1970s

5 Questions with Sabih Ahmed

This interview featuring Asia Art Archive (AAA) Senior Researcher Sabih Ahmed is part of post’s new theme Challenging the Global: C-MAP Experts Respond to 5 Questions. Here, Ahmed shares his thoughts on considering practices from the ground up and looking to lateral associations.

Selections from Mário Pedrosa: Primary Documents

Mário Pedrosa is widely considered Brazil’s preeminent critic of art, culture, and politics and is one of Latin America’s most frequently cited public intellectuals. Three selections from his writings included here (“The Vital Need for Art”; “Environmental Art, Postmodern Art, Hélio Oiticica”; “The New MAM Will Consist of Five Museums”) come from the anthology Mário Pedrosa:…

Cold War Modern: Raymond Loewy in the US and the USSR

Juliet Kinchin, Curator of Architecture and Design, in consultation with Alexandra Sankova, Director of the Moscow Design Museum, looks into the Cold War transnational connections in Raymond Loewy’s work. “Scallops St. Tropez” was Raymond Loewy’s contribution to a book of celebrity recipes published in 1958. The book’s editor, Helen Dunn, introduced Loewy, as “perhaps the…

Xu Bing’s “Series of Repetitions”

In 1975, near the end of the Cultural Revolution in China, artist Xu Bing relocated to the countryside for two years. The 1987-8 woodcuts in MoMA’s collection reflect this pastoral atmosphere while anticipating the artist’s later turn to Conceptual art. The set of woodcuts by Xu Bing (Chinese, born 1955) in MoMA’s collection depicts rural…

Photography and Modern Indian Architecture (1949-1990s)

Ram Rahman (photographer, designer, curator and activist) discusses key examples of modernist architecture in post-colonial India. Using photographic documentation and archival materials, he surveys the landscape of architects, designers, photographers, entrepreneurs, and intellectuals working (primarily in New Delhi) between the 1950s and 1990s. This presentation is excerpted from a closed-door session with MoMA’s C-MAP Asia…

Growing Up With Style

Artist and critic Luis Camnitzer discusses his personal relationship to the work and legacy of Joaquín Torres-García with special attention to his influential Taller and the recent exhibition at MoMA. I am at a point in my life when I have made complete peace with Joaquín Torres-García. It took a long time. Growing up in…

Species of Spaces in Eastern European and Latin American Experimental Art

Art historian Klara Kemp-Welch draws parallels between artists of disparate avant-gardes whose claims over spaces in the 1960s and 1970s were political gestures. How are we to navigate the historical fields of experimental art in state socialist Eastern Europe and under Latin American military dictatorships? What happens when pedagogy, poetry, sculpture, and sociability bleed into…