The essay analyzes the resonances between the Brazilian artist Rubem Valentim and the Sudanese artist Ibrahim El-Salahi by focusing on two paintings belonging to MoMA’s collection. Deploying hybridized semiotics and different strands of painterly abstraction, the artists critically express their stance towards race, nationhood, and universal human values.
The sculptures of Congolese artist Bodys Isek Kingelez (1948-2015) offer a vision of a future modernity that is beautiful, harmonious, and functional.
The names, cultures, and nationalities of African artists who influenced Picasso have historically been omitted from scholarship. Yet Picasso’s interest in African masks is well-known. In this essay, MoMA staff member Kunbi Oni charts the implications— and possibilities—that closer attention to the makers of such masks could shed on modern art.
The publication, Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents (2018), edited by Anneka Lenssen, Sarah Rogers, and Nada Shabout, offers an unprecedented resource for the study of modernism: a compendium of critical art writings by twentieth-century Arab intellectuals and artists. The selection of texts—many of which appear for the first time in English—includes manifestos, essays, transcripts…
In 1939, the South African artist Ernest Mancoba turned toward abstraction for the first time. Although this artistic development has been associated with Mancoba’s relationship to the CoBrA movement, Joshua Cohen argues that his embrace of abstraction also can be read as a turn away from the burdens of representation imposed by patrons upon a black South African artist.
When the Brussels Expo presented the exhibition Fifty Years of Modern Art in 1958, it unintentionally pioneered a more broadly global view of modern art, although not without some friction.
As part of an ongoing collaboration between the Jaipur Literature Festival and MoMA, this post Presents discussion “Patriot Games: Contextualizing Nationalism” explores nationalism around the world, with panelists Urvashi Butalia, Bouchra Khalili, Bruce Robbins, Eyal Weizman, and moderator Marie Brenner.
Bisi Silva discusses the history of the organization and how it serves to introduce theoretical discourse and build connections among practitioners across the continent.
The roundtable discussion focuses on international networks that decenter, complicate, or even bypass Western-centric models.
During 2016 and 2017, more than 80 scholars, artists, and curators visited MoMA as C-MAP guests. n conjunction with the 5 Questions interview series, we asked them a sixth question: How can MoMA better approach international artistic production and exchange?
“In your practice, how do you approach the challenges that arise when presenting art from contexts that are not familiar to your audience?” With the dominance of the biennial model and the aggressive globalization of art institutions, such a question is as pertinent to a curator as it ever was.
Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945-65, an exhibition on view at Haus der Kunst in Munich from October 2016 – March 2017, presents the period and its art as already global, multi-faceted, and modern.
