[Event update: This event is postponed until further notice]

Did artists who came of age in the postcolonies of the Third World, or what is now known as the Global South, approach avant-gardism—the “experimental exercise of freedom,” in the Brazilian art critic Mário Pedrosa’s terms—in ways that we are yet to fully comprehend?

This lecture is part of the Visual & Media Cultures Colloquium (VMCC) Series, presented by graduate students in the History of Art & Visual Culture Department at UC Santa Cruz.
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ADMISSION
[Event update: This event is postponed until further notice]
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PARKING 
Lot 124 & 125 are the closest parking lots to the event
Parking is by UCSC permit or ParkMobile
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ABOUT THE LECTURE

In a 1965 poem dedicated to the avantgarde Indian painter Jagdish Swaminathan (1928–1994), Mexican poet Octavio Paz (1914–1998) connected dissonant temporal and spatial arcs of decolonization through an astounding juxtaposition: the blue-black Indian Indigenous mother goddess who was first assimilated into the Brahmanical canon as Kali in the fifth century only to emerge in the eighth century as the principal deity in esoteric Tantra and the dark-skinned Aztec fertility goddess Tonantzi,n whose transformation into the fair protectress Virgin Mary of Guadalupe occurred in the 16th century after the Spanish conquest of Mesoamerica.

Both Paz’s words and Swaminathan’s paintings cipher deeply felt, albeit transhistorical, attachments that not only conjoined far-flung countries of India and Mexico in the wake of the 1955 Asian-African conference at Bandung, Indonesia but also produced particular aesthetic effects that provoked a rejection of the frailties of the Third World political project in favor of an anterior time that, once imaginatively actuated, returned to the third world avant-garde all the revolutionary energies allegedly lost to the 1960s North Atlantic neo-avant-garde. This is the hypothesis that this talk follows.

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ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Atreyee Gupta is Associate Professor of Global Modern Art and South and Southeast Asian Art in the History of Art Department at the University of California, Berkeley. Her area of expertise is Global Modernism, with a special emphasis on the aesthetic and intellectual flows that have cut across Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America from the twentieth century onwards. Gupta’s books include Non-Aligned: Art, Decolonization, and the Third World Project in India, ca. 1930–1968 (Yale University Press, forthcoming in 2025), which focuses on the artistic and intellectual resonances of the Non-Aligned Movement during the Cold War era and the interwar anti-colonial Afro-Asian networks that preceded it; and Postwar Revisited—A Global Art History, 1945–1965 (co-edited with late Okwui Enwezor, Duke University Press, forthcoming in March 2025). Tentatively titled One Hundred Years in Present Tense: Art in South Asian America, ca. 1893-1993, her current book project links Third World political, artistic, and cultural currents to trace the long diasporic arc of South Asian art in the United States.
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IMAGE CREDIT: Jagdish Swaminathan, The Emerging Sign, 1965, oil on canvas, 59.7 x 88.9 cm.