Exhibition reviews should be 4000-8000 words in length, and include up to 6 images. Generally, there are three kinds of exhibition reviews that we publish:
— Reviews of a major exhibition, including the catalogue, that raises new scholarly issues or issues related to material culture, visual culture, American history, or museum studies
— Reviews of a museum, or several related museums (or exhibitions), that raise particular issues in relation to American studies
— Shorter reviews of single exhibitions, without catalogues, of 2500 – 4000 words, with up to 3 images
Protocol
You can contact the museum or institution and tell them you are reviewing for American Quarterly, and request that they send you a catalogue and press materials. We can also do this for you if you prefer. You can request a walk-through of the exhibition and discuss the exhibition with the curatorial staff (or the education and marketing departments), if you think it appropriate.
Guidelines
Reviews should situate the exhibition and/or museum in the broader context of American culture, and make clear why the exhibition and/or museum is important to issues of American studies.
Reviews should provide information about the importance and/or success of the exhibition, its public reception (where of interest), education and/or pedagogical elements (where of interest), design elements, curatorial staff, funding sources of the exhibition (where relevant to, for instance, the content or point of view of the exhibition). In some cases, it is worth noting how long a project took to come to fruition; in other cases, the debate about an exhibition is its most interesting element.
Since most of the AQ’s readers will not have seen the exhibition, it is important to provide enough description to situate them within the space. In some cases, the trajectory of the exhibition, the wall text, and other design elements, such as multimedia or particularly interesting spatial designs, are worth analyzing. However, you should feel under no obligation to exhaustively describe all elements of the exhibition.
Reviews should assess the scholarship underlying the exhibition by situating it in relation to scholarship in the field. If there is a catalogue, the relationship between the catalogue and the exhibition should be discussed – does the exhibition effectively communicate the principal contents and arguments of the catalogue?
Images
Exhibition press kits often include photographs. Otherwise, most museums and exhibition spaces will have images available. AQ will pay for the cost of images, if there is any (for reviews, this is usually just for reproduction costs). Increasingly, these are digital images rather than photographs.
We can accept illustrations either as black and white photographs or as electronic scans (this is preferred). Be sure that you have proper permission for all artwork and send copies of all permissions granted to AQ.
Expenses
If you travel to see the exhibition, AQ will reimburse you up to $250 for travel expenses.
Formatting Text
The review should begin with a header listing the full name of the exhibition, the institution, and the curator and/or designer, the dates of the exhibition, and the catalogue information if applicable.
Example
Embroidery, Enterprise, and the Modernist
Vision in Gilded Age America
Mary W. Blanchard
Rutgers Center for Historical AnalysisCandace Wheeler: The Art and Enterprise of American Design, 1875-1900. Curated by Amelia Peck and Research Assistant Carol Irish, Department of American Decorative Arts, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. October 10, 2001-January 6, 2002.
Candace Wheeler: The Art and Enterprise of American Design, 1875-1900. By Amelia Peck and Carol Irish. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001). 276 pages. $45.00 (cloth).
The exhibition review should be submitted as an attached file in either Word or Word Perfect to american.quarterly@usc.edu . All text should be in 12-point Times New Roman font. Everything, including footnotes and block quotes, should be double-spaced. Please format your manuscript using Chicago Manual of Style’s 15th edition. Please see the AQ Formatting Instructions.
