• Allie Stielau

    By recording the physical evidence of metal’s molten transition between forms, gold and silver ingots offer a material foothold on the metaphors of liquidity and flow used to conceptualize the global circulation of precious metal in premodernity.

Notes from the Field

  • Book Review
    Arts of Allusion: Object, Ornament, & Architecture in Medieval Islam
    Reviewed by Scott Redford

    This book can be described as an extended essay on perception and mentality in the medieval Islamic world in relationship to objects.

  • Book Review
    The Invention of the Colonial Americas: Data, Architecture, and the Archives of the Indies, 1781–1844.
    Reviewed by Miruna Achim

    When did colonial America begin? This is the polemical question Byron Ellsworth Hamann sets out to answer in his immensely erudite and lavishly illustrated The Invention of the Colonial Americas: Data, Architecture, and the Archives of the Indies, 1781–1844.

  • Book Review
    Painting in Stone: Architecture and the Poetics of Marble from Antiquity to the Enlightenment
    Reviewed by Dario Gamboni

    Stone, and especially marble—in the broad, ancient, and traditional sense of a veined stone lending itself to be carved and polished—is a topical subject in the history of art and architecture.

  • Book Review
    Danish Modern Furniture 1930–2016: The Rise, Decline and Re-Emergence of a Cultural Market Category
    Reviewed by Charlotte Ashby

    Though the original Danish version of this book was published in 2006, sustained interest in Scandinavian mid-century modern design in popular and academic circles makes this new, expanded English edition most welcome.

  • Book Review
    The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution
    Reviewed by Ivan Gaskell

    Dan Hicks’s book is true to the period of its subject for he has written a Victorian melodrama.


© 2020 Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture
West 86th is a publication of the Bard Graduate Center and the University of Chicago Press