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In her compelling social history of photography, Study in Black and White: Photography, Race, Humor, Tanya Sheehan reaches beyond photographs and photographers to examine humor books, minstrel shows, satirical illustrations, advertising, and print culture to reveal the ways that early photographic discourses using humor constructed concepts of race and photographic practice. Across five chapters of case studies, Sheehan demonstrates how written, performed, and sketched humor about photography and jokes made with photographs became avenues for the dehumanization of black and indigenous peoples as well as a route to forge and assert whiteness. Continuing a discursive inquiry into early… Full Review

Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia 1948–1980 was an archive of radical potential. The highly anticipated architecture exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) included over four hundred drawings, plans, photographs, models, and film reels related to the construction, ideological and physical, of the second Yugoslavia (Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia). Unlike in MoMA’s previous architecture exhibition Latin America in Construction: Architecture 1955–1980 (2015), which used MoMA’s own collection to supply the majority of objects on display, the materials showcased in Toward a Concrete Utopia were the result of extraordinary coordination by the curators and researchers to assemble… Full Review

“I wanted a museum that was a tool to help people find a useful and useable history that would enable them to become better citizens; a museum that would explore and wrestle with issues of today and tomorrow as well as yesterday,” writes Lonnie G. Bunch III in A Fool’s Errand: Creating the National Museum of African American History and Culture in the Age of Bush, Obama, and Trump (9). Bunch wrote the passage while he was the founding director of the Smithsonian’s nineteenth and newest museum. Then, in the months leading up to the book’s publication and just two… Full Review

In Sacred Art: Catholic Saints and Candomblé Gods in Modern Brazil, Henry Glassie and Pravina Shukla explore Brazilian religious-themed art rooted in European- and African-based faiths. The authors limit their study to the northeastern states of Bahia and Pernambuco, where “Native, European, and African cultures first fused into something new and Brazilian” (2). Their examination demonstrates that artists continue to draw inspiration from both the European- and African-originated sacred subject matter and that the profuse resultant works have become “markers of national identity” with local, national, and international appeal (2). Throughout the text Glassie and Shukla highlight the transformation… Full Review

Kristine Khouri and Rasha Salti’s exhibition Past Disquiet and its accompanying catalog of essays and documents is the result of ten years of research into neglected histories of international solidarity. Their research brings to light a dynamic, sprawling network of Cold War “grassroots cultural diplomacy” projects (57) that often developed independently or at arm’s length from the state. During the 1960s–90s, cultural workers found common cause in anti-imperialist struggles and campaigns for national liberation, justice, and equality. Solidarity was expressed by artists and intellectuals through the organization of exhibitions, the donation of works, and the development of institutions explicitly committed… Full Review

Editor’s note: François Brunet, the author of the book under review, passed away unexpectedly on December 25, 2018. Didier Aubert, Brunet’s first doctoral student, wrote this review and commemoration. While caa.reviews upholds firm conflict of interest guidelines that prevent the commissioning of reviews where there might be a personal or professional connection between reviewer and reviewee, here we made an exception in order to acknowledge Brunet’s significant contributions to the study of American art and culture, both as a scholar and mentor. François Brunet, whose sudden and untimely death on Christmas day last December left countless students and colleagues… Full Review

Two themes dominate this premier biography of the Dutch Golden Age celebrity Romeyn de Hooghe: art and ambition. De Hooghe was a prolific and successful graphic artist who produced a wide and diverse array of etchings, engravings, prints, paintings, sculptures, and emblem books and medals, many of whose images are virtually synonymous with the culture of the late Golden Age and can be found in nearly every textbook on the subject. Such were De Hooghe’s skills that the stadtholder-king William III employed them repeatedly in his long-running propaganda wars against his archenemy King Louis XIV of France. Indeed, the imagery… Full Review

Flagellant sodalities originated in 1260 following the tumultuous processions of self-scourging lay penitents who, enflamed by the charismatic Fra Raniero Fasani of Perugia, beseeched God for peace and mercy. Their number significantly increased throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, as flagellation became a structured lay male ritual enacted in both private confraternal spaces and public processions. From the later quattrocento, flagellation in large part was no longer a private weekly practice. Rather, it was performed as a grand public spectacle, primarily during Holy Week, when the imitatio Christi experience resonated most profoundly for spectators and battuti (flagellants) alike. The seven-hundredth… Full Review

“The Art-form which is form-of-power does not say anything, it Does something to you,” wrote modernist composer, astrologer, and painter Dane Rudhyar nearly a decade before he joined the Transcendental Painting Group (TPG) in Santa Fe, New Mexico (Art as Release of Power, Hamsa, 1929). Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist is the latest ambitious example of a growing fascination with esoterically inspired art that attempted to compel an active, dynamic spirituality into our mundane world: to “do something,” rather than merely illustrate appearances. The exhibition is expertly curated by Gilbert Vicario, the Selig Family Chief Curator at the Phoenix… Full Review

In 1980, artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude were invited to Miami to consider completing a work for the New World Festival of the Arts, a large-scale festival spanning the visual and performing arts during the summer of 1982. Their visit would connect them to Miami’s nascent art scene and inspire their self-funded project Surrounded Islands, completed in May 1983, for which the artists transformed Biscayne Bay by surrounding eleven islands with a pink polyethylene fabric. Bridging public sculpture with earth art, Surrounded Islands became one of the couple’s most iconic works. The Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM)’s recent… Full Review