CAA News Today

Claudia Hucke reads Timed Out: Art and the Transnational Caribbean by Leon Wainwright, a “demanding read” and rare piece of theoretical literature on Caribbean art. Focusing on the Anglophone Caribbean, especially Trinidad and Guyana, the book “provides a good balance between theory and insightful analyses of artworks and artists’ biographies.”  Read the full review at caa.reviews.

Beatriz E. Balanta reviews Kristine Juncker’s Afro-Cuban Religious Arts: Popular Expressions of Cultural Inheritance in Espiritismo and Santería. The volume “combines the study of material culture with the methodological tools of anthropology to trace the history of Afro-Cuban religious arts,” with a concentration on the artworks of four prominent female religious leaders. Read the full review at caa.reviews.

Shawn Digney-Peer examines Historical Perspectives on Preventive Conservation, the sixth installment in the Getty Conservation Institute’s Reading in Conservation series. Comprised of sixty-six entries divided into nine themes, “the intent of the volume is to provide a context for what is meant by ‘preventive conservation’ and to illustrate how thinking and practices have evolved.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.

Patricia Johnston takes a look at Wendy Bellion’s Citizen Spectator: Art, Illusion, and Visual Perception in Early National America. The author, focused on “Federal-period American visual culture,” demonstrates “how active looking reflected political ideologies and encouraged the emergence of community and national identities in the decades following the Revolution.” 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.

Francesco Ceccarelli visits Jefferson e Palladio: Come construire un mondo nuovo at the Palladio Museum in Vicenza, Italy. The exhibition is dedicated to Thomas Jefferson, one of Andrea Palladio’s “greatest American disciples,” and demonstrates “how both men prefigured a new world through their novel conceptions of the built environment and its symbols.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.

Jo Farb Hernández reviews Horace Pippin: The Way I See It, the catalogue published “in conjunction with the first exhibition project in over twenty years to provide an in-depth examination of the work of the painter Horace Pippin” at the Brandywine River Museum of Art. The six contributing authors “focus their texts to contrast with the platitudes that have defined Pippin’s work” since the late 1930s. Read the full review at caa.reviews.

Linda Rodriguez reads Urban Space as Heritage in Late Colonial Cuba: Classicism and Dissonance on the Plaza de Armas of Havana, 1754–1828 by Paul Barrett Niell. Featuring a “heritage approach,” it is “one of the few books that analyzes the art and architectural history of the Cuban colonial period in depth, while placing it in useful dialogue with works produced in other areas of the Spanish viceroyalties.” 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.

Zeynep Çelik Alexander reads Spyros Papapetros’s On the Animation of the Inorganic: Art, Architecture, and the Extension of Life, “the latest foray into the late nineteenth-century Germanic discourse” known as “empathy theory.” Behind the author’s web of connections between figures such as Aby Warburg, Wilhelm Worringer, and Fernand Léger, “there is a radical historiographical proposition.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.

Frances Colpitt visits Melvin Edwards: Five Decades at the Nasher Sculpture Center. Curated by Catherine Craft and featuring over sixty sculptures along with maquettes and preparatory drawings, the traveling retrospective is a “fluid and compelling exhibition” that encompasses both the “clenching brutality” and “seductive formalism” of the artist’s work. Read the full review at caa.reviews.

Krystel Chehab reviews Rubens, Velázquez, and the King of Spain by Aneta Georgievka-Shine and Larry Silver, an examination of Peter Paul Rubens’s and Diego Velàzquez’s paintings for the Torre de la Parada, a royal hunting lodge near Madrid. The authors “commendably broaden an understanding of exchanges between these two leading seventeenth-century painters.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.

Michael Guadio examines Commercial Visions: Science, Trade, and Visual Culture in the Dutch Golden Age, Dániel Margócsy’s study of “science as commerce” in “the early capitalist economy of the Netherlands.” The book “tells a persuasive story about visual culture, commodification, and the mobility of knowledge in early modern science.” 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.

Abigail McEwan reviews Alejandro Anreus’s Luis Cruz Azaceta, the tenth volume in the A Ver: Revisioning Art History series, which publishes monographs on Latino artists. Focusing on the career of Luis Cruz Azaceta, a Cuban American artist, the book interweaves “biographical and diasporic coordinates within a richly informed social history of his work.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.

Stella Ramage visits the Fiona Pardington: A Beautiful Hesitation exhibition. Held at three venues in New Zealand, the show is a “survey of thirty years’ work by one of New Zealand’s most prolific photographers,” showcasing Fiona Pardington’s “unashamed, lyrical romanticism” and “persistent preoccupations with mortality and memory.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.

Rosemary Hawker examines The Photograph and Australia, an exhibition that “brings together over five hundred photographs from major Australian collections of historical and contemporary works.” The Art Gallery of New South Wales Curator Judy Annear “helps us find multiple ways to think about the photographic record of Australia and what Australian photography might be.” 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.

