Browse Recent Book Reviews

In Civil Rights Childhood: Picturing Liberation in African American Photobooks, Katharine Capshaw writes about the ways in which images enlisted African American children in the Civil Rights Movement. Her subject is photographic books—fiction and nonfiction—by black authors from the 1940s to the 1970s. The books consider, at first implicitly and later explicitly, the possibility of political agency in children (xi). In Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), Laura Wexler examines the “mammy image.” Capshaw addresses the lacuna that Wexler’s analysis produces in its “visual erasure” of black… Full Review

Aleksandra Lipińska has written an important book on Netherlandish sculpture that addresses many issues that are already of interest to historians of Netherlandish art and culture. Her topic is alabaster carving, a seemingly modest intervention until we realize that alabaster was the primary stone for all’antica sculpture in the Low Countries during the sixteenth century. It was also the material that introduced this antique manner in three-dimensional form to the region. In a way, Lipińska’s title, Moving Sculptures: Southern Netherlandish Alabasters from the 16th to 17th Centuries in Central and Northern Europe, resembles that of Michael Baxandall’s The Limewood… Full Review

Cynthia Mills’s Beyond Grief: Sculpture and Wonder in the Gilded Age Cemetery is a highly readable, engaging, and authoritative book on American memorial sculpture in the late nineteenth century. She focuses her attention on four famous monuments: Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s Adams Memorial (1891), Rock Creek Cemetery, Washington, DC; Daniel Chester French’s The Angel of Death and the Sculptor (1893), Forest Hills Cemetery, Roxbury, Massachusetts; Frank Duveneck’s (with Clement J. Barnhorn) Memorial to Elizabeth Boott Duveneck (1891), Cimitero Evangelico degli Allori (Evangelical Cemetery of the Laurels), Florence, Italy; and William Wetmore Story’s Angel of Grief (1894), Protestant Cemetery, Rome, Italy. However, the… Full Review

Barbara Mundy is well known and greatly respected for her scholarship on the Mesoamerican mapping tradition. This new book now demonstrates her deep knowledge of the Aztec capital of Mexico-Tenochtitlan both before and in the century after the Spanish conquest of Mexico. Deeply researched, insightfully conceptualized and argued, and written in an engaging style, it is a book of particular importance. Mundy explains Mexico-Tenochtitlan and early colonial Mexico City as no one has, infusing life into the dry facts of the city’s sixteenth-century history and guiding the reader to a close, insider’s view of the capital as it functioned and… Full Review

Jean-Michel Basquiat: Now’s the Time, the catalogue produced to accompany the first major exhibition of the artist’s works in Canada, takes its name from one of Basquiat’s 1985 paintings. In that Now’s the Time, white letters spelling out “NOW’S THE TIME”© and PRKR stand out against a black circle, collectively invoking a vinyl pressing of jazz legend Charlie Parker’s 1945 arrangement of the same name. The homage makes clear that Parker’s life and work mattered to Basquiat. Both were uncompromising black artists who articulated clear visions through a mastery of seemingly improvisatory aesthetics. They did so while struggling… Full Review

What is the role of an image in a ritual setting? This unflagging question in the study of religious art and visual culture has been raised again by Koichi Shinohara, a historian of East Asian Buddhism who has already produced a number of inspiring works treating the issue. Images in Asian Religions: Text and Contexts (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2004; co-edited with Phyllis Granoff) is one such work, in which he utilized a close reading of apologetic writings by the seventh-century Chinese vinaya specialist Daoxuan and his colleague Daoshi to discuss how a distinctive discourse about image worship… Full Review

Chika Okeke-Agulu’s thoroughly researched and beautifully illustrated Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth Century Nigeria significantly advances an understanding of modern African art. He considers a key time period in Nigerian art history, from the late 1950s eve of independence (Nigeria gained its independence in 1960) to roughly 1968 at the beginning of the Nigerian Civil War (1967–70). The term “postcolonial modernism,” Okeke-Agulu rightly insists, means that the artistic developments of this time cannot be disentangled from prevailing nationalist ideologies. He sees postcolonial modernism as an “international phenomenon,” and throughout the book highlights the connections of Nigerian ideas and… Full Review

In 1960, Dominique and John de Menil instituted a project to study images of persons of African descent in Western art. As Adrienne Childs and Susan Libby note in the introduction to their edited volume, Blacks and Blackness in European Art of the Long Nineteenth Century, that project, which began as a photographic archive, was initiated in response to segregation and racial discrimination in the United States. The Menil’s undertaking eventually culminated in a series of five books, republished by Harvard University Press, along with three new volumes, the last appearing in 2014 (click here for review)… Full Review

In Performative Monuments: The Rematerialisation of Public Art, Mechtild Widrich examines the relationship of embodiment, memory making, and especially documentation to the meaning of monumental, performative, and audience-oriented art in post-World War II Europe. Ranging from former Yugoslavia to Austria and a split Germany during the Cold War, Widrich expertly discusses artists from each region, including VALIE EXPORT in Vienna, Marina Abramović in the former Yugoslavia, and Joseph Beuys in Germany. Widrich’s art-historical exegesis of these artists’ works and the history of their reception leads to a sophisticated and deft unfolding of historical events alongside analyses of documents, photographs… Full Review

Time and again it is declared that photojournalism is in crisis—that neither its truth claims nor its purported humanitarianism carry much currency in today’s hyper-mediatized, post-indexical world. Critics commonly hold that our era’s wholesale mistrust in photography’s veracity and its ability to straightforwardly incite “empathy and compassion” has rendered photojournalism “fatally compromised or exhausted” (2). Indeed, in a climate where claims such as, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality” (Karl Rove), become prescriptive, and what passes for news is driven by political and market forces, conventional photojournalistic images have little purchase in terms… Full Review