How do art history and museum practice deal with international networks that decenter, complicate, or even bypass Western-centric geopolitical discourses of art history? This theme considers the relationship of historical precedents—such as the Non-Aligned Movement, Third Worldism, pan-Africanism, pan-Arabism, and related discourses of the Global South—to artistic production and circulation. While conventional markers of time, like 1945, 1968, and 1989, hold prominence in artistic and world history, new dates became of key interest to our research. 1955, the year of the Afro-Asian Conference at Bandung, is an important moment to consider in relation to artistic trajectories, just as 1961, the year of the Non-Aligned Movement Conference in Belgrade, is another preeminent historical example of an alternate nexus of connections of relevance to art of the period.
This theme departs from a 2016–17 C-MAP research focus on non-aligned networks, which was conceived as the Museum prepared for an extensive re-presentation of the permanent collection with the opening of new gallery space in 2019. Activities outside the Museum also provided fodder for our discussions. For example, Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945-65, an exhibition on view at Haus der Kunst in Munich from October 2016 to March 2017, illustrated possible avenues for complicating hegemonic histories of modern art. Across groups, C-MAP participants read broadly, invited speakers to the museum, and hosted internal workshops and seminars. Since then, the Theme was expanded to include other transgeographic and translocal connectivities, including connections that route through Western cosmopolitan centers, in turn revealing histories that are commonly left out of its dominant, westerncentric narratives.
Below is a list of texts that we found particularly applicable to the initial phase of our research.
James Barnor (b.1929) is a pioneering figure in Ghanaian photography. He documented the decolonizing processes and realities of the postcolonial context in Ghana, as well as the diasporic, metropolitan life in London.
Okamoto Tarō recollects his experiences in Paris between 1929 and 1940, discusses the Abstraction-Création movement and reflects on his time at the Sorbonne and Musée de l’Homme.
In the spirit of collectivity despite geographical distance, post invited contributions to create a “collective poem” based on the 1981 project Poema Colectivo Revolución by the artists’ group Colectivo 3.
Bauhaus’ active members constituted an international network that included architects and artists from several countries in Central Europe, among them the former Czechoslovakia. The Czech and Slovak connections to the Bauhaus can be studied from various perspectives, and this essay focuses on the role of print periodicals in this history.
In 2018, on the eve of the Bauhaus centenary, the exhibition BAUHAUS ↔ VKhUTEMAS: Intersecting Parallels in The Museum of Modern Art Library explored the intersecting parallels of these two sites of radical experimentation. Its selection of ephemera, publications, and correspondence highlights the extensive circulation of ideas and people between the two institutions. The video here features Anna Bokov’s presentation at a “post presents” event organized in relation to the exhibition on October 17, 2018.
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.
Alfred H. Barr, Jr. made a trip to Russia in 1927-28 to investigate the avant-garde, meeting with several Vkhutemas faculty while he was there.
This essay argues that the Bauhaus and VKhUTEMAS operated independently of each other, with choice moments of mutual exchange, focusing on the site of the avant-garde magazine as evidence of this.
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.
If the Caribbean has largely been subtracted from those better-known narratives of art and artists that dominate the Atlantic world, attempts to mend this failing have often brought about mixed results. How may we come to appreciate that Caribbean experience is integral to the historical development and understanding of modern and contemporary art?
MoMA’s C-MAP research program developed an extended focus on historical alliances such as Bandung, the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), pan-Africanism, pan-Arabism, and other south-south, east-east, and Third World nexuses. This conversation addresses such pasts, and their reverberations in the present, as they appear in Mohaiemen’s media-based practice.
The Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Initiative was a large-scale international traveling exhibition that doubled as a cultural exchange program.
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