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By linking ancient places with present communities, Landscapes of Origin in the Americas explores how cultural landscapes sustain the continuity of origin narratives.

Landscape is a powerful factor in the operation of memory because of the associations narrators make between the local landscape and the events of the stories they tell. Ancestors and mythological events often become fixed in a specific landscape and act as timeless reference points. 

In conventional anthropological literature, "landscape" is the term applied to the meaning local people bestow on their cultural and physical surroundings. In this work, the authors explore the cultural and physical landscapes an individual or cultural group has constructed to define the origins or beginnings of that cultural group as revealed through shared or traditional memory. The cultural landscapes of origins in diverse sites throughout the Americas are investigated through multidisciplinary research, not only to reveal the belief system and mythologies but also to place these origin beliefs in context and relationship to each other. In a continual interaction between the past, present, and future, time is subordinate to place, and history, as defined in Western academic terms, does not exist.



 

A new interpretation of the reception and legacy of Marcel Duchamp's controversial Fountain.

In 1917, Marcel Duchamp sent a “telegram” in the form of a urinal signed “R. Mutt.” When it arrived at its destination forty years later, it was both celebrated and vilified for proclaiming that anything could be art. From, that moment on, the entire Western art world was reconfigured as “Post-Duchamp.”

This new work from celebrated art historian and philosopher Thierry de Duve marks the completion of his decades-long effort to understand how Duchamp's Fountain marked a turning point in art history and to resolve the unprecedented problems this piece poses for philosophical aesthetics. Beyond shedding new light on the piece's initial reception and correcting certain historical errors, Le télégramme de Duchamp offers a bold interpretation of Fountain. Duve argues that Duchamp's urinal heralded the demise of the fine arts system and the advent of what he terms the system of “art in general." He further asserts, however, that this system did not originate in the 1960s but can be traced back to the 1880s. Duve's new book, therefore, shows that Duchamp was neither the creator nor agent of this new system, but rather its brilliant messenger. 

Honorable Mention for the 2025 New Deal Book Award 

Leon Bibel (1913–1995) was a prolific modern American artist who painted, printed, stamped, etched, sketched, and carved. He produced pieces that ranged from social realism to dreamy expressionism and was an aesthetic experimentalist, never working for too long in any medium or style. And despite Bibel's obvious talent, his work would have languished in obscurity were it not for the New Deal programs like the Federal Art Project and Public Works of Art Project.
 
Leon Bibel, the first biography of this eclectic artist, recounts his life from his birth in Szczebrzeszyn, Poland, in 1913, to his death in New Jersey in 1995. After immigrating to the United States in the 1920s, Bibel came of age during the Great Depression, when New Deal agencies recognized his abilities and supported his artistic endeavors. Working-class artists faced challenges after these programs folded, and Bibel would later spend twenty years as a New Jersey chicken farmer before resurrecting his art career in the 1960s.
 
Historian Richard Haw shows how Bibel's life was defined by the New Deal, his visionary artwork shaped by the era's commitment to social and economic justice. With reproductions of more than 240 of Bibel's works, most in vivid color, this book reveals how he depicted everything from the trauma of unemployment to the dignity of work, from the horrors of lynching to the pleasures of everyday life.

Over the course of some two centuries following the conquests and consolidations of Spanish rule in the Americas during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries—the period designated as the Baroque—new cultural forms sprang from the cross-fertilization of Spanish, Amerindian, and African traditions. This dynamism of motion, relocation, and mutation changed things not only in Spanish America, but also in Spain, creating a transatlantic Hispanic world with new understandings of personhood, place, foodstuffs, music, animals, ownership, money and objects of value, beauty, human nature, divinity and the sacred, cultural proclivities—a whole lexikon of things in motion, variation, and relation to one another.

Featuring the most creative thinking by the foremost scholars across a number of disciplines, the Lexikon of the Hispanic Baroque is a uniquely wide-ranging and sustained exploration of the profound cultural transfers and transformations that define the transatlantic Spanish world in the Baroque era. Pairs of authors—one treating the peninsular Spanish kingdoms, the other those of the Americas—provocatively investigate over forty key concepts, ranging from material objects to metaphysical notions. Illuminating difference as much as complementarity, departure as much as continuity, the book captures a dynamic universe of meanings in the various midst of its own re-creations. The Lexikon of the Hispanic Baroque joins leading work in a number of intersecting fields and will fire new research—it is the indispensible starting point for all serious scholars of the early modern Spanish world.

Coinciding with Diana Scarisbrick’s ninety-fourth birthday, this work honors her extraordinary career as the “world’s leading jewelry historian.”

