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John Dunkley: Neither Day nor Night, curated by Diana Nawi, then associate curator at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, and assisted by the Jamaican independent curator Nicole Smythe-Johnson, introduced to US audiences the significant and expansive oeuvre of John Dunkley, a seminal figure in Jamaican art history. A self-taught artist, Dunkley worked in Central America and Cuba, returning to establish himself as a barber in downtown Kingston in the 1930s and 1940s while producing a remarkable body of work. This landmark exhibition was the most comprehensive presentation of his painting and sculpture outside of Jamaica and in museum space… Full Review

Phoebe Wolfskill’s Archibald Motley Jr. and Racial Reinvention: The Old Negro in New Negro Art offers a compelling account of the artistic difficulties inherent in the task of creating innovative models of racialized representation within a culture saturated with racist stereotypes. She approaches this topic through the work of one of the New Negro era’s most celebrated yet highly elusive artists, Archibald Motley Jr. As a Creole Catholic whose family moved from New Orleans to Chicago prior to the Great Migration, Motley’s personal history registers ever so subtle differences from the more dominant narratives of African American history in the… Full Review

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

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

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

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