Rococo period rooms have always been fantasies assembled from pieces of wall paneling, furnishings, and objets d’art that often have no historical link to each other but are designed to simulate and invoke some kind of eighteenth-century reality. Robert Horvath’s Room for the Lost Paradise (2024-25) plays with this idea…
Reflections on Mai, Joshua Reynolds, and Eighteenth-Century Art — A Roundtable
Roundtable Participants: Kate Fullagar, Miriama Bono, Pauline Reynolds, Jocelyn Hackforth-Jones, Peter McNeil, Monica Anke Hahn, Carl Vail, Peter Brunt. In March 2023, the longstanding battle for ownership of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Portrait of Mai (c. 1776) was resolved (Fig. 1). After more than two decades of struggle to retain in public…
Colonial Crossings: A Review–by Juan Manuel Ramírez Velázquez
Colonial Crossings: Art, Identity, and Belief in the Spanish Americas (The Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, July-December 2024) To welcome visitors, the exhibition Colonial Crossings: Art, Identity, and Belief in the Spanish Americas (July-December 2024) created a large-scale map illustrating transoceanic routes across the Atlantic, the Caribbean,…
Between Europe and Africa: A Gift of Prestige in the Era of the Trade in Enslaved Africans
Ana Lucia Araujo Historians and art historians have increasingly explored the role of material culture and gift exchanges in the context of the transatlantic slave trade.[1] A number of these studies have paid particular attention to the role of prestige gifts in the commercial and cultural exchanges between Africans and…
From Harar to Diu: Circulation and Reception of a Qur’anic Manuscript across the Indian Ocean
Sana Mirza A Qur’anic manuscript in the collection of Princeton University Library (PUL) reveals a fascinating history of the interconnections between commercial and artistic centers within the eighteenth-century Indian Ocean, and the complexity of identities and regional styles of manuscript production during a period of increasing transoceanic empires and networks.…
The Indian Madras Cloth and Elite Self-Fashioning in the Bight of Biafra
Eguono Lucia Edafioka Ukpon a tue re do omo.[1][It is the cloth one wears to which we will give the salute of chieftaincy.] On a December morning in 1842, King Eyo Honesty of Old Calabar penned a letter to Commodore Raymond of the British Navy. In the letter, the King…
Forging Swahili Muslim Style: Material Culture from Pate Island (ca. 1750-ca. 1850)
Zulfikar Hirji The ousting of the Portuguese from coastal East Africa in 1729 ushered in an era of cultural efflorescence in the Swahili Muslim city-states of Pate, Siyu, and Faza on Pate Island in the Lamu Archipelago.[1] At this time, each city-state had a population ranging in size from ten…
The Ujumbe of Mutsamudu, an Eighteenth-Century Swahili Stone House in the Comoros
Stéphane Pradines and Olivier Onezime The Swahili Coast is a stretch of land extending from Mogadishu in Somalia to the Bay of Sofala in present-day Mozambique. Etymologically speaking, wa-swahili means the people of the sahel, the Arabic word for “shore.” This appellation dates to the colonial period and the nineteenth…
Arts of the Maghreb: North African Textiles and Jewelry – Curatorial Reflections
Helina Gebremedhen In November 2024, the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) inaugurated the exhibition Arts of the Maghreb: North African Textiles and Jewelry. The exhibition, on view through October 2025, highlights the rich artistic traditions of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, showcasing intricate…
A Pirate Primer? Review of Stan Douglas: The Enemy of All Mankind – by Lytle Shaw
Stan Douglas: The Enemy of All Mankind, David Zwirner, New York, September 12-October 26, 2024 Our view is from an odd position, perhaps twenty feet in the air (Fig. 1). We look down onto a clearing within a steeply sloping bamboo forest. In the center, two figures in eighteenth-century costumes…