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 the 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, and the Institute for South Asia Studies. At the Institute for South Asia Studies, she co-founded the UC Berkeley South Asia Art Initiative in 2018 and served as its co-director from 2020 to 2023. 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.
Select publications
A Questionnaire on Global Methods, edited by George Baker and David Joselit, October 18 (Spring 2022): 44–9.
“Delhi Silpi Chakra: Art and Politics after the Radcliffe Line,” in Twentieth-Century Indian Art, edited by Partha Mitter, Parul Dave Mukherji, and Rakhee Balaram, 146–57. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2022.
“Francis Newton Souza’s Black Paintings: Postwar Transactions in Color,” The Art Bulletin, 103, no. 4 (2021): 111–37. Abridged version reprinted as “Francis Newton Souza’s Black Paintings: Postwar Transactions in Color,” in Inventing the Third World: In Search of Freedom in the Global South, 1947–1979, edited by Gyan Prakash and Jeremy I. Adelman, 155–80. New York and London: Bloomsbury Press, 2022.
“Not Aligned: Fragments from a Global History,” MMCA Studies, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul (2020): 52–65. [Published in Korean and English]
“Developmental Aesthetics: Modernism’s Ocular Economies and Laconic Discontents in the Era of Nehruvian Technocracy,” in Water Histories of South Asia: The Materiality of Liquescence, edited by Sugata Ray and Venugopal Maddipati, 185–208. New Delhi and London: Routledge, 2020.
“Can words (re)make worlds?” 28 Magazine 12 (2018): 118–125. [Published in Arabic] Reprinted as “Can words (re)make worlds?” New Alphabet School, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 2019. https://newalphabetschool.hkw.de/can-words-remake-worlds/
“Dwelling in Abstraction: Post-Partition Segues into Postwar Art,” To Draw the Line: Partitions, Dissonance, Art – A Case for South Asia, Third Text 31, no. 2-3 (2017): 433–57.
“Art History and the Global Challenge: A Critical Perspective,” Artl@s Bulletin 6, no. 1 (2017): 20–25.
“After Bandung: Transacting the Nation in a Postcolonial World,” Postwar – Art between the Pacific and Atlantic 1945 – 1965, Exh. Cat., Haus der Kunst, Munich, 2016, 632–37. Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2016.
“The Global, The Local, The Contemporary, The Collaborative,” in Rethinking Place in South Asian and Islamic Art, 1500–Present, edited by Deborah S. Hutton and Rebecca M. Brown, 78–93. London and New York: Routledge, 2016.
“Belatedness and Simultaneity: A Short History of Photography from India,” Postdate: Photography and Inherited History in India, Exh. Cat., San Jose Museum of Art, 2015, 24–35. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015.
“Ghar Pe/At Home in the Margins of Contemporary Art,” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 13, no. 2 (March/April 2014): 53–61.
“In a Post-colonial Diction: Postwar Abstraction as Aesthetics of Modernization,” Art Journal 72, no. 3 (Fall 2013): 30–47.
“Is Art History Global? Responding from the Margins,” in Is Art History Global? edited by James Elkins, 348–57. New York: Routledge, 2007. (Coauthored with Sugata Ray)
Recent Published Interviews and Broadcast:
- “5 Questions with Atreyee Gupta,” post: Notes on Modern & Contemporary Art Around the Globe, Museum of Modern Art, New York, February 17, 2017.
- “Art History and the Global Challenge: A Critical Perspective,” Artl@s Bulletin 6, no. 1 (2017): 20–25.
- “It is Difficult to Change the DNA of a Museum,” Conversation with Ming Tiampo, TRAFO – Beitäge zur transregionalen Forschung, Max Weber Stiftung – Deutsche Geisteswissenschaftliche Institute im Ausland, December 18, 2015.
- “Who is written into the history of India, of Europe, or of the world?” 5in10, TRAFO – Beitäge zur transregionalen Forschung, Max Weber Stiftung – Deutsche Geisteswissenschaftliche Institute im Ausland, April 13, 2015.
