In Grime, Glitter, and Glass: The Body and the Sonic in Contemporary Black Art, Nikki A. Greene offers a compelling contribution to the growing sonic turn in contemporary art and visual studies. This turn, emerging over the past two decades, reflects an increasing engagement with sound as both a creative medium and a critical framework for thinking through culture, history, identity, and representation. At the time of writing, I note Christine Sun Kim’s recent survey at the Whitney Museum of American Art; Jennie C. Jones’s minimalist stringed sculptures on the Metropolitan Museum of Art rooftop; Torkwase Dyson’s eight-channel soundscape playing at Brooklyn Bridge Park; and Camille Norment’s sonic sculptural installation in the long-awaited Studio Museum in Harlem’s new building.

Greene’s study situates itself within this evolving sonic landscape, examining the work of Renée Stout, Radcliffe Bailey, and María Magdalena Campos-Pons through a richly interdisciplinary lens that foregrounds the sonic as a methodological tool through which the artist case studies articulate identity, memory, and resistance. The titular metaphors—grime, glitter, and glass—act as material and conceptual registers through which the African diaspora resonates visually. Building on the work of Fred Moten and Alexander Ghedi Weheliye as well as more recent contributions by Tina M. Campt, Greene explores how the artist case studies engage with migration, spirituality, and institutional critique, offering a multisensory approach to art historical analysis.

Structured as a “metaphorical photomontage” (9), Grime, Glitter, and Glass adopts a musical architecture: a “prelude” introduces the conceptual framework, followed by three “verses” dedicated to each individual artist case study, and a concluding “coda” (vi–vii). Similarly, Greene’s formal analyses of specific works use sonic analogies such as rhythm, modulation, and resonance, enabling the reader to apply Campt’s concept of Listening to Images (Duke University Press, 2017). Greene’s writing is intentionally digressive, weaving together archival research, exhibition history, musical analysis, and sense studies. A curated Spotify playlist provides an auditory companion to the text.

In the first chapter, Greene examines Renée Stout’s work through the lens of grime, conceptualized as both surface texture and an African diasporic feminist aesthetic. She analyzes the interplay between Stout’s photorealist paintings and her nkisi-inspired sculptures, particularly Fetish #2 (1988), a plaster cast of the artist’s body incorporating monkey hair, cowrie shells, and coins. Greene traces the influence of the Nkisi nkondi figure held by the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, where Stout grew up, and Robert Farris Thompson’s book Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (Vintage Books, 1984), which left an indelible mark on a generation of Black visual artists in the United States by charting the resonance of west and central African cultures in the Americas, hitherto historicized to be lost in the transatlantic trade of enslaved peoples. By examining the surface “muck” (36) of Stout’s sculptures in contrast to European psychoanalytic theories on fetishism and commodity fetishism, Greene claims these works as sites of cultural resonance and subversion. Her etymological exploration of grime ranges from olfactory funk in Kikongo to the “feminist funk power” (15) of Betty Davis.

The second chapter focuses on Radcliffe Bailey’s use of glitter as well as other materials to evoke African diasporic memory and spirituality. Greene’s analysis is anchored in Bailey’s retrospective Memory as Medicine (2012) exhibited at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, where she is Associate Professor of Art History; the chapter serves as both an homage and a eulogy following the artist’s recent passing. Works such as the sculpture Pullman (2010), a blue-black glitter-covered heart encased in glass, is examined in relation to the Underground Railroad and Bailey’s family history during the 1800s, the Reconstruction-era legend of John Henry, the early twentieth-century Pullman Company, and the work of conceptual artist David Hammons. Greene grounds the artist’s aesthetics in a Black diasporic sonic and visual tradition by considering a variety of artworks in relation to musical touchpoints: including Pullman in terms of reverse migration as narrated in hip-hop group Arrested Development’s song Tennessee (Chrysalis, 1992), the music video for which features Bailey drawing and scratching over archival lynching photographs reproduced on pine plywood; Transbluesency (1999), a mixed media painting featuring an inherited tintype photograph and nkisi medicinal pouch, in relation to Duke Ellington and Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones; and Windward Coast (2009–12), an installation of piano keys, a plaster bust, glitter, and a shell playing a recording of the piano keys falling in Bailey’s studio with regard to Sun Ra, Bailey’s favorite musician.

Chapter three turns to María Magdalena Campos-Pons, analyzing how her performances and installations serve as embodied diasporic archives that foreground Afro-Cuban identity through glass as well as Cuban music and sugar. Greene highlights how Campos-Pons evokes the African diaspora in predominantly white institutional spaces through collaboration, collective movement, the invocation of figures such as the Yoruba deity Yemayá, and gift-giving. Clearly, the composer and jazz musician Neil Leonard has played an invaluable role in Campos-Pons’s incorporation of sound into her work. Greene details how Leonard traveled to Matanzas and heard the Cuban rumba ensemble Los Muñequitos de Matanzas prior to meeting Campos-Pons; joined in her procession into the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York with batá drummers and brass players for Habla LAMADRE (2014); and commissioned Rafael “El Niño” Navarro Pujad to fill the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem Massachusetts with recorded songs for Campos-Pons’s Alchemy of the Soul, Elixir for the Spirits (2015), a mixed-media installation featuring blown and cast glass, which acted as a distillery emitting the sweet smell of sugar. Greene also narrates an important story about Black feminist sisterhood and institutional capital, detailing how Campos-Pons performed at the Guggenheim at the invitation of Carrie Mae Weems and how the designer Zinda Williams created Campos-Pons’s structured spiral, white dress to mimic the architectural icon. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Campos-Pons’s installations and performances at documenta 14 and the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, framing them as radical acts of political and cultural reclamation. The book’s “coda” introduces the artwork of Alexandria Smith, suggesting future directions for the study of sound and embodiment in painting and printmaking.

While Greene’s interdisciplinary approach is innovative and generative, the text occasionally misses opportunities for deeper engagement. The sonic landscape of Matanzas facilitated by Leonard proves a stronger diasporic aural undercurrent in Campos-Pons’s installations and performances than, say, Celia Cruz’s Azúcar, Azúcar (1970), despite the multisensory aesthetics. Similarly, an exploration of grime as in the low bass, rhythm-heavy transatlantic genre of popular music influenced by UK garage, dancehall, and hip-hop would add to Greene’s consideration of Stout’s sculptures, as would an engagement with Valerie Cassel Oliver’s exhibition The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse (Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 2021) overall. Lastly, more nuanced distinctions could have been made about the time and place of African and African diasporic philosophy and spirituality with which the contemporary artists engage, such as Stout with the nineteenth-century Kingdom of Kongo in Central Africa and the West African Yoruba deity Èṣù; Bailey with twentieth-century Mende masks from Sierra Leone; and Campos-Pons with the syncretic Santería developed in Cuba. As a result of, and despite, its circuitousness, Grime, Glitter, and Glass: The Body and the Sonic in Contemporary Black Art is a compelling and generative contribution to art history. It will also be of particular interest to scholars of visual culture, sound studies, Black feminist theory, and diaspora studies. Greene’s methodological emphasis on the sonic opens new pathways for understanding the multisensorial dimensions of contemporary art.