Description:
From the fluttering fabric of a tent, to the blurred motion of the potter's wheel, to the rhythm of a horse puppet's wooden hooves--these scenes make up a set of mid-1980s art exhibitions as part of the U.S. Festival of India. The festival was conceived at a meeting between Indira Gandhi and Ronald Reagan to strengthen relations between the two countries at a time of late Cold War tensions and global economic change, when America's image of India was as a place of desperate poverty and spectacular fantasy. Displaying Time unpacks the intimate, small-scale durations of time at work in the gallery from the transformation of clay into ceramic to the one-on-one, personal encounters between museum visitors and artists.
Using extensive archival research and interviews with artists, curators, diplomats, and visitors, Rebecca Brown analyzes a selection of museum shows that were part of the Festival of India to unfurl new exhibitionary modes: the time of transformation, of interruption, of potential and the future, as well as the contemporary and the now.
Brief description: Rebecca M. Brown is a scholar of colonial and post-1947 South Asian art and visual culture at Johns Hopkins University. She has served as a consultant and a curator for modern and contemporary Indian art for the Peabody Essex Museum, the Walters Art Museum, and the Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation. She chairs the Advanced Academic Program in Museum Studies at Johns Hopkins. Her courses are often cross-listed with Political Science, East Asian Studies, Museums and Society, and Women, Gender and Sexuality. Her publications include Goddess, Lion, Peasant, Priest: Modern and Contemporary Indian Art from the Shelley and Donald Rubin Collection (exhibition and catalog, 2011), Gandhi's Spinning Wheel and the Making of India (Routledge 2010), Art for a Modern India, 1947-1980 (Duke University Press 2009), A Companion to Asian Art and Architecture (coedited with Deborah S. Hutton, Wiley-Blackwell 2011), and Asian Art (coedited with Deborah S. Hutton, Blackwell 2006).
Review Quotes:
"Brown. . . boldly unfurls novel ways of thinking through, and with, exhibitory practices of the past, the present, and the future."
-- "caa.reviews"