Introduction

1989 saw the launch of the World Wide Web, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and with it the so-called end of the Cold War and the opening up of global economic markets. Since then, art historians across the world have increasingly engaged the concepts and realities of globalization and its impacts on the field. However, the move towards more global accounts and narratives of the history of art predates 1989. From the 1960s onwards, communities across the Global South saw waves of liberation movements, in which they fought to obtain greater freedoms, rights, and agencies to represent their own individual and collective voice and positions. Alongside these decolonization movements, the fields of gender and postcolonial studies grew to challenge the biases and injustices fundamental to the formation of canons of knowledge, such as art history. The essays and case studies collected in this volume, Art History in a Global Context: Methods, Themes, and Approaches, trace how art historians have responded to these changing social, political, and economic realities to move traditionally Western, white, and male-centric canons of art history toward more globally inclusive narratives.

In the historiography of global art histories, Linda Nochlin's essay "Why have there been no great women artists?" published in ARTnews in 1971 is a watershed moment.1 In calling out the systemic sexism that informed the formation of the canons of art historical knowledge, Nochlin's text broke the illusion and possibility of a single, linear canon of art history. Instead, she revealed the discipline and its institutions as exemplars of the values of the elite societies of Western European and United States that formed them in the nineteenth century. These values privileged narratives of the single, white, male artist genius, as well as the idea of a canon formed through a linear progression through time of Western art movements. The narratives formed, as Nochlin's essay illuminates, were almost entirely exclusionary of artists of color, female artists, those working outside of the cosmopolitan centers of Western European and United States, and artists who reflected identities and economic realities beyond those of the elite social classes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

As the first feminist critique of the discipline, Nochlin's essay broke down the door for others to critique the assumed biases of the canons of knowledge in art history's institutions. In the UK, Griselda Pollock's Differencing the Canon engaged the methods of social art history, psychoanalysis, and feminism to further reveal the depth of these biases within the canon of art history.2 Since Nochlin and Pollock's early writings, the canons of art have been productively critiqued. Soon after Nochlin and Pollock's writings began to question the implicit biases of art valued in the discipline of art history, the artist activist group, the Guerrilla Girls, were founded (1985). In their own words:

A bunch of female artists, incensed by an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art that included 165 artists but only 17 women, founded the Guerrilla Girls. Dubbing ourselves "The Conscience of the Artworld," we started making posters that bluntly stated the facts of discrimination and used humor to convey information, provoke discussion and to show that feminists can be funny.3

While the core issue of focus for the Guerrilla Girls is female representation in museum collections and exhibitions, their work also calls out the ethics of museum and exhibition funding, and the lack of inclusion of artists of color in museum collections and exhibitions globally. Educators, artists, curators, and critics continue the challenge to rewrite the narratives of art history to be inclusive of artists of all colors, genders, sexual identities, and social and political positions, and across diverse geographic and cultural realities.

In 1992, the Indian art critic and art historian, Geeta Kapur, delivered the Asbry Lecture at Clare Hall, Cambridge University titled "When was Modernism in Indian/Third World art?"4 In her lecture, which was later published as an essay, Kapur applied postcolonial thought to critique the idea that Modernism can be applied to art across the globe on equal terms. As Kapur points out in her essay, Modernism in India is a still-in-process and incomplete project of British colonialism. Kapur questions art historical canons that assume that the temporalities and movements of art in the West are relevant for the Global South. Her essay proved crucial for the application of postcolonial theory to the field of art history. Since the 1980s, in the context of exhibitions and arts institutions, curators in the Global South were deeply engaged with the application of postcolonial thought to their exhibition methods. In 1989, Gerardo Mosquera curated the third Bienal de la Habana as a global art exhibition that was organized from - and from the perspectives of - the Global South.5 Though previous Bienal de la Habana iterations were all positioned as exhibitions of the Third World, Mosquera's was the first to seek a truly global representation and gathering of artists. That same year in London, the Pakistan-born artist, critic, and curator, Rasheed Araeen, curated The Other Side, the first retrospective exhibition to look at British African, Caribbean, and Asian Modernism and their exclusion from art and art historical institutions. While exhibitions such as Les Magiciens de la Terre (1989, Centre Pompidou) also made the claim of being the first global or world art show, Mosquera and Araeen modeled how to position the center of one's artistic canon from the Global South and to curate works of artists primarily outside Western Europe.

Since the 1980s, two central yet highly divergent currents have led educators, artists, critics, scholars, art historians, and gallerists to seek or claim "global art histories": on the one hand, economic globalization has enabled a seemingly transnational art world whose main institutions are auction houses and art fairs that speak of global contemporary art; on the other hand, there is a growing strength among artists, educators, curators, and arts organizations that are striving to decolonize the discipline and its institutions by calling attention to the former exclusions of artists and artworks from beyond Western Europe and the United States and proposing new methods for the field. This dichotomy can lead to confusion for those trying to teach, curate, and study more global approaches to the discipline of art history. Adding to this confusion, in many texts and publications the definition of the term "global" being applied is rarely defined or clarified. Art History in a Global Context: Methods, Themes, and Approaches is intended to support teachers, students, and interested readers of the discipline who are invested in the hope for global art histories that contribute to the decolonization of our discipline and its institutions. In this, we support the work of many curricular innovations, curatorial programs, academic and museum collaborations, and emergent museum programs that are striving for this shared goal. These welcome programs and changes are a call to faculty, curators, critics, and scholars to transform the discipline of art history - and their practices and approaches to it - to reflect more globally inclusive narratives. However, there are still few textbooks that bring together historiographical accounts of the disciplinary shifts alongside case studies that offer models of diverse possible approaches. Art Histories in a Global Context responds to provide a tool for faculty and students, among others, who are actively seeking, even struggling, to understand "global art history" and the discipline beyond the founding Western canons.

To reflect the diversity of methods, narratives, and approaches this project takes, the current volume is written by a collection of authors from different linguistic, cultural, geographic, generational, and disciplinary perspectives. In collecting this series of essays and case studies, this volume attempts a historiography of global art histories in academic, museological and exhibition projects, as well as providing a set of case studies to bring to life some methodologies being employed in the field. Just as there is no single art history, Art History in a Global Contexts demonstrates and celebrates that there is no single method or narrative for global art history.

Similar to the field of global art history, this edited volume has been a work in progress for almost one decade. The initial work began at the annual College Art Association (CAA) meetings in the context of its International Committee, which Ann Albritton chaired for two years. Through the CAA International Committee Ann Albritton, Gwen Farrelly, and other members coordinated a series of CAA panel sessions focused on Global Art Histories. These panels: surveyed global art histories being formed through the work of emerging practices in India, South Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa; looked at the movements towards global narratives of art history in the study of early modern periods; and revisited the critical histories of Les Magiciens de la Terre and modern art museums' attempts toward more global narratives of modern art in their collections and exhibitions. Simultaneously, the CAA International Committee worked with the Getty Foundation to...