Pujan Karambeigi is a PhD candidate in art history at Columbia University, where he is completing a dissertation on the role of art in nation-building in the wake of decolonization. His work focuses on the institutional histories of modern and contemporary art. His research has been supported by several prestigious fellowships, including the Mellon International Travel Fellowship, the G.A.S. Foundation Fellowship, the Mellon-Marron Research Consortium Fellowship at the Museum of Modern Art, the DAAD fellowship, and other awards. His scholarship has appeared in ARTMargins, and his criticism has been published by The Nation, Jacobin, Texte zur Kunst, Art in America, Mousse Magazine, and elsewhere.
On September 29, 1967, William Rubin wrote to the Ford Foundation after attending a slide presentation by Frank McEwen. McEwen, the founding director of the National Gallery of what was then Southern Rhodesia (today Zimbabwe), had shown images of what Rubin described as “ateliers of native sculptors in Rhodesia—some of them actually out in the…
