Eleventh Global Studies Conference

Abstract

On January 27, 2017, the President of the United States of America issued an Executive Order to ban citizens of seven countries from entering the US: Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. The Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) responded by installing works by artists of those seven countries throughout the Museum, replacing canonical works by Pablo Picasso and other western artists –often for the first time– with rarely (if ever) seen works from their own collection. These works revealed that the modernist art acquired at MoMA between the 1930s and 1960s engaged forms and languages of modernism outside of the so-called western art world. Thus far, these works and the internationalist turn they reflect have been considered anomalous to MoMA’s central aims, goals, and aesthetic values of the period, which is otherwise known for its codification of the canon that gives primacy to white, male artists of the western art centers. This paper probes this lost, or submerged, history of internationalism to understand more fully the character, vision, effects, and aesthetics of MoMA’s internationalism and to inquire as to the viability of this moment as a point of comparative study for the role and intent of museums in the age of globalization.