CAA News Today

Susan Kart reviews Art and Risk in Ancient Yoruba: Ife History, Power, and Identity, c. 1300, Suzanne Preston Blier’s research on the “copious yet contested discourse on the history of Ife” and its thirteenth- and fourteenth-century art objects, and commends the book’s unique dovetailing of place and artistic production. Read the full review at caa.reviews.

Mallory Sharp Baskett examines Christa Clarke’s catalogue of artworks of African origin collected by Albert C. Barnes, African Art in the Barnes Foundation: The Triumph of L’Art nègre and the Harlem Renaissance. A substantial essay, along with images and analyses of all 123 objects, elucidates Barnes’s influential collecting practice and the collection’s role in African American scholarship and arts education from the early twentieth century to the present. Read the full review at caa.reviews.

Nancy Um explores Going Global in Mughal India, Sumathi Ramaswamy’s digital album, which brings together works of calligraphy, paintings, and prints from India, Ottoman Turkey, and Europe. The virtual muraqqa’, or album in the Persianate arts, successfully asserts “the important place of the globe as an integrated element in a dynamic and inclusive royal Mughal iconography.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.

Suzanne Singletary visits the exhibition Discovering the Impressionists: Paul Durand-Ruel and the New Painting at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which presents the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art dealer as “a shrewd strategist undaunted by risky ventures and largely uncharted practices” who shaped the careers of Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, and other Impressionist artists.  Read the full review at caa.reviews.

Caa.reviews publishes over 150 reviews each year. Founded in 1998, the site publishes timely scholarly and critical reviews of studies and projects in all areas and periods of art history, visual studies, and the fine arts, providing peer review for the disciplines served by the College Art Association. Publications and projects reviewed include books, articles, exhibitions, conferences, digital scholarship, and other works as appropriate. Read more reviews at caa.reviews.