CAA News Today

Amanda Cachia visits Electronic Superhighway (2016–1966) at Whitechapel Gallery in London. The “ambitious exhibition” covers “fifty years of digital culture” and considers “how the world’s ceaseless flow of electronic information and unrelenting proliferation of images have come to impact contemporary art.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.

Lauran Whitworth reviews Art AIDS America, organized by the Tacoma Museum of Art and the Bronx Museum of the Arts. Aiming “to be the most comprehensive exploration of the impact of AIDS on the course of American art,” the “powerful” show is “haunted by loss and erasure but simultaneously teeming with verve and resistance.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.

Elizabeth M. Molacek discusses the Power and Pathos: Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World exhibition, curated by Jens Daehner and Kenneth Lapatin of the Getty Villa. “A feast for the eyes,” the exhibition provided “an unprecedented opportunity” to see nearly fifty objects and “succeeded in demonstrating the significance of bronze and defining the trajectory of monumental sculpture in the Hellenistic period.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.

Anna Blume reads Images Take Flight: Feather Art in Mexico and Europe, 1400–1700, edited by Alessandra Russo, Gerhard Wolf, and Diana Fane. The “scholarly and magnificent book” features thirty-three essays “that reveal how feathers, birds, and images of flight became defining signifiers within art, thinking, and history during the geographical expansion of Europe into the Americas.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.

Michael Yonan visits Wordplay: Matthias Buchinger’s Drawings from the Collection of Ricky Jay at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The artist “was born without legs or hands” and created micrography, “a technique whereby minutely drawn words create an image.” The “small but excellent” exhibition managed to “illuminate the life of a little-known historical figure” and “examine a historically significant art form.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.

Margit Thøfner reviews Art and Antiquity in the Netherlands and Britain: The Vernacular Arcadia of Franciscus Junius (1591–1677) by Thijs Weststeijn. This “well-researched, thoughtful, and timely” book argues “for the seminal role” played by Junius’s The Painting of the Ancients in Three Books “within the history of early modern Netherlandish art theory and also in the broader European tradition.”  Read the full review at caa.reviews.

Jeffrey Fraiman reviews Clare Robertson’s Rome 1600: The City and the Visual Arts under Clement VIII. It is a “comprehensive study of the plenitude of projects commissioned by various patrons” in the “tumultuous and transforming” time during the reign of Clement VIII. The publication “transports readers to Rome circa 1600” and “will surely inspire valuable new directions in research.” 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.

Peter Gena reads Records Ruins the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording by David Grubbs. In this “excellent and meticulously researched book,” Grubbs examines “several early recordings along with a number of post-Cagian minimalists and free improvisers.” The volume is “highly recommended and a must-read for anyone probing new music and recordings.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.

Eloise Quiñones Keber reviews Alessandra Russo’s The Untranslatable Image: A Mestizo History of the Arts in New Spain, 1500–1600. The author “extends and deepens her excursions into the creative and cultural dynamics of the art forms of early colonial New Spain” while advocating “their necessary place in contemporaneous Renaissance and early modern art history” in this “learned, insightful, and challenging” study. Read the full review at caa.reviews.

Sonja Drimmer examines Postcards on Parchment: The Social Lives of Medieval Books by Kathryn M. Rudy. Over the course of “three hundred riveting pages,” Rudy establishes “a new category of late medieval object, which she terms ‘parchment painting.’” The book is full of “intrepid flights of scholarship” and “like the manuscripts that it revives,” it “is prodigious with riches.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.

Gennifer Weisenfeld discusses Christine Guth’s Hokusai’s Great Wave: Biography of a Global Icon. “A landmark in multidisciplinary scholarly sophistication,” the volume “examines the long and storied history of one Japanese artwork as it has circulated around the world being imagined, reimagined, and reimaged, thereby fusing the local and global across time.” 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.

Anni Albers spooling thread (n.d.). Photo by Claude Stoller. Courtesy Western Regional Archives, State Archives of North Carolina, Asheville, NC.

Sunanda K. Sanyal visits the solo exhibition Zanele Muholi: Isibonelo/Evidence at the Brooklyn Museum. For the last decade, Zanele Muholi, “who identifies herself more as a visual activist than an artist,” has created photo and video projects to document “multiple facets of LGBT life in South Africa, focusing particularly on hate crimes against the community.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.

Holly Gore reviews Leap before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957 at the Hammer Museum. The exhibition “offers an earthbound view on this storied institution, as seen through over two hundred artworks created by students and faculty.” Ultimately, the show’s “uplifting effect is grounded in physical encounter,” and the artworks “feel ever-vital, never dusty.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.

