Research Expertise and Interest

global modern art, modern and contemporary South and Southeast Asian art

Research Description

Atreyee Gupta’s 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. She is the author of Non-Aligned: Art, Decolonization, and the Third World Project in India, ca. 1930–1960 (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. With late Okwui Enwezor, she has also edited Postwar—Towards a Global Art History, 1945–1965 (Duke University Press, forthcoming in 2025). Her current book, tentatively titled One Hundred Years in Present Tense: Art in South Asian America, ca. 1893–1993, links Third World political, artistic, and cultural currents to the long diasporic arc of South Asian art in the United States.

Especially invested in the question of the “global” as materially, intellectually, and politically constellated around decolonization, Gupta has published essays on global modernism, the Cold War, and the Non-Aligned Movement in journals such as The Art Bulletin, Art Journal, Third Text, October, and Yishu. Other publications have focused on the methodologies for a global art history (James Elkins, ed., Is Art History Global? 2006); the myriad histories of the “global” (Artl@s Bulletin, 2017); and the question of translation that emerges therein (28 Magazine, Gaza 2018).

Gupta’s curatorial projects at the University of California, Berkeley include When All That Is Solid Melts into Air (Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, 2020), which she co-curated with BAMPFA Director and Chief Curator Lawrence Rinder and undergraduate and graduate students. Other curatorial projects include the born-digital Artists’ Residency Crisis & Creativity: Mithu Sen and Brendan Fernandes (October 25–October 27, 2020), which was organized under the aegis of the UC Berkeley South Asia Art Initiative during the COVID-19 shelter-in-place mandate.

At UC Berkeley, Gupta is affiliated with the Center for Contemporary India, Center for Race and Gender, Center for Latin American Studies, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Center for Southeast Asia Studies, the Institute for South Asia Studies, and the South Asia Art Initiative. In the History of Art Department, she teaches courses on modern and contemporary Asian and Asian American art and architecture, along with thematic seminars on South and Southeast art, art and decolonization, curatorial practice, and global modernisms more broadly.