New Books in Museum Studies24 Maalis 2023

Claudia Brittenham, "Unseen Art: Making, Vision, and Power in Ancient Mesoamerica" (U Texas Press, 2023)

In Unseen Art: Making, Vision, and Power in Ancient Mesoamerica (U Texas Press, 2023), Claudia Brittenham unravels one of the most puzzling phenomena in Mesoamerican art history: why many of the objects that we view in museums today were once so difficult to see. She examines the importance that ancient Mesoamerican people assigned to the process of making and enlivening the things we now call art, as well as Mesoamerican understandings of sight as an especially godlike and elite power, in order to trace a gradual evolution in the uses of secrecy and concealment, from a communal practice that fostered social memory to a tool of imperial power. Addressing some of the most charismatic of all Mesoamerican sculptures, such as Olmec buried offerings, Maya lintels, and carvings on the undersides of Aztec sculptures, Brittenham shows that the creation of unseen art has important implications both for understanding status in ancient Mesoamerica and for analyzing art in the present. Spanning nearly three thousand years of the Indigenous art of Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and Belize, Unseen Art connects the dots between vision, power, and inequality, providing a critical perspective on our own way of looking. Sarah Newman (@newmantropologa) is an archaeologist and Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. Her research explores long-term human-environmental interactions, including questions of waste and reuse, processes of landscape transformations, and relationships between humans and other animals. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Sadiah Qureshi, "Vanished: An Unnatural History of Extinction" (Penguin, 2025)

Anyone alive today is among a tiny fraction of the once living: over 90% of species that ever existed are now extinct. How did we come to think of ourselves as survivors in a world where species ca...

4 Heinä 39min

Cleo Nisse, "Venetian Canvas and the Transformation of Painting" (Princeton UP, 2026)

Between the fifteenth and early seventeenth centuries, European painting underwent a profound transformation as artists increasingly painted on canvas instead of wood or walls. Nowhere was more imp...

26 Kesä 47min

Where Harlem Rests at the Woodlawn Cemetery

A cemetery as open-air museum? Historian and award-winning author of Boss of the Grips: The Life of James H. Williams and the Red Caps of Grand Central Terminal, Eric K. Washington thinks so. In this...

23 Kesä 0s

Lewis Ryder, "Connoisseurs and conmen: The contest for cultural authority in early twentieth-century Britain" (Manchester UP, 2026)

⁠Connoisseurs and conmen: The contest for cultural authority in early twentieth-century Britain⁠ (Manchester University Press, 2026) by Dr. Lewis Ryder examines John Hilditch (1872-1930), a notoriou...

5 Kesä 44min

David Cunningham on Contesting Confederate Monuments (JP)

David Cunningham joins John to speak about his pathbreaking article about visiting each of the 113 communities that removed or relocated Confederate symbols between 2015 and 2023. After discussing his...

4 Kesä 51min

Homes of the Past

In 1940s New York, immigrant Jewish scholars sought to build a museum to commemorate their lost worlds and people. Among the Jews who arrived in the United States in the early 1940s were a small numbe...

1 Kesä 0s

“You Sound So Australian”: From Being Read to Rewriting the Room with guest Zindzi Okenyo

Welcome to the first episode of The Cultural Competence Collective podcast! For our first episode, we are joined by the multi-talented actress, musician and director, Zindzi Okenyo! You may recognise...

30 Touko 0s

Kanika Singh, "The Story of a Sikh Museum: Heritage, Politics, Popular Culture" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

The Story of a Sikh Museum: Heritage, Politics, Popular Culture, published by Cambridge University Press in July 2025, is a pioneering study on Sikh museums, a unique phenomenon of contemporary Indi...

27 Touko 39min