Midori Yamamura discusses the sixth edition of The Echigo–Tsumari Art Triennale in Nīgata, Japan. “The world’s largest international exhibition,” the placed-based triennale featured “180 new works in addition to 200 preexisting projects” and impelled viewers “to rethink consumer society, urban lifestyle, and the corporate world as not necessarily happier choices.” 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.

John Hawley visits Van Dyck: The Anatomy of Portraiture at the Frick Collection. The “more than one hundred paintings, drawings, and prints” by Anthony van Dyke and his contemporaries look “exclusively at portraiture, with special attention given to the way drawings (which account for nearly half the exhibited works) highlight Van Dyke’s inimitable process as a portraitist.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.

Stephen J. Lucey reads The Apse Mosaic in Early Medieval Rome: Time, Network, and Repetition by Erik Thunø. Presenting “an alternative ‘non-diachronic’ art-historical interpretation of the Roman apse decorations from the sixth through ninth centuries,” the author “promotes the continuity of imagery as a ‘synchronic’ manifestation, which reflects a timeless ecclesiological essence.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.

Jennifer Nelson reviews Visual Acuity and the Arts of Communication in Early Modern Germany, edited by Jeffrey Chipps Smith. The essays “consider German visual culture from the late fifteenth to early eighteenth centuries by means of healthy reliance on present-day creativity and hermeneutic skill” and put “productive pressure on its period’s blind spots.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.

Amy F. Ogata discusses Marta Gutman’s A City for Children: Women, Architecture, and the Charitable Landscapes of Oakland, 1850–1950. The author “explores the long tradition of benevolent concern for the poorest children in the rapidly urbanizing context of Oakland, California,” and argues that the structures “reveal a complex history of adaptive reuse against the drama of class and racial politics.” 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.

Sarah-Neel Smith reviews Walid Raad, an exhibition and catalogue produced by the Museum of Modern Art. The museum “should be applauded for its impeccable staging of this rich exhibition,” while the volume “will undoubtedly serve as the go-to resource on the artist for years to come,” despite being “colored by a set of historiographic problems that Raad himself works over in his artistic production.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.

Mark Alan Hewitt reads Lost Mansions: Essays on the Destruction of the Country House, a book of essays edited by James Raven. The publication “takes up the subject of how England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland have dealt with the destruction of county houses during the past several decades,” noting that today’s keepers “must squarely face the reality of multiculturalism, diminishing resources, and indifferent politicians.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.

Theresa Leininger-Miller discusses the catalogue Common Wealth: Art by African Americans in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, edited by Lowery Stokes Sims. Featuring one hundred works by African American artists, all of which were acquired by the museum over the past forty years, the “large, handsome” book “is part of a trend of museums publishing and showcasing their growing collections of African American art.” 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.

Mary Manning visits Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The exhibition “presents ninety-two works that depict members of the artist’s vast social circle” and shows how Sargent’s “personal relationships and growing prestige afforded him substantial access to creative personalities who would influence his understanding of the arts.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.

Angelina Lucento reviews Hyperrealism: When Reality Becomes an Illusion, an exhibition at the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. The show illustrates how the photo-realist members of the Union of Artists of the USSR used painting “to examine the role of the technologies of reproduction and transmission on the perception of the postwar socialist body and the spaces of its existence.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.

Grace Lees-Maffei provides a summary of design history in the essay “Design History: The State of the Art.” The author sketches “the history of design history for those unfamiliar with it, including the international spread of the subject,” and focuses “on the current state of the field with reference to several key topics and work currently in progress.” 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.

Andy Campbell visits Black Sheep Feminism: The Art of Sexual Politics at the Dallas Contemporary. Consisting of artworks, mostly from the 1970s, by Joan Semmel, Anita Steckel, Betty Tompkins, and Cosey Fanni Tutti, the exhibition “unapologetically centralize[s] representations of the embodied experiences of (heterosexual) sex and eroticism.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.

Jeremy George reads At Home with the Sapa Inca: Architecture, Space, and Legacy at Chinchero by Stella Nair. “A critical addition to Andean studies,” the book discusses the Inca royal estate at Chinchero, Peru, and “examines the experiential aspects of this site in relation to indigenous ideologies of space and the built environment.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.

Jeannie McKetta discusses Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots at the Dallas Museum of Art. The exhibition spotlights an overlooked period of Pollock’s career: his “black paintings” made between 1951 and 1953. The works were negatively received at the time, but the show “contextualizes the monochromes by displaying them among a few of Pollock’s earlier paintings and experimental ink drawings.” 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.