A Global Museum

How does art history deal with the radical diversity of objects it encompasses?

The sculptures of Congolese artist Bodys Isek Kingelez (1948-2015) offer a vision of a future modernity that is beautiful, harmonious, and functional.

The Kochi-Muziris Biennale has produced three exhibitions since its inception in 2012, with its fourth edition opening in December 2018. This essay sites the biennale within the historical context of the twin port cities of Kochi and Muziris, as well as within the recent burgeoning of the biennial as a international format for viewing “global” art and representing local identities.

The recent documentary “Reading Architecture” (2017) explores the contemporary history of design in India across five practices in Mumbai. Sameep Padora, one of five featured architects, is the founder of Sameep Padora & Associates (sP+a), a Mumbai (India) based architecture studio. In 2016, he initiated sPare, a research arm of the studio.

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.

Despite protests and petitions from leading architects and architectural historians across the world, the Hall of Nations was surreptitiously demolished overnight on April 23-24, 2017. In this essay, Stierli bids farewell to architect Raj Rewal’s iconic building—a hallmark of modernist architecture in post-independence India.

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 this 5 Questions video, art historian Gina McDaniel Tarver, a specialist in modern and contemporary Colombian art, comments on the importance of local immersion to challenge categorical thinking.

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.

Film historian Ashish Rajadhyaksha discusses major moments in the study of early Indian cinema, a history that is punctuated by fires both on the screen and off the screen.

In 2016, The Museum of Modern Art received a major gift from the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, which added more than 100 works of modern art by major artists from Latin America to the Museum’s collection and established the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute for the Study of Art from Latin America.