CAA News Today

Boris Charmatz’s If Tate Modern Was Musée de la Danse? (May 15–16, 2015) is the focus of a new multimedia review on the Scalar platform, If caa.reviews were performance.reviews. Organized by Juliet Bellow, the project includes an introduction by Bellow, and three reviews of the performances at the Tate Modern by Arabella Stanger, Nicole Zee, and Tamara Tomic-Vajagic. The review presents the complexities of Charmatz’s transformation of the Tate Modern into a museum of dance for two days and features an interactive map showing where the performances occurred in the Tate Modern, in addition to videos and still images. Charmatz’s project challenges conceptions of museums as institutional spaces and incorporates audience participation and “unauthorized” performances. This review is part of a new caa.reviews initiative to review time-based media works.

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.

Mickey Abel and Karlyn Griffith discuss The Crusader Bible: A Gothic Masterpiece at the Blanton Museum of Art. Devoted to a single manuscript, the exhibition “represents an extraordinary opportunity to see a significant treasure of the Middle Ages.” Through “historical didactics, innovative technology, and the spatial layout,” the curator demonstrates the “contemporary relevancy of cross-cultural exchange.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.

David B. Brownlee reviews Michael Hall’s George Frederick Bodley and the Later Gothic Revival in Britain and America, an “enormous and enormously rich biography of one of the greatest High Victorians.” Although the immense volume “slightly exasperates even an avid reader,” “it is worth persisting” to read this “compelling account of his multifaceted and path-breaking creativity.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.

Robert E. Harrist Jr. reviews The Efficacious Landscape: On the Authorities of Painting at the Northern Song Court by Foong Ping. “Brimming with new findings,” the book provides “original interpretations of the role ink landscape painting played at the Northern Song imperial court” and “the most extensive account in a Western language” of the artist Guo Xi’s career. 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.

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.