This essay is a review of art historian Chika Okeke-Agulu's Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria (Duke University Press, 2015). The book offers a chronicle of artistic theories, practices, and institutions during Nigeria's independence years (1957–67) amid the historical frames of Third World liberation, African decolonization, and Cold War realpolitik. The essay explores in particular how Postcolonial Modernism revisits and explores the thematic of “national culture”—the concept presented by Frantz Fanon in 1959, with long-lasting impact on theories of postcolonial arts—in the (decentralized) Nigerian art world, with a focus on the synthetic studio practices of members of the Zaria Art Society. Fanon's “two-fold becoming” model of national culture, which implies catalyzing links to international liberation movements, impacts not only Okeke-Agulu's narrative of a generational opposition to the preceding cultural paradigms of Negritude, but also—the essay argues—the writing of global modernist history at-large.

In International Pop , the curators Darsie Alexander and Bartholomew Ryan propose a new reading of Pop that establishes a set of relationships marked by difference. Theirs is a world riven by disconnection over flow, in which migrations and networks are frequently translated, blocked, or interrupted. While the US mass media provided source material for many artists it was often reworked to other ends. While many narratives of Pop have stressed distance and irony here we witnessed a new version of the moment that made a virtue out of intimacy, politics, and desire.

This essay reviews the three-venue exhibition ¡Presente! The Young Lords in New York, which opened in July of 2015 at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, El Museo del Barrio and the Loisaida Center in the Lower East Side. It assesses the three significantly different approaches of these institutions to capturing the visual and performative legacy of the Young Lords, a radical decolonial Nuyorican group of the early 1970s whose political activism engaged communities to transform space through artistic practices. In critically surveying these three approaches, this essay means to explore the cultural, art-historical, and political stakes of exhibitions like ¡Presente! , in which different kinds of loyalty and conceptions of legacy come into contact.

In tracing the development of Cuban cultural policy between the years of 1959 and 1976, Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt conceptualizes that history, and its ideas about the role of culture in society, as a potential “antidote” to contemporary, neoliberal policy paradigms. However, in its intense focus on the positions articulated by the revolutionary leadership, her account of that history shortchanges the ideas of those who held critical or opposing views. This review locates Gordon-Nesbitt's approach in the context of debates about early revolutionary cultural policy, and in relation to the current tendency in cultural policy, which thoroughly instrumentalizes creativity and culture.

By placing on view a large selection of objects recently acquired by the New York Museum of Modern Art, the exhibition Incident Transgressions: Report on “Transmissions: Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America 1960–1980” (September 5, 2015 to January 3, 2016) sought to situate artistic practices from Latin America and Eastern Europe within a discursive model of cross-cultural and aesthetic transmission. However, the exhibition marginalized an account of the specific relations between these objects in favor of a more encompassing global curatorial narrative. While seeking to outline the parameters of the exhibition, and its implications in regard to contemporary trends in art history and museology, the text aims to highlight some of the instances of transmission and contact, both real and imagined, between the objects displayed.

This review of Antipolitics in Central European Art: Reticence as Dissidence under Post-Totalitarian Rule 1956–1989 by Klara Kemp-Welch situates the book in the existing literature and discussions of post-war unofficial art in Central Europe and assesses the book's significant contributions, which include a transnational approach, an extensive analysis of six oeuvres created by unofficial artists through their socio-political contexts, and a rigorous interpretive framework built around the titular concept of “antipolitics,” which Kemp-Welch borrows from the Hungarian dissident writer György Konrád. The review, however, also suggests that applying a framework rooted in the writings of political dissidents to unofficial art risks reducing complex and ambiguous works too much to local politics and thus reinforcing Cold War assumptions about art from the former East.

This essay critically examines the exhibition Leben mit Pop: Eine Reproduktion des Kapitalistischen Realismus, which was first staged in 2013 at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf. This exhibition surveyed the emergence of Capitalist Realism as a regional form of Pop Art in West Germany during the 1960s. The article evaluates Leben mit Pop as a modification of established art historical scholarship and as an intervention within ongoing debates in curatorial practices and critical cultural theory. It aims to resituate Capitalist Realism relative to the consolidation of the North Atlantic art market, arguing that this allows for a more incisive account of its relevance to contemporary art.

