Bringing together established and emerging specialists in seventeenth-century Italian sculpture, Material Bernini is the first sustained examination of the conspicuous materiality of Bernini’s work in sculpture, architecture, and paint. The various essays demonstrate that material Bernini has always been tied (whether theologically,…

In March 2020, the Economist asserted that “contemporary art from Africa has become one of the hottest art markets”. Eight months later, the Art Newspaper upped the bid, with the headline, “Africa’s art market grows even amid adversity.”

Today there are specialist auctions at Sotheby’s and Bonhams dedicated to African art; well…

Contemporary African Art Since 1980 is the first major survey of the work of contemporary African artists from diverse situations, locations, and generations who work either in or outside of Africa, but whose practices engage and occupy the social and cultural complexities of the continent since the past 30 years. Its frame of analysis…

The Ghanaian-born sculptor El Anatsui is one of the most significant artistic innovators of our time, merging personal, local, and global concerns in his visual creations. By weaving together discarded aluminum tops from Nigerian liquor bottles, Anatsui creates large-scale sculptures that demonstrate a fascinating interplay of color, shape, and…

Written by two acclaimed scholars Okwui Enwezor and Chika  Okeke-Agulu, 'El Anatsui. The Reinvention of Sculpture', is the most comprehensive, incisive and authoritative account yet on the work of El Anatsui, the world-renowned, Ghanaian-born sculptor.

The product of more than three decades of research, scholarship and…

This book is a critical study of the drawings of influential Nigerian artist and poet Obiora Udechukwu.  It argues, quite compellingly, that the radical fusion of lyrical formalism and socio-political critique in Udechukwu’s drawings is a direct outcome of his lifelong commitment to the graphic, pictorial and rhetorical properties of line…

The clothes we wear invariably telegraph information about our identity, our place in society and the stories we wish to convey about ourselves. The fantastically colorful costumes specific to African and Caribbean rituals and celebrations go several steps further, transforming ordinary people into mythic figures and magicians, tricksters and…

Postcolonial Modernism chronicles the emergence of artistic modernism in Nigeria in the heady years surrounding political independence in 1960, before the outbreak of civil war in 1967. Chika Okeke-Agulu traces the artistic, intellectual, and critical networks in several Nigerian cities. Zaria is particularly important, because it was…

Written by Chika Okeke-Agulu, the award-winning art historian and critic, and profusely illustrated in full colour, this book provides an unprecedented historical overview and critical examination of the Grillo’s place within the history of 20th-century Nigerian art. Through persuasive reading of the artist’s work, it argues that Grillo is…

Brazil has long been called the “country of the future.” This book documents an exhibition that examines Brazil from the perspective of blindness as a critical category, a metaphor for the way in which the obstruction of perception can illuminate alternate modes of knowledge and experience. It features twenty emerging and mid-career artists…

Hélio Oiticica (1937–80) was one of the most brilliant Brazilian artists of the 1960s and 1970s. He was a forerunner of participatory art, and his melding of geometric abstraction and bodily engagement has influenced contemporary artists from Cildo Meireles and Ricardo Basbaum to Gabriel Orozco, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, and Olafur Eliasson…

This book examines a group of twelve ancient Egyptian tombs (ca. 2300 BCE) in the elite Old Kingdom cemetery of Elephantine at Qubbet el-Hawa in modern Aswan. It develops an interdisciplinary approach to the material—drawing on methods from art history, archaeology, anthropology, and sociology, including agency theory, the role of style, the…

This book contains a total of seven essays, taking the research approach of "Internet" and "class" to explore the social and cultural phenomena of art from the late Ming to the heyday of Qing. The so-called "network" refers to the connection or contrast formed by different people, groups, regions or fields (such as the palace and civil society)…

This innovative book narrates the history of a single object—a tea-leaf storage jar created in southern China during the 13th or 14th century—and describes how its role changed after it was imported to Japan and passed from owner to owner there. In Japan, where the jar was in constant use for more than seven hundred years, it was transformed…

Chikubushima, a sacred island north of the ancient capital of Kyoto, attracted the attention of Japan’s rulers in the Momoyama period (1568–1615) and became a repository of their art, including a lavishly decorated building dedicated to the worship of Benzaiten. In this meticulous and lucid study, Andrew Watsky keenly illustrates how private…

Why did early modern architects continue copying drawings long after the invention of print should have made such copying obsolete? Carolyn Yerkes answers that question in a fresh investigation into the status of architectural drawing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Her book explores a vast network of manuscripts and…

A draftsman, printmaker, architect, and archaeologist, Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–78) is best known today as the virtuoso etcher of the immersive and captivating Views of Rome and the darkly inventive Imaginary Prisons. Yet Carolyn Yerkes and Heather Hyde Minor argue that his single greatest art form—one that combined…