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Despite the growth of museum-history scholarship in recent decades, there is still much to learn about museums’ origins and development. Kathleen Curran’s skillfully researched and richly illustrated book is a stimulating contribution to this field, especially regarding collections and display practices among the first generation of major American art museums as they matured. These include the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (both founded in 1870), what became the Philadelphia Museum of Art (whose origins date to 1876), and, to a lesser extent, museums further west, including the Art Institute of… Full Review

Ancient Egypt Transformed: The Middle Kingdom, along with its corresponding exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is a much-needed and long sought-after addition to the corpus of Egyptological studies. With the exception of such classic treatises as Wolfram Grajetzki’s The Middle Kingdom of Ancient Egypt: History, Archaeology and Society (London: Duckworth Egyptology, 2006) and the Fitzwilliam Museum’s Pharaohs and Mortals: Egyptian Art in the Middle Kingdom (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989), few books have been wholly dedicated to the art of the Middle Kingdom. This stands in stark contrast to the Old Kingdom, which entices readers with… Full Review

The Art of Life in South Africa is not an art-history book, but every page addresses both art and history. Magaziner, a historian, uses art education in apartheid-era South Africa as a window into the experience of living in a repressive state, and the complicated, nuanced ways in which trainees and teachers adapted to, and thrived in spite of, that state. Art making is an act of self-expression, an intervention to make the world more beautiful, which seems wholly incongruous with the horrors of apartheid-era South Africa. Yet, through Magaziner’s rich description of an art-teacher training program, a seemingly peripheral… Full Review

As installed at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Hélio Oiticica: To Organize Delirium provided a salient comment on the artist who perhaps best represents the new canon of twentieth-century Latin American art. This canon is grounded in three pillars of Oiticica’s work: abstraction, participation, and conceptualism. I have previously argued that in the Global North this canon was first consolidated by Héctor Olea and Mari Carmen Ramírez’s seminal exhibition Heterotopías / Inverted Utopias, which opened at the Reina Sofía in 2000 (see Daniel R. Quiles, “Exhibition as Network, Network as Curator: Canonizing Art from ‘Latin America,’” Artl@s Bulletin 3… Full Review

There has been a spate of recent exhibitions identifying and reflecting upon a turn in photographic practice: a turn toward the materiality of the photograph and the full embrace of its unique processes of “capture.” These exhibitions, and the catalogue texts that supplement them, often seize on the notion of photography’s essence as indexical. Photography’s material structure and process of image making are said to be determined by their causal relationship to the world. Their indexical trace of this world, rather than the iconic depiction of it, determines photography’s unique contribution to representation. And those practices that reflect on this… Full Review

I remember thinking sometime around 2010, when SITE Santa Fe presented The Dissolve, that it seemed odd how much the site—Santa Fe, or geography more broadly—mattered so little in that year, or any other prior year’s, biennial. Rather, The Dissolve was about media (technologies of moving images) and not about place. When Irene Hofmann stepped in as director of SITE Santa Fe in 2011, she overhauled the biennial format, taking two years off before presenting SITElines.2014 Unsettled Landscapes. Where other biennials had rejected place as a precept, this biennial exhibition (created with two guest curators, Candice Hopkins and Lucía… Full Review

The second and final showing of Kathryn Andrews: Run for President closed at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas in early January 2017. When I visited, I saw wall-sized photomurals of past presidential publicity gambits—often palpably raced ones—framing sculptures with mirror-polished steel surfaces, sagging balloons, and memorabilia from blockbuster movies including Spiderman, The Matrix, and Lethal Weapon. There was also clown-related symbolism, particularly in the installation that drew from Bozo the ClownTM’s 1984 presidential run, but also in four portraits of men made-up as hobos and/or clowns. Andrews’s show was a kaleidoscopic arrangement of symbols… Full Review

After Year Zero: Geographies of Collaboration—a book that puts the question of a starting point at its heart—wears a black-on-black cover. The black title is pressed in to the book’s black surface, barely discernible save for its slight gloss. On the back of the book, a large circle ringed in that same glossy black looms over a blackened oval. Riffs on these shapes appear in the book’s interior to separate the sections; they appear as white against black, reconfigured, layered, and partitioned. These design elements are suggestive of After Year Zero’s central preoccupations: universalisms new and old, de-centering… Full Review

In Painting the Hortus Deliciarum: Medieval Women, Wisdom, and Time, Danielle B. Joyner has tackled one of the most challenging topics in Romanesque studies, the illuminated manuscript compilation known as the “Garden of Delights.” Created ca. 1175–85 by Abbess Herrad for the Augustinian convent of Saint Odile at Hohenberg in Alsace, and destroyed in the bombardment of Strasbourg in 1870, during the Franco-Prussian War, this highly important Romanesque work survives only in copies and descriptions. Students of Romanesque art and culture will welcome this volume not only for its thoughtful insights but also for its beautifully reproduced illustrations… Full Review

Charlemagne’s biographer, Einhard, as well as one of his key courtiers, Alcuin, flattered the ruler with praise for his interest, indeed expertise, in science generally and astronomy in particular. In 809 CE a group of computistic scholars, apparently under the leadership of Adalhard of Corbie, gathered at Aachen and produced a handbook containing both texts and images that were intended to be helpful in understanding the calendar and, on the basis of that knowledge, of properly arranging the liturgical year. The Carolingians embarked on a program of spiritual and societal regeneration. Correct worship was essential for that program’s success. The… Full Review