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As the title suggests, Is Art History? Selected Writings collects a representative array of academic articles, catalog essays, lectures, and reviews by the art historian Svetlana Alpers on a variety of topics well beyond her transformative contributions to the study of seventeenth-century Dutch art. Much to the credit of this edited collection, it compellingly demonstrates how her work on Dutch topics was part of a systematic reappraisal of art historical methodology with implications for early-modern painters from Diego Velázquez and Giovanni Battista Tiepolo to Jean-Simeon Chardin, as well as modern and contemporary artists such as Bradley Walker Tomlin, Catherine Murphy… Full Review

The objects of Mesoamerican art history are often asked to carry a heavy burden. Having survived any number of inhospitable contexts—the iconoclasm that supported Spanish imperial expansion, imperfect archival preservation, conditions of exchange that left works vulnerable, and other troubles besides—artworks gain a new status in Mesoamerican art history as exemplars of tradition, interpreted as representatives that meaningfully stand in for entire classes of objects now lost simply because they are the works that are known to scholarship. But what if these objects are less emblematic than we think they are—or what if they are best suited to speak only… Full Review

The tension between Indigenous sovereignty and the US government’s propaganda machinery during the Cold War is at the heart of Jessica Horton’s Earth Diplomacy: Indigenous American Art, Ecological Crisis, and the Cold War. Exploring how Indigenous artists engaged with the international exhibition circuit, Horton argues that displays of their work functioned as sites of both cultural erasure and subversion, wherein artists mobilized Indigenous epistemologies and iconographies to assert political and ecological sovereignty. By foregrounding the interrelation between Cold War aesthetic strategies and Indigenous diplomatic practices, Horton aligns with recent scholarship working to decolonize the art history of the Cold… Full Review

Sometimes the stars align: the assignment to review Elizabeth Carmel Hamilton’s Charting the Afrofuturist Imaginary in African American Art: The Black Female Fantastic arrived shortly after I had seen Blaque Orbit, an Afrofuturist film series offered by LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) and curated by Camm Harrison. A six-hour deep dive into Afrofuturistic visions from 1992 to 2022, the lineup featured works by several Black women artists, including Cauleen Smith and Martine Syms. While reading Hamilton’s book, Smith’s video The Fullness of Time (2008) came to mind, as it features Smith wandering through New Orleans three years after Hurricane… Full Review

Up close, glass bead, wire, and thread intermesh through squiggles and circles; at times, their translucency invites nearby light and shadows, and moments of the bare wall underneath to peek through. Step back, however, and you’ll notice figures. Towards the tapestry’s top are two seated figures, one in yellow, another in maroon. Towards the middle is a larger yellow figure, with facial features outlined in black thread next to another smaller mostly forest-green colored figure, encircled in gold. Seen at various vantages, Untitled Fairy Tale (from the Graphic Novel Series), 2019–20 invites the viewer to ask: who are these figures… Full Review

Nick Mauss and Angela Miller’s Body Language: The Queer Staged Photographs of George Platt Lynes and PaJaMa looks at the work of the influential photographer George Platt Lynes and PaJaMa, a collective formed in 1937 in New York City by the American artists Paul Cadmus, and Jared and Margaret French. Following in the footsteps of David Leddick’s Intimate Companions (2000), the authors trace the artistic, emotional, and sexual entanglements that connected these close-knit figures. The book is organized into two essays. The first authored by Mauss is dedicated to Lynes, and the second by Miller looks to PaJaMa’s collaborative work… Full Review

Jordana Moore Saggese’s Heavyweight: Black Boxers and the Fight for Representation is a valuable contribution to art historical literature devoted to examining racialized violence in the United States and the role of visual images in promoting and maintaining this violence.  The focus of her book is the representation of Black heavyweight boxers in the United States in visual culture—the illustrated press, photographic portraits, cabinet cards, prints, paintings, and so forth—from 1880 through 1910. Saggese examines how these representations contributed to the shaping, policing, and fetishizing of Black masculinity. She argues that their meanings were produced through visual conventions whose roots… Full Review

Since the New Negro Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s when Alain Locke and W.E.B. Du Bois were building a discourse on Black artistic production, scholars across disciplines have grappled with defining Black art beyond the commonsense that it is art made by people who happen to be Black. Or outside the terms that hail it for its presumed “authentic testimony, resistive politics, or reparative potential” (1): What is it? What does it do? What does it look like? What is its position within the aesthetic regime?  The answers to these and related questions are wide-ranging and not definitive, as… Full Review

In her debut monograph, Land into Landscape: Art, Environment, and the Making of Modern France, Kelly Presutti examines how landscape was integral to the development of French identity in the nineteenth century. At the heart of the book lies a paradox that Presutti explores: “despite numerous claims locating both abstract nationhood and individual rights in the land, for much of the nineteenth century, it was not clear what that land looked like or even how a national landscape was meant to appear” (1). Each chapter takes up a specific landscape type—mountains, coasts, forests, wetlands—chosen because they “were the subject… Full Review

The United States Geological Survey (USGS) defines landscapes as areas critical to economic development, as they supply natural resources and other goods and services essential to human needs. Similarly, traditional geographical studies have regarded landscapes as physical and objective entities, perceiving them as an external world that can be empirically accessed and analyzed. From the perspective of extractive industries, landscapes are transformed into territories—defined areas to be utilized and exploited. Fazal Sheikh’s exhibition, Fazal Sheikh: Thirst | Exposure | In Place, emphasizes viewing and understanding landscapes through a different lens. Sheikh’s work invites us to consider landscapes… Full Review