televised incarnations… Full Review

The title of Figuring History, an exhibition of twenty-six large-scale works by Robert Colescott (1925–2009), Kerry James Marshall (b. 1955), and Mickalene Thomas (b. 1971), signals at least two of the show’s significant themes. Both terms have double meanings. “History” refers to people and events of the past as well as to the history of art. “Figuring” indicates both the representations of the human figure and the artists’ attempts to “puzzle out the place and meaning of those figures” (39) in historical and art historical narratives. Employing different strategies, all three artists grapple with figures in history and histories… Full Review

Noah Purifoy: Junk Dada takes an in-depth look at the artistic and biographical journey of the under-recognized African American artist and activist, Noah Purifoy (1917–2004) and his large-scale installation and home environment, the Joshua Tree Outdoor Museum (1989–2004). This lush catalogue, richly illustrated with eighty photographs by Fredrik Nilsen, features insightful essays by Yael Lipschutz, art critic and archivist of the Noah Purifoy Foundation in Joshua Tree, California; Lowery Stokes Sims, curator emerita of the Museum of Art and Design, New York City, and former executive director of the Studio Museum in Harlem; and Kristine McKenna, the Los Angeles–based art… Full Review