Browse Recent Book Reviews

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

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

A growing body of scholarship has recently spotlighted modernist architecture in Southeast Asian cities at midcentury, a period marked by decolonization, rapid urbanization, and export-oriented industrialization. The transnational regime of urban renewal dramatically reshaped the built environment, often removing slums and displacing urban poor people from central districts across Asia. Amidst these sweeping changes, architects and planners embraced modernism as a tool for social transformation in newly independent nations, adapting its language to local contexts through innovative experimentation. Everyday Modernism: Architecture and Society in Singapore, coauthored by Jiat-Hwee Chang, Justin Zhuang, and Darren Soh, extends this important scholarship by… Full Review

Paula Modersohn-Becker: I am Me was the first American retrospective of the artist and as such, marked Modersohn-Becker’s ascending renown on this side of the Atlantic. Beyond dutiful historical redress, the exhibition’s curators, Jill Lloyd-Peppiatt and Jay Clarke, tapped into the momentum of a triumphalist apotheosis. At the Neue Galerie, across rooms dedicated to facets such as the nude, landscape, or works on paper (the drawings alone were worth the price of admission), the presentation followed a roughly chronological rhythm that, as nearly all treatments of Modersohn-Becker have, hew committedly to the artist’s biography. Quotations from her diaries and correspondence… Full Review

Tastemakers, Collectors and Patrons: Collecting American Art in the Long Nineteenth Century is an ambitious undertaking: a collection of a dozen contributions, including the introduction. Best described as a collection of case studies with each essay dedicated to a single collector or coherent group of collectors, this volume stands out for the ways in which it does not engage in much conjecture about why a person made a particular artistic decision. Often books dedicated to the history of collecting art in the United States—whether early contributions like Aline Saarien’s The Proud Possessors (1958) and Lilian B. Miller’s Patrons and Patriotism … Full Review

Editor’s Note: Following author Sarah Lewis’s decision to decapitalize the word "black,” this review retains the lowercase when referring to the racial category/ethnic group.                                                                  ********** In A Companion to American Art, published by Blackwell in 2015, I surveyed how scholars of American art had been approaching the critical study of race and visual representation since the late twentieth century. At the time, those approaches included either foregrounding or decentering race in interpretations of the work of black artists; speaking about race in relation to a broader range of (especially white-produced) artistic production; and even imagining “post-racial” art and art… Full Review