Overview

Mediating Modernisms explores the fertile exchanges between Indigenous artists living in colonial societies and the mid-twentieth mediators who carried ideas of aesthetic modernism and modernist primitivism into these worlds. Spanning South Africa, North America, Australia, Scandinavia, New Zealand, Brazil, Nigeria, and India, the case studies examine the mediators who played the role of mentors, friends, and patrons to Indigenous artists. Their relationships constituted complex mutual exchanges of aesthetic ideas and practices that inspired artists to create new fusions of modernism with Indigenous art traditions and that reflected their negotiations between affiliation to tradition and embrace of technology, newness, and metropolitan patronage. Challenging current understandings of modernist primitivism and elucidating the creation of the “global contemporary” art world, this volume reveals broader historical patterns, shared ideological and aesthetic dynamics, and the structural parallels that link mediators and Indigenous artists to globally circulating artistic ideas and geopolitical forces. Contributors. Peter Brunt, Roberto Conduru, Hanna Horsberg Hansen, Elizabeth Harney, Jyotindra Jain, Sandra Klopper, Ian McLean, Anitra Nettleton, Chika Okeke-Agulu, Ruth B. Phillips, Una Rey, Megan Tamati-Quennell, Nicholas Thomas, Norman Vorano, Mark Andrew White

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9781478029007

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Reviews

""Mediating Modernisms is a groundbreaking project that substantially adds to our understanding of the emergence of artists practicing Indigenous modernisms by looking closely at the role intermediaries played in their training and exposure to metropolitan currents of modernism, as well as providing access to institutions, patrons, and markets for modernist Indigenous artists. This extraordinary volume offers a fundamental reorientation of and challenge to prevailing conceptions in studies of modernist art practices.""--Iftikhar Dadi, author of ""Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia"" ""With a wide and deep scope, this collection examines the role of mediators in the two-way street between modernizations made by Indigenous artists and those that constitute non-Indigenous artistic modernism in the twentieth century. Mediating Modernisms is a welcome realization of a long and carefully conducted research project on a key topic within the history of art, conducted by exemplary scholars and on a world-wide scale matched by few others of its kind.""--Terry Smith, author of ""Art to Come: Histories of Contemporary Art""

Author Information

Ruth B. Phillips is Professor Emerita of Art History at Carleton University. Norman Vorano is Associate Professor and Queen’s National Scholar in Indigenous Art and Visual Culture at Queen’s University.

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