Art in the Encounter of Nations is the first book-length study of interactions between the Japanese and American art worlds in the early postwar years. It brings to light a rich exchange of opinions and debates regarding the relationship between the art of the two nations. The author begins with an examination of the Japanese margins of American Abstract Expressionism. Taking a contrapuntal approach, he investigates four abstract painters: two Japanese artists who moved to the United States (Okada Kenzo and Hasegawa Saburo) and two European Americans whose work is often associated with Japanese calligraphy (Mark Tobey and Franz Kline). He then looks at the work of two young scions of the calligraphy and pottery worlds of Japan -- Morita Shiryo and Yagi Kazuo -- and argues that their radical innovations in these ancient arts were, in part, provoked by their sense of a threat posed by Euro-American modernity. The final chapter is devoted to the career of Japanese American sculptor and designer Isamu Noguchi, whose feeling of affiliation was directed to both the U.S. and Japan in shifting ratios through a series of public and private places, each posing unique opportunities for exploring national distinctions.

A powerful imagining by two Native creators of a first encounter between two very different people that celebrates our ability to acknowledge difference and find common ground. Based on the real journal kept by French explorer Jacques Cartier in 1534, Encounter imagines a first meeting between a French sailor and a Stadaconan fisher. As they navigate their differences, the wise animals around them note their similarities, illuminating common ground. This extraordinary imagining by Brittany Luby, Professor of Indigenous History, is paired with stunning art by Michaela Goade, winner of 2018 American Indian Youth Literature Best Picture Book Award. Encounter is a luminous telling from two Indigenous creators that invites readers to reckon with the past, and to welcome, together, a future that is yet unchartered.

Published on the occasion of an exhibition of the same name held at Tate Modern, London, July 12-October 22, 2017; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas, February 3-April 23, 2018; and Brooklyn Museum, New York, September 7, 2018-February 3, 2019.

The news media have given us potent demonstrations of the ambiguity of ostensibly truthful representations of public events. Jordana Mendelson uses this ambiguity as a framework for the study of Spanish visual culture from 1929 to 1939--a decade marked, on the one hand, by dictatorship, civil war, and Franco's rise to power and, on the other, by a surge in the production of documentaries of various types, from films and photographs to international exhibitions. Mendelson begins with an examination of El Pueblo Español, a model Spanish village featured at the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona. She then discusses Buñuel's and Dalí's documentary films, relating them not only to French Surrealism but also to issues of rural tradition in the formation of regional and national identities. Her highly original book concludes with a discussion of the 1937 Spanish Pavilion, where Picasso's famed painting of the Fascist bombing of a Basque town--Guernica--was exhibited along with monumental photomurals by Josep Renau. Based upon years of archival research, Mendelson's book opens a new perspective on the cultural politics of a turbulent era in modern Spain. It explores the little-known yet rich intersection between avant-garde artists and government institutions. It shows as well the surprising extent to which Spanish modernity was fashioned through dialogue between the seemingly opposed fields of urban and rural, fine art, and mass culture.

Traditionally, relations between Europe and Asia have been studied in a hegemonic perspective, with Europe as the dominant political and economic centre. This book focuses on cultural exchange between different European and Asian civilizations, with the r

The first major history of the glamorous art biennial. Biennials have proliferated across the globe since the end of the Cold War and have now stabilized at about 200 a year. While this quintessentially contemporary form has significant roots in the world expositions of the 19th century, Jones argues that the biennial is also the platform for an important new aesthetic shift. Moving away from a focus on visual looking in the mid 20th century, the art world today embraces experience: art fairs give the feel of closeness and spaciousness, crowds, and they engage all our senses, even taste. Jones argues that the dominance of installation art and the simultaneous rise of biennialsor recurring art fairsneed to be examined as joint phenomenamutually reinforcing and linked to specific geo-political and aesthetic conditions. From the rise of tourism to the flows of art commerce, Jones hatches a new way to track the development of international art fairs in nearly every corner of the globe: from the early world fairs of London, Paris, Chicago, and New York to art fairs proper in Venice, Sao Paulo, Havana, Berlin, Lyon, and Beijing, as well as Kassel s Documenta, Whitney Biennial, and moreall explained through a rapidly evolving aesthetics of experience that has never, until now, been addressed in such a substantial way."

This multidisciplinary book offers the first broad ecocritical review of American art and examines the environmental contexts of artistic practice from the colonial period to the present day. Tracing how visions of the environment have changed from the Native-European encounter to the emergence of modern ecological activism, more than a dozen scholars and practitioners discuss how artists have both responded to and actively instigated changes in ecological understanding.

Focusing on travel images and cross-cultural exchange, examines interactions between the Ottoman Empire and Europeans from 1774 to 1839, highlighting mutual dependence and reciprocity.

How global contemporary art reanimates the past as a resource for the present, combating modern art's legacy of Eurocentrism. If European modernism was premised on the new—on surpassing the past, often by assigning it to the “traditional” societies of the Global South—global contemporary art reanimates the past as a resource for the present. In this account of what globalization means for contemporary art, David Joselit argues that the creative use of tradition by artists from around the world serves as a means of combatting modern art's legacy of Eurocentrism. Modernism claimed to live in the future and relegated the rest of the world to the past. Global contemporary art shatters this myth by reactivating various forms of heritage—from literati ink painting in China to Aboriginal painting in Australia—in order to propose new and different futures. Joselit analyzes not only how heritage becomes contemporary through the practice of individual artists but also how a cultural infrastructure of museums, biennials, and art fairs worldwide has emerged as a means of generating economic value, attracting capital and tourist dollars. Joselit traces three distinct forms of modernism that developed outside the West, in opposition to Euro-American modernism: postcolonial, socialist realism, and the underground. He argues that these modern genealogies are synchronized with one another and with Western modernism to produce global contemporary art. Joselit discusses curation and what he terms “the curatorial episteme,” which, through its acts of framing or curating, can become a means of recalibrating hierarchies of knowledge—and can contribute to the dual projects of decolonization and deimperialization.