Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2025 -

Primo (art historian) tells a sweeping story of British art that is simultaneously familiar (with chapters on celebrated artists like Hans Holbein, Peter Paul Rubens, and Angelica Kauffman) and refreshingly strange (with an emphasis on Dutch artists, from Marcus Gheeraerts to Daniel Mytens, and the Bohemian printmaker Wenceslaus Hollar). Above all, it is a recentering of the story of British art, in which artists from the Continent--and their impacts on English-born painters (from Robert Peake to William Hogarth and Joshua Reynolds)--are seen not as anomalies but logical, essential contributors to a body of work made in Britain across three centuries. The reader is in good hands with Primo, who seamlessly blends lively artists' biographies with perceptive formal analysis, foregrounding dozens of jaw-dropping paintings from 1500 to 1800. While the book is aimed at an intelligent general audience, there are plenty of insights for serious students and experts alike. Primo excels in distilling big subjects into manageable units that feel rich and satisfying. His love for the material is infectious, and his voice radiates a thoughtful, unassuming affability. A master class in big, narrative-driven art history.Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers through faculty.

Of Salt and Spirit accompanies the exhibition of the same name at the Mississippi Museum of Art (MMA). Using Black feminist and womanist lenses, the book's 95 exceptional images, three essays, and round table discussion explore how place, community, agency, and self-expression has led to important artistic developments for Black women quilters in the American South during the 20th and 21st century. The book is exemplary in showing diverse quilting approaches, considering the critical roles of race, gender, and class, and exploring making as knowledge production for cultural identity. Through the quilt as material culture, the book addresses traditions of storytelling as agents of memory and remembrance, and how this tradition preserves both craft and personal histories. The MMA houses one of the largest quilt collections in the South, many of which were donated by the American photographer Roland L. Freeman. Inclusion of some of Freeman's documentation of Black southern women quilters illustrates his many personal connections with the quilters and enriches the quilts' contexts. This powerful book is essential for a range of programs including art, ethnography, African American studies, and American history.Summing Up: Essential. All readers.

This is a wide-ranging and accessible survey of the critical absence in Dutch art of enslaved people, who fundamentally contributed to the economic flourishing of the Dutch Republic. Building on recent research into the global trade in human cargo, raw materials, and other goods, the author focuses on the invisibility of enslaved Indigenous and African workers in Dutch art. Seventeenth-century accounts of the brutal conditions under which these workers toiled are few, and they serve to emphasize the Dutch colonial dependency on global outposts to provide wealth in Amsterdam and elsewhere. Consistently, the prosperity of the Dutch Republic and the conditions of making and marketing art are set against the interdependence of the African diaspora, the plantation economy, and seafaring exploration. Interspersed contemporary responses demonstrate how artists and poets with ties to the African diaspora grapple with their fraught heritage today. This study of a compelling subject indicates directions for further consideration of the complex interaction between Indigenous peoples of the globe and Europeans in the early modern era.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.

Not unlike the exhibition it accompanies, this superb catalog, edited by chief curator Denise Murrell (Metropolitan Museum of Art), engages its audience in an exhaustive examination of the Harlem Renaissance and its dialogues with transatlantic modernist styles and artists. It is stunningly produced with 147 pages of full-color plates, 114 figures, and 11 essays by academics and curators. Murrell's opening essay situates the New Negro movement within the transformational Great Migration, during which new Black cities were formed and African American artists sought to convey modern Black life in divergent styles and critical approaches. As the movement's founding philosopher, Alan Locke encouraged artists like Aaron Douglas to mine such diverse sources as African sculpture, Black folk arts, and the Western modernist avant-garde of cubism, fauvism, and expressionism. Others, inspired by activist W. E. B. Du Bois, employed a more academic, naturalistic approach to their portrait and genre subjects, seeking to give a seriousness of depiction and purpose to their Black subjects, including those from the middle and upper classes. The catalog inventively explores how these styles intersected with politics, whether in gambling imagery, Neue Sachlichkeit directness, photography, queer identities, the Antilles, and parades. Stimulating.Summing Up: Essential. General readers through faculty; professionals.

Cornejo (Univ. of New Mexico) offers eye-opening analyses of how Central American artists engage in conceptual and visual strategies to combat racial and social injustices and gender and political violence resulting from colonialism and decades of civil war and political instability. Chapter 1 focuses on the responses of contemporary artists to the repression, disappearance, and genocide of the Indigenous Mayan people, who were political targets of Guatemala's military dictatorship during its civil war (1960-96). Chapter 2 navigates the transcultural currents of this study in its discussion of feminism and feminist art history by focusing on the nonconformist dimensions of performance art in Central America. Chapter 3 navigates the complexities of migration, mobility, and geography in artworks responding to the geopolitics of emigration from Central America and anti-immigrant animus in the US. The final chapter addresses how artists have tackled the issues of citizenship, human rights, and legal protection resulting from criminalizing undocumented populations across the US, Mexico, and Central American borders. In sum, artists, as arbiters of visual disobedience, rally to restore justice, dignity, and humanity to the marginalized populations that have been abused by colonialism, racism, and violence, as explained in this much-needed study.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.