Geoffrey Symcox examines A Kingdom of Images: French Prints in the Age of Louis XIV, 1660–1715, a joint exhibition and companion volume by the Getty Research Institute and Bibliothèque nationale de France. He commends the organizers for “mobilizing the rich resources” of these institutions “to display a series of images otherwise inaccessible to the general public, creating a visual feast of images that illuminates a critical moment in the history of printmaking.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.

Jason Hill takes a look at the exhibition and accompanying catalogue Things beyond Resemblance: James Welling Photographs, organized by the Brandywine River Museum of Art. The featured photographic series is “an homage” to the painter Andrew Wyeth, eliciting “deeply inquisitive expressions (or, better, material accretions) of admiration for an important if counterintuitive artistic influence.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.

George R. Goldner reviews Italian Master Drawings from the Princeton University Art Museum, “a hybrid publication” composed of ninety-five entries on select artworks and an appendix of drawings acquired by the museum since 1977. Despite criticisms, Goldner finds it “a worthwhile publication that brings the best of Princeton’s Italian drawings to a wider audience.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.

Delinda Collier critiques Double Desire: Transculturation and Indigenous Contemporary Art, a collection of fifteen essays edited by Ian McLean that address the marginalization of Aboriginal artists. The volume “is led by postcolonial theory’s focus on the author over the artwork,” though the reviewer is left wondering “how much of the discussion was useful in increasing agency and opportunities for the 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.

Leisa Rundquist reviews the exhibition and catalogue for When the Curtain Never Comes Down: Performance Art and the Alter Ego. Curated by Valérie Rousseau for the American Folk Art Museum, the exhibition successfully opens up “new discussions on objects and related performative actions of artists referred to as ‘self-taught’ and ‘art brut.’” Read the full review at caa.reviews.

Marcela Guerrero examines the catalogue for Nancy Hoffman’s exhibition Who More Sci-Fi Than Us? Contemporary Art from the Caribbean. Four region-based essays and an interview “examine the complexity of Caribbean art through the metaphor of science fiction,” though a lack of “intra-island links” leaves readers “somewhat empty handed.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.

Mia L. Bagneris takes a look at the monograph Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. The book includes contributions by Jennifer Higgie, Donatien Grau, and Naomi Beckwith, but the abundance of illustrations of the painter Yiadom-Boakye’s “compelling, portrait-style pictures of black figures” makes it a “celebration of the artist’s oeuvre rather than a critical engagement with it.” 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.

Rachel Middleman visits Earth Machines at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Featuring an international roster of artists, the exhibition reveals how “the local Silicon Valley high-tech industry propels a cycle of innovation and consumption that threatens to outstrip our ability to understand and manage its global, social, and environmental consequences.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.

Martha Lucy examines Gustave Caillebotte: The Painter’s Eye, an exhibition co-organized by the National Gallery of Art and the Kimbell Art Museum. Focusing on fifty canvases produced between 1875 and the early 1880s, the curators tease out “the unusual terms of Caillebotte’s modernity” and his relationship to Impressionism. Read the full review at caa.reviews.

Blair French reviews Billy Apple^®: The Artist Has to Live Like Everybody Else, “one of the most significant survey exhibitions ever accorded a living New Zealand artist.” Hosted by the Auckland Art Gallery, the show gives “institutional and public recognition” to the “extraordinarily complex and comprehensive individual practice” of the Pop-Conceptual artist Billy Apple. Read the full review at caa.reviews.

Noriko Murai looks at Edwardian London through Japanese Eyes: The Art and Writings of Yoshio Markino, 1897–1915 by William S. Rodner. The first English-language scholarly monograph on Yoshio Makino, or “Markino,” a Japanese illustrator who lived in London during the early twentieth century, the book provides a “detailed and engaging account of Markino’s most productive years.” 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.

Katherine Smith visits the High Museum of Art’s exhibition Alex Katz, This Is Now. The show focuses on the artist’s landscape paintings, enabling visitors to “discover another, important aspect of Katz’s oeuvre” and “deepen an appreciation of the artist’s achievements in this genre.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.

Allan Antliff reviews The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College, Eva Díaz’s exploration of Josef Albers, John Cage, and R. Buckminster Fuller at the college from the 1930s to 1950s. She calls it “the first sustained examination of the interdisciplinary tensions arising from its protagonists’ shared interest in freedom through experimentation.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.

Emma Sachs examines The Cambridge History of Painting in the Classical World, edited by J. J. Pollitt, a survey of mural and panel painting from the Aegean Bronze Age to Late Antiquity in the Mediterranean. The nine authors “have space to express their own opinions,” resulting in a “refreshingly honest discussion” that “distinguishes this volume from a standard survey textbook.” 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.

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.