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Stimulated by the availability of new technologies, the pedagogy of art history is in the midst of dramatic transformation. Until recently, college courses in the discipline were customarily illustrated using manually sequenced film transparencies extracted from local slide libraries. Now, nearly overnight, it seems, art history programs have all but abandoned that tried and true method in favor of PowerPoint presentations assembling digital files downloaded from shared image databases. Meanwhile, class meetings in brick and mortar settings are giving way to electronic communications among disparately located teachers and students participating in distance-learning courses. What are the implications of this upheaval… Full Review

Unlike their Mesoamerican counterparts, the inhabitants of Teotihuacan (50–750 C.E.) left no clear record identifying those responsible for developing the sophisticated urban plan of their great city-state; the presumed rulers who commandeered the power and authority to assemble the work force required to carry out the massive construction and artistic programs at Teotihuacan remain unnamed. Although recent excavations at the Pyramid of the Moon reveal high-status burials, there are as yet no clear portraits nor excavated remains that clearly locate specific rulers. Questions about the sociopolitical makeup of Teotihuacan and the identity of their leaders have long preoccupied Pre-Columbianists, yet… Full Review

“There could be no lord without vassals, nor vassals without a lord.” Penned in 1611 by Sebastián de Covarrubias, this deceptively simple sentence serves well to summarize the central argument of Michael Schreffler’s The Art of Allegiance: Visual Culture and Imperial Power in Baroque New Spain. Departing from recent studies that have interpreted seventeenth-century Mexican artworks as expressions of an emergent Creole patriotism, Schreffler offers an enlightening discussion of a series of secular images that reasserted the vicarious presence of the Spanish King in colonial Mexico. These images, Schreffler argues, embodied the sense of mutual dependence that existed in… Full Review

Sidi Ballo’s masterful performance on a June night in Mali in 1978 was for Patrick McNaughton “a galvanizing event” whose memory stayed with him for three decades and inspired his writing of this book. As he so aptly notes, not all Malian masquerade performers are created equal. I share with him that sentiment. I know from my own work in Mali that it is only a rare and exceptional artist whose performance reveals the full power of the masquerade and whose virtuosity can so decisively imprint its memory on those who experience it. McNaughton skillfully sets the scene in… Full Review

Rhetorically, New York City has long wielded artistic agency in postwar art. For instance, the metropolis apparently stole the idea of modern art away from Paris (according to Serge Guilbaut in How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985]) and subsequently named its own school of painters (The New York School). Despite this centrality, however, few scholars have rigorously investigated the complex interactions between artists and the city itself. In The Disappearance of Objects, Joshua Shannon tackles precisely this issue as it transpired in the crucial years of the early and mid-1960s… Full Review

Bruce Nauman’s masterful Topological Gardens, which was the United States entry in the 53rd International Art Exhibition—La Biennale de Venezia, not surprisingly won the Golden Lion Award for best national pavilion. Breaking from most previous U.S. exhibitions at the biennale, Nauman’s amounts to a not-so-mini-survey and is spread, also uncharacteristically, over three venues—the United States Pavilion in the Giardini, the Università Iuav di Venezia at Tolentini, and the Università Ca’ Foscari, the latter two being the sites, respectively, of Days and Giorni, a pair of new sound installations. Also at Ca' Foscari is Untitled (1970/2009), a videotaped re-interpretation… Full Review

Carole Paul’s The Borghese Collections and the Display of Art in the Age of the Grand Tour is an analysis of the shifting attitudes toward collection and display—form, content, and contexts—in the world of Settecento Rome. With a focus on the Borghese’s Galleria Terrena, the suites where most of the family’s paintings hung, and the Casino Nobile, home to the sculptures, Paul examines the interrelated narratives of aristocratic patronage, grand tour sociability, the international aesthetic landscape, and the development of museums. Her arguments rest on a detailed reading of the redesign of the Borghese galleries under Prince Marcantonio Borghese IV… Full Review

In the introduction to African American Visual Arts: From Slavery to the Present, Celeste-Marie Bernier positions her study in relation to a widely recognized problem within African American art history and criticism: In my view, far too many critics celebrate African American artists solely for their ability to survive political disenfranchisement, racist brutality and cultural annihilation, rather than for the ground-breaking formal qualities and aesthetic properties of their art. Traditionally in African American art criticism, artistic issues have been discounted in favour of their sociological, biographical and historical implications. Similarly, attempts by scholars to define a black… Full Review

For this exhibition, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles, assembled over 130 works by more than 100 artists to present the first large-scale exhibition of artists’ books in Los Angeles since 1978. But To Illustrate and Multiply was not a historical survey of artists’ books. Despite the expanse of works included, the exhibition was decidedly contemporary in scope—the earliest book on view was Ray Johnson’s The Paper Snake from 1965, and many of the books presented were created even more recently. This is not to say that the exhibition failed to provide an important perspective onto the history… Full Review

So often our preliminary encounter with an exhibition sets our expectations and attitude about the work. This is particularly true for shows where that initial encounter occurs prior to actually seeing the art. My introduction to William Kentridge: Five Themes at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art was very much influenced by hearing muffled music as I walked through the galleries of works on paper that were part of the exhibition’s first section, “Parcours d’Atelier: Artist in the Studio.” Haunting and somewhat melodramatic, the alluring sound (by Phillip Miller) materialized as accompaniment to Kentridge’s multi-screen installation, 7 Fragments for… Full Review