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,…
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…
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.…