Nageen Shaikh is an art historian and critic. She is most interested in production over ideation in South Asian art, early modern and contemporary art, artist studios, languages, and collaborations between art materials, design, and science.
Book Review
A new publication reflects a growing interest in the lives of the makers behind the civilization’s arts and crafts, long marginalized and erased by mythologized depictions of the ancient world.
Book Review
A book on 18th-century Pahari painting warns against thinking of these works as “miniatures,” a Western term, instead illuminating the artistic collaboration and ways of life at their heart.
Guide
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s first catalog in 25 years, Molly Crabapple chronicles the Jewish Bund, a photographer captures a Black Southern waterway, and more
Book Review
Historian Atreyee Gupta unravels the threads of catchall terms like “Global South” to trace the connections between Indian painters and anticolonial figures like Frantz Fanon.
Book Review
Art history has struggled to address a contradictory artistic output that engaged with Japan’s modernization and occupation, a new book argues.
Book Review
The cover of a new book draws you in for Kahlo, but you will stay for Mary Reynolds, the innovative bookbinder and partner of Marcel Duchamp.
Book Review
Time Machines reveals entanglements between the largely forgotten optical telegraph and artistic movements in 19th-century France.
Book Review
Like an art history detective, Mei Mei Rado mines textiles and techniques to reveal cross-cultural Chinese-European liaisons driven by nationalism and a keen interest in design.
Book Review
No Man’s Land, Pakistani artist Amin Gulgee’s first comprehensive monograph, maps his interest in exploring ritual, science, grief, and healing in a visual language all his own.
Art
An exhibition hints that Jean-Léon Gérôme and his contemporaries deserve a second look for the virtuosity of their photorealism. I don’t take the bait.
Art
An exhibition hints that Jean-Léon Gérôme and his contemporaries deserve a second look for the virtuosity of their photorealism. I don’t take the bait.
Books
Rosina Buckland’s book dispels the whitewashed argument that Meiji-era art resulted from foreign influences that watered down local forms.