1725. Native American Allies at the Court of Louis XV (The Palace of Versailles and the Musée du Quai Branly, Paris, November 2025-May 2026) What is the art of alliance? The collaborative Collections royales d’amérique du nord (CRoyAN) project, launched in 2019, mobilizes this question to frame its third exhibition…
This interview brings together Jonathan Michael Square, curator of Almost Unknown, The Afric-American Picture Gallery (Winterthur Museum, May 2025–January 2026), and Tyler Horne, Tour Programming Assistant at the Winterthur Museum. Inspired by William J. Wilson’s 1859 essay “Afric-American Picture Gallery,” the exhibition, Almost Unknown, brought the essayist’s imagined gallery to…
This dialogue brings into conversation two recent volumes on landscape. While they take different approaches, both Stephanie O’Rourke’s Picturing Landscape in an Age of Extraction (University of Chicago Press, 2025) and Kelly Presutti’s Land into Landscape (Yale University Press, 2024) foreground the potential for landscape to reveal new facets of our historical and…
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…