• Graham M. Jones

    By analyzing artist Rose Salane’s photographs of confessions written by tourists who pilfered items from the Pompeii archaeological site, this article explores the power of the material world to act on the human conscience despite the deadening effects of capitalism.

  • Jennifer M. S. Stager

    Painted statues intervene in long-standing debates about paint on sculpture and invoke the instability of commercial color film technologies to take aim at the fixed tradition of a monochrome classical past and the gendered, racialized associations that past had been designed to conjure.

     

Notes from the Field

  • Book Review
    Gerald Summers & Marjorie Butcher: Makers of Simple Furniture, 1931–1940
    Martha Deese

    Based on a 1986 interview that Deese conducted with Gerald’s widow, Marjorie, and on extant personal and company papers and photographs owned by the family, the article provided the first account of the company that the couple founded in 1931 and included fifteen images of little-known furniture.

  • Book Review
    Inventing Late Antique Reliquaries: Reception, Material History, and Dynamics of Interaction (4th–6th Centuries CE)
    Adrien Palladino

    This ambitious book, the fruit of a doctoral dissertation approved by the universities of Fribourg and Brno in 2019, seeks to explain how relic containers figured in the controversial Christian practice of dispersing the bodily remains of holy persons to communities far from their places of burial.

  • Book Review
    Tales Things Tell: Material Histories of Early Globalisms
    Finbarr Barry Flood and Beate Fricke

    Through six extensive case studies, this fascinating book unpacks and eruditely fleshes out early globalisms in material and object-oriented terms, demonstrating how such an emphasis and the perspective of art history can enhance the currently expanding field of global history.

  • Translated Text
    How To Make a New Spain: The Material Worlds of Colonial Mexico City
    Reviewed by Barbara E. Mundy

    Readers of Enrique Rodríguez-Alegría’s earlier The Archaeology and History of Colonial Central Mexico (Cambridge, 2016) will reencounter familiar themes in this recent book.

  • Book Review
    Objects Untimely: Object-Oriented Philosophy and Archaeology
    Reviewed by Astrid Van Oyen

    Time has long been a central concern of both archaeology and philosophy. For Plato, time was an absolute external reality. Aristotle, instead, emphasized the relative temporal relations between events.


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West 86th is a publication of the Bard Graduate Center and the University of Chicago Press