Each essay in this groundbreaking volume—the first in an exciting new series, Art &—engages aesthetic and cultural debates that situate research on the arts at the intersection of various disciplines, including architecture, film, literature, curatorial and museum studies, and the arts of performance. Reflecting the series’ goal to engage with different cultural contexts and time periods, newly commissioned essays from emerging and established scholars address subjects ranging from medieval dance and ancient Assyrian reliefs to expressions of gender embodiment and the art of the Afro-Atlantic. First-person narratives ground theoretical considerations of the theme. 

Reflecting a commitment to embracing the book form as a space for art itself, Art & Histories includes a detachable accordion-fold insert with a work from Miami-based artist Glexis Novoa. One of his signature horizon lines unites Washington, DC, and the artist’s native Havana. Meticulous drawings executed on travertine marble entangle the two cities and their monuments, symbolizing both violent and triumphant histories and their ideological reversals.

Art & Histories is available in paperback and open-access ebook formats.

Initiated in 2007, this project is a collaboration of the National Gallery’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts in association with the Archivio di Stato di Roma and the Accademia Nazionale di San Luca. In addition to a repository of historical material and a bibliography, the project includes scholarly essays published online in English and Italian. 

Volume 1 includes “The Cameral Obligation in the Documents of the Accademia di San Luca” by Antonia Fiori (translated by Sabine Eiche) and “Notaries and the Accademia di San Luca, 1590–1630” by Laurie Nussdorfer.

Volume 2 includes “Girolama Parasole among the “Illustrious” in the Portrait Collection at the Accademia di San Luca” by Susan Nalezyty and “Printmaking and the Progression of the Arts in Rome: The Interested Case of Girolama Parasole” by Evelyn Lincoln.

This ambitious volume delves into the institutional history of art academies. These academies provided practical training for artists as well as spaces for theoretical discussions and debates as they emerged across Europe and the Americas around 1600 and through their proliferation in the 18th and 19th centuries. Many were founded under official auspices, with state, ecclesiastical, or monarchical support for the teaching of “fine arts.” Others originated through private patronage or expanded beyond painting, sculpture, and architecture, competing or merging with trade schools. Complex models for teaching art evolved around the world across an array of institutions, as the European academy model responded to differing regional conditions, including colonial contexts.

Seventeen essays from leading and emerging scholars examine academies from Brazil, Colombia, Italy, France, Germany, Mexico, Turkey, the United States, and beyond. In examining academies of art both within specific political and historical moments and across transnational boundaries, the authors ask nuanced questions about the institutions’ goals and rules around membership, addressing issues of race, class, and gender. The picture of art academies that emerges is one of malleable institutions that wrote, reformed, and adapted policies according to local needs.

Academies of Art in Europe and the Americas, 1600–1900 is available in paperback and open-access ebook formats.
 

Water and its transmutations link the contributions in Art & Water, the second volume in the series Art &. The series situates the study of art at the intersection of various disciplines—here, they include modernist literature, poetry, film, and both natural and built environments. Essayists use water to address hydrolatry practices in India; ritual objects and practices of enslaved Afro-Surinamers; traces of millstones in the architecture of Seville; and visualizations of sea-level change in the 19th-century United States. Their research places art within broader conversations in the humanities considering a water-oriented rather than terrestrial historical framework.

Continuing the series’ tradition of exciting book design, an enclosed poster from Brazilian multimedia artist Aline Motta addresses ancestry, memory, and belonging across the Black Atlantic while compellingly conjuring water’s capacity to transform, bring together, and renew.

Art & Water is available in paperback and open-access ebook formats.

Art & Abilities invites readers to rethink specific physical and cognitive limitations not as deficits, but as essential tools for expanding aesthetic horizons. By dropping the prefix dis-, the volume reframes these conditions as diverse ways of being that spark radical innovation. Contributors investigate how sensory differences—from blindness and stuttering to nonverbal autism—redefine both creative processes and the spaces they inhabit. Spanning subjects ranging from an ancient Sanskrit treatise and impressionism to modern architectural and typographic design, the essays shift the perspective from individual impairment toward communal care and multisensory engagement. In dialogue with broader developments in the humanities, including the medical and health humanities and critical disability studies, Art & Abilities moves beyond seeing art as a mere reflection of our world, embracing it as an active force that shapes how we experience culture. 

Continuing the series’ tradition of innovative book design, a contribution from New Zealand–based artist Pelenakeke Brown merges Indigenous Sāmoan concepts with keyboard mark-making in the book’s endpapers and bookmarks, turning the physical object and standard bookbinding technology into a space attuned to complex, relational identities. By challenging outdated, ableist frameworks within art history and beyond, Art & Abilities reveals a world where creativity is a shared human experience, informed by the unique world-making possibilities of every body and mind.

Art & Abilities will be available in print and open-access ebook formats.