This article discusses the relationship between Native American art and place as a curatorial strategy in the recent exhibition Before and After the Horizon: Anishinaabe Artists of the Great Lakes. It is argued that while the Anishinaabe connection to the Great Lakes region as a spiritual, cultural, and epistemological center is essential to the art of the exhibition, the curators present this place as timeless and unchanging. The result is an interpretation of the Native American relationship to place that is idealized, ahistorical, and inaccurate to the tumultuous legacy of colonialism. Rather, as the art on display makes clear despite the curatorial context, the relationship to place is dynamic and changing. Other recent exhibitions of indigenous art show that these curatorial decisions were not unavoidable and that Native American art can be exhibited to show that its relationship to place has adapted and changed while still being maintained.

This article comparatively discusses the 14th International Architecture Biennale of Venice, directed by Rem Koolhaas, and the pilot exhibit and architectural design of Louvre Abu Dhabi undertaken by Jean Nouvel, in the context of recent big art events and world museums. Curatorial, historiographical, and installation strategies in these venues are differentiated in order to think through the question of displaying a global history of architecture. I make a distinction between the curatorial practices carried out in the Fundamentals and Absorbing Modernity sections of Venice's Central and National Pavilions as curator-as-author and curators-as-chorus, which I map onto recent historiographical and museum design practices, including the Louvre Abu Dhabi, to discuss the geopolitical implications of its installation strategies. I also argue that six methodological perspectives for displaying architectural history emerge from the curator-chorus of Absorbing Modernity, which can be identified as survey, nationalist history, case study, thematic history, archive metaphor, and deferment, all of which contribute to and raise questions about the ongoing project towards a global architectural history. After suggesting a difference between “world” and “global” history of architecture, I call for a more geopolitically conscious and cosmopolitan global history of architecture, by exposing the intactive bonds between the history of modernism and of colonization, as well as the continuing legacy of geopolitical and economic inequalities that operate in such venues.

This review concerns Osbel Suarez, Cold America: Geometric Abstraction in Latin America (1934–1973), an exhibition presented by the Fundación Juan March in Madrid, Feb 11–May 15, 2011 and Alejandro Crispiani's book Objetos para transformar el mundo: Trayectorias del arte concreto-invención, Argentina y Chile, 1940–1970 [ Objects to Transform the World: Trajectories of Concrete-Invention Art, Argentina and Chile, 1940–1970 ] (Buenos Aires: Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, 2011). The review briefly assesses the state of the literature on Latin American Geometric Abstractio and analyzes these two publications from 2011, which stand precisely for traditional approaches and new developments in the field.

This article reviews Pamela M. Lee's Forgetting the Art World (2012) and TJ Demos's Return to the Postcolony (2013). Reviewer examines the texts' shared concern with self-reflexive art practices that in different ways work to expose their own conditions of existence with respect to globalization. Both authors, according to the review, engage with art as a privileged medium that is capable of materializing knowledge about globalization and that thereby holds some potential to shape, mediate, or confront its trajectory. After appraising both the originality and limitations of Lee's and Demos's approaches, reviewer concludes with an outline of the core issues and challenges that globalization poses for art-historical methods.

This essay analyzes the recent book Fifteen Ways to Leave Badiou , produced by the Egyptian curator Bassam El Baroni for the Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum (ACAF). For the project, which was carried out in 2011, concurrent with the events of the Arab Spring, El Baroni invited a group of artists from the Middle East to produce works responding to Alain Badiou's text “Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art”. The essay has three objectives, the first of which is to situate Fifteen Ways… relative to the ongoing encounter between contemporary global art and Western philosophy. Next, it considers how the works in the project can be said to stage an immanent critique of Badiou's aesthetic theory. Lastly, the essay examines the book within the context of the popular uprisings of 2011.

This article examines the cultural, economic and political context of the Art Dubai art fair and its symposium the Global Art Forum, as well as the commercial, educational and curatorial role of the recent flourishing of galleries in Dubai. It unpacks the complex connections that exist in the MENA region between art as a critical practice, and art a marker of modernity and a commodity of hyper-capitalist consumption. The article evaluates the consequences of importing internationalist and activist art discourses to a conservative and absolutist monarchies in the Gulf with curtailed freedom of speech and of expression.

This article looks back on the consequence, for a scholar of the art of the western canon, of a two-day conference held at the Clark Art Institute titled “In the Wake of the Global Turn: Propositions for an Exploded Art History Without Borders.” The author reflects on the pedagogical challenges of the ethical and political project of reimagining the limits of the discipline in both geographic and theoretical terms in order to accommodate issues of the untranslatable, incommensurable, and irresolvable when it comes to visual cultures from around the world. As well, the article touches on the ways in which attempts to “expand” the discipline through efforts at writing a global art history have merely reentrenched outmoded ideas about cultural power rather than dislocated the most limiting terms of art historical analysis.