Through twenty contributions by noted scholars, Liber Amicorum explores the pioneering research accomplished by jewelry historian Diana Scarisbrick. These collected pieces celebrate both the length of Scarisbrick’s career and its wide-ranging nature, touching upon her work with everything from gems, rings, chalices, bindings, and crown jewels to contemporary jewelry production, jewel theft, and individual collections.

Throughout the book, the insightful historical research of the contributors is beautifully supported by high-quality illustrations. These bring their essays to life, highlighting the splendor and fragility of some of the objects that are discussed as each delves into the work of this eminent scholar.

El Tajín, an ancient Mesoamerican capital in Veracruz, Mexico, has long been admired for its stunning pyramids and ballcourts decorated with extensive sculptural programs. Yet the city's singularity as the only center in the region with such a wealth of sculpture and fine architecture has hindered attempts to place it more firmly in the context of Mesoamerican history. In Lightning Gods and Feathered Serpents, Rex Koontz undertakes the first extensive treatment of El Tajín's iconography in over thirty years, allowing us to view its imagery in the broader Mesoamerican context of rising capitals and new elites during a period of fundamental historical transformations.

Koontz focuses on three major architectural features—the Pyramid of the Niches/Central Plaza ensemble, the South Ballcourt, and the Mound of the Building Columns complex—and investigates the meanings of their sculpture and how these meanings would have been experienced by specific audiences. Koontz finds that the iconography of El Tajín reveals much about how motifs and elite rites growing out of the Classic period were transmitted to later Mesoamerican peoples as the cultures centered on Teotihuacan and the Maya became the myriad city-states of the Early Postclassic period.

By reexamining the iconography of sculptures long in the record, as well as introducing important new monuments and contexts, Lightning Gods and Feathered Serpents clearly demonstrates El Tajín's numerous iconographic connections with other areas of Mesoamerica, while also exploring its roots in an indigenous Gulf lowlands culture whose outlines are only now emerging. At the same time, it begins to uncover a largely ignored regional artistic culture of which Tajín is the crowning achievement.

2026 PROSE Award in Architecture & Urban Planning, Association of American Publishers (AAP) 
2026 Book Prize Shortlist, Modernist Studies Association (MSA) 

The forgotten history of the occult foundations of the early twentieth-century global city.

War, revolution, genocide, rebellion, slump. The economic and political turmoil of the early twentieth century seemed destined to rip asunder the ties that bound colonizers and the colonized to one another. The upheaval represented an opportunity, and not just to nationalists who imagined new homelands or to socialists who dreamed of international brotherhood. For modernists in the orbit of various occultisms, the crisis of empire also represented an opportunity to reveal humanity’s fundamental unity and common fate.

Lineages of the Global City recounts a continuous, if also contentious, transnational exchange among modernists and occultists across the Americas, Europe, South Asia, and Australia between 1905 and 1949. At stake were the feelings and affect of a new global subject who would perceive themselves as belonging to humanity as a unified whole, and the urban environment that would foster their subjectivity. The interventions in this debate, which drew in the period’s most renowned modernists, took the form of a succession of plans for cities, suburbs, and communes, as well as experiments in building, drawing, printmaking, filmmaking, and writing. Weaving together postcolonial, feminist, and Marxist insight on subject formation, Shiben Banerji advances a new way of understanding modernist urban space as the design of subjective effects.

Liu Shiming (1926–2010) is a revered Chinese artist whose works have had a distinct impact on the course of modern Chinese sculpture. Born in Tianjin in 1926, Shiming attended the prestigious Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing, where he was part of the first generation of sculptors trained by the People’s Republic of China to study both traditional Chinese art and French modernist principles. Shiming received early recognition for his work, and his student project Measuring Land (1950) was one of the first works exhibited abroad following the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. 

Though well respected in China, the sculptor, who died in 2010 at the age of eighty-four, is only now beginning to win the wider recognition he deserves. Meanwhile, contemporary competitors are numberless, most of them Instagram-friendly, while art history tends to focus on towering names and indisputably major movements and events: Braque and Picasso inventing Cubism, Duchamp’s readymades redefining art itself, Warhol’s mind-bending Brillo Boxes, and so on. So why examine an artist in the middle ground? Perhaps, first, because that is where the vast majority of us live, trying to make sense of our lives and grateful for the occasional insight, release, or enrichment that visual art can bring us. Second, because the story of Liu Shiming reveals a great deal about the forces that have shaped postwar art worldwide. He was a man who sought to lead a simple life, dedicated entirely to art, in the midst of China’s epochal, dangerously complex twentieth-century social and political changes.