Marie Antoinette may be a person—and name—known by many, but she is also one laden with a series of inherent paradoxes. Expected to support domestic luxury industries and dress in a manner befitting a French queen, she was nonetheless pilloried for her spending. And while her life was populated with…
On June 6, 2025, Resplendent Dreams: Reawakening the Rococo opened at the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA) in Indianapolis. The exhibition brings together three artists—Robert Horvath, Diego Montoya, and Anthony Sonnenberg—whose work responds to and reinvents the rococo. Their creations engage with queerness, visibility, and critique, engagements that are expansive…
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: 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,…
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…
Over the century and a half of its existence (1648–1793), the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture amassed a collection of more than 15,000 artworks: paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, casts, and medals.[1] Its conceptual core was formed by reception pieces (morceaux de réception)—works that young artists submitted for examination…
Guillaume Lethière (The Clark Art Institute, June 15-October 14, 2024)Guillon Lethière, né à la Guadeloupe (Musée du Louvre, November 13, 2024-Feburary 17, 2025) Since last June, museumgoers on both sides of the Atlantic have been able to discover the extraordinary life and career of the neoclassical painter Guillaume Guillon Lethière…
Between 1725 and 1733, Augustus II the Strong, Elector of Saxony (r. 1694-1733) and King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania (r. 1697-1706, 1709-33), acquired an extraordinarily rare Chinese treasure for his Green Vault (Grünes Gewölbe). In 1723, this private Dresden palace royal treasury, originally known as the Privy…
The culmination of the recent Entangled Pasts exhibition at the Royal Academy, London (3 February–28 April 2024) was undoubtedly Lubaina Himid’s monumental work Naming the Money (2004) (Fig. 1). The exhibition itself was an ambitious and highly admirable engagement by the Royal Academy with its own institutional “entanglement” with colonial and…
Responses Absence and Abundance: Thinking Ahead From HECAA@30 – by Jennifer Van Horn The Power of Storytelling and Story-Listening: Reflections on HECAA@30 – by Karen Lipsedge Everything in Between: Reflections on HECAA@30 – by Emily C. Casey and Matthew Gin The Ethics of Study and Display of Ivory Objects –…