Outstanding Academic Titles 2025: Fine Arts

Enjoy this week's Outstanding Academic Titles list snippet: Five titles pertaining to fine art and art history

Posted on December 5, 2025 in Outstanding Academic Titles

Enjoy these five selections from the Choice Reviews 2025 Outstanding Academic Titles list. This week, we highlight Outstanding Academic Titles focused on the fine arts and art history. A hearty congratulations to the winning authors, editors, and publishers!

1. The Harlem Renaissance and transatlantic modernism
ed. by Denise Murrell Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2024

Not unlike the exhibition it accompanies, this superb catalog, edited by chief curator Denise Murrell (Metropolitan Museum of Art), engages its audience in an exhaustive examination of the Harlem Renaissance and its dialogues with transatlantic modernist styles and artists. It is stunningly produced with 147 pages of full-color plates, 114 figures, and 11 essays by academics and curators. Murrell’s opening essay situates the New Negro movement within the transformational Great Migration, during which new Black cities were formed and African American artists sought to convey modern Black life in divergent styles and critical approaches. As the movement’s founding philosopher, Alan Locke encouraged artists like Aaron Douglas to mine such diverse sources as African sculpture, Black folk arts, and the Western modernist avant-garde of cubism, fauvism, and expressionism. Others, inspired by activist W. E. B. Du Bois, employed a more academic, naturalistic approach to their portrait and genre subjects, seeking to give a seriousness of depiction and purpose to their Black subjects, including those from the middle and upper classes. The catalog inventively explores how these styles intersected with politics, whether in gambling imagery, Neue Sachlichkeit directness, photography, queer identities, the Antilles, and parades. View on Amazon

2. Foreign invention of British Art: from Renaissance to Enlightenment
Primo, Leslie. Thames & Hudson, 2024

Primo (art historian) tells a sweeping story of British art that is simultaneously familiar (with chapters on celebrated artists like Hans Holbein, Peter Paul Rubens, and Angelica Kauffman) and refreshingly strange (with an emphasis on Dutch artists, from Marcus Gheeraerts to Daniël Mytens, and the Bohemian printmaker Wenceslaus Hollar). Above all, it is a recentering of the story of British art, in which artists from the Continent—and their impacts on English-born painters (from Robert Peake to William Hogarth and Joshua Reynolds)—are seen not as anomalies but logical, essential contributors to a body of work made in Britain across three centuries. The reader is in good hands with Primo, who seamlessly blends lively artists’ biographies with perceptive formal analysis, foregrounding dozens of jaw-dropping paintings from 1500 to 1800. While the book is aimed at an intelligent general audience, there are plenty of insights for serious students and experts alike. Primo excels in distilling big subjects into manageable units that feel rich and satisfying. His love for the material is infectious, and his voice radiates a thoughtful, unassuming affability.  View on Amazon

3. Of salt and spirit: Black quilters in the American South
Plummer, Sharbreon S. ed. by Sharbreon Plummer ALA Neal-Schuman, 2024

Of Salt and Spirit accompanies the exhibition of the same name at the Mississippi Museum of Art (MMA). Using Black feminist and womanist lenses, the book’s 95 exceptional images, three essays, and round table discussion explore how place, community, agency, and self-expression has led to important artistic developments for Black women quilters in the American South during the 20th and 21st century. The book is exemplary in showing diverse quilting approaches, considering the critical roles of race, gender, and class, and exploring making as knowledge production for cultural identity. Through the quilt as material culture, the book addresses traditions of storytelling as agents of memory and remembrance, and how this tradition preserves both craft and personal histories. The MMA houses one of the largest quilt collections in the South, many of which were donated by the American photographer Roland L. Freeman. Inclusion of some of Freeman’s documentation of Black southern women quilters illustrates his many personal connections with the quilters and enriches the quilts’ contexts. This powerful book is essential for a range of programs including art, ethnography, African American studies, and American history. View on Amazon

4. Visual disobedience: art and decoloniality in Central America
Walden, Lauren. Hong Kong University Press, 2024

Cornejo (Univ. of New Mexico) offers eye-opening analyses of how Central American artists engage in conceptual and visual strategies to combat racial and social injustices and gender and political violence resulting from colonialism and decades of civil war and political instability. Chapter 1 focuses on the responses of contemporary artists to the repression, disappearance, and genocide of the Indigenous Mayan people, who were political targets of Guatemala’s military dictatorship during its civil war (1960–96). Chapter 2 navigates the transcultural currents of this study in its discussion of feminism and feminist art history by focusing on the nonconformist dimensions of performance art in Central America. Chapter 3 navigates the complexities of migration, mobility, and geography in artworks responding to the geopolitics of emigration from Central America and anti-immigrant animus in the US. The final chapter addresses how artists have tackled the issues of citizenship, human rights, and legal protection resulting from criminalizing undocumented populations across the US, Mexico, and Central American borders. In sum, artists, as arbiters of visual disobedience, rally to restore justice, dignity, and humanity to the marginalized populations that have been abused by colonialism, racism, and violence, as explained in this much-needed study. View on Amazon.

5. Surrealism from Paris to Shanghai
Walden, Lauren Hong Kong University Press

This is the first English-language monograph to examine the brief yet vibrant history of Surrealism in Shanghai during the 1920s and 1930s. Drawing on archives, periodicals, private collections, and other primary sources, Walden (Birmingham City Univ., UK) presents a thorough analysis of the movement’s historical context, key artists and organizations, and their works, particularly in painting and photography. She explores the philosophical influences that shaped Surrealist expression in Shanghai, arguing that the movement adopted “a dialectical form,” intricately tied to both the Parisian Surrealist movement and traditional Chinese Daoism (p. 20). This synthesis, she contends, enabled Surrealism in Shanghai to navigate and reconcile the “multifarious contradictions of East/West, colonial/cosmopolitan, [and] ancient/modern” (p. 23). The movement’s diffusion across various formats, media, and groups forms the structural foundation of the book, and each case study is richly illustrated to highlight the complex interplay between traditional Chinese iconography and Surrealist aesthetics. Overall, this groundbreaking work provides invaluable insights into an understudied chapter of Chinese art history. Walden’s meticulous scholarship and inclusion of rare primary materials make this book an essential resource for scholars and researchers exploring the unique manifestations of Surrealism in China. View on Amazon.

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