Journal of Curatorial Studies - Volume 5, Issue 3, 2016

This article offers an analysis of two little-known 1951 exhibitions that marked a new era for American cultural diplomacy with postwar Germany. Contemporary Berlin Artists was circulated across the United States, while Amerikanische Malerei: Werden und Gegenwart (‘American Painting in the Making and Now’) introduced contemporary American art to Berliners. Both exhibitions were organized by the American Federation of Arts (AFA) in collaboration with the United States High Commissioner for Germany. The article examines how the AFA employed contemporary art in its exhibitions to advance American cultural and diplomatic goals for West Germany.

Focusing on publicly funded international travelling exhibitions of Inuit art during the 1950s and 1960s, this article examines how Canadian civil servants came to recognize contemporary Inuit art as a ‘soft power resource’, an attractive cultural force with moral authority in the international arena, which they could use to fight communism as part of the cultural Cold War. The article takes into consideration how the discourses of modernism and primitivism shaped the reception of Inuit sculpture in Eastern Europe, and the way those discourses had political resonances that coincided with the government’s policy of validating the nationalist aspirations of Europeans while sharing carefully mediated glimpses of Canadian life, among other objectives. Seeking to understand how Joseph Nye’s concept of a ‘soft power resource’ can provide a useful way of understanding the reshaping of Canada’s cultural policies after World War II, specific reference is made to the ways that Indigenous arts were entangled in Canada’s foreign objectives during this era.

From 1964 to 1966, the United States Information Agency toured an exhibition of modern artworks titled Contemporary American Indian Paintings to Greece, Turkey, Iran, Algeria and Israel. Among other exhibitions of Native American art sent abroad during the Cold War, the paintings were intended to counter Soviet critiques of US colonization with a message of benevolent modernization, while deflecting international attention away from Indigenous decolonization struggles. This article positions the tour between federal Indian termination policy and Cold War propaganda, considering how Contemporary American Indian Paintings quietly slipped Native American diplomatic concerns into a global arena shaped by imperialism.

At Expo 67 in Montreal, the US government sought to counter negative world opinion by sponsoring a public diplomacy display that emphasized American culture. While US technological achievements were championed in a space exhibit, the bulk of the Creative America exhibition celebrated American popular culture, a break from the typical focus of such displays upon economic and military power. Not only did Creative America celebrate Hollywood, folk art and pop music, it also offered a subtle critique of American mass culture, a particular point of emphasis in the pop art featured in American Painting Now. This embrace of pop art marked a shift in US government cultural diplomacy away from abstract expressionism, an art form supported for its embrace of freedom. In highlighting pop art, American cultural diplomacy emphasized freedom of expression in a different way: the freedom to criticize one’s own society.

This article focuses on 49th Parallel: Centre for Contemporary Canadian Art (1981–92), a New York City-based art gallery that was conceived as a diplomatic ‘pilot project’ by Canada’s Department of External Affairs to focus on ‘new’ and ‘experimental’ Canadian contemporary art. Drawing from policy papers, memorandums and grant applications, I examine the gallery’s conceptual framework governing three key exhibitions, particularly the assumptions informing the gallery’s deployment of contemporary art as a tool of soft power within a climate of ascendant neoliberal capitalist ideologies. These records of the gallery’s mandate and programming reveal mounting pressures to increase the presence of Canadian art in the international art scene.

VACÍO MUSEAL: MEDIO SIGLO DE MUSEOTOPÍAS PERUANAS (1966–2016) Curated by Gustavo Buntinx, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Lima, 24 June – 25 September 2016

THE PRESENT IN DRAG 9th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, curated by DIS (Lauren Boyle, Solomon Chase, Marco Roso and David Toro), various locations in Berlin, 4 June – 18 September 2016

TALKING CONTEMPORARY CURATING, TERRY SMITH New York: Independent Curators International (2015), 344 pp., Paperback, ISBN: 978-0-91636-590-5, US $19.95

CURATORIAL DREAMS: CRITICS IMAGINE EXHIBITIONS, SHELLEY RUTH BUTLER AND ERICA LEHRER (EDS) Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press (2016), 386 pp., Paperback, ISBN: 978-0-77354-683-7, $39.95

CULTURES OF INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS 1840–1940: GREAT EXHIBITIONS IN THE MARGINS, MARTA FILIPOVÁ (ED.) Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate (2015), 358 pp., Hardcover, ISBN: 978-1-47243-281-0, £75.00

CITIES, MUSEUMS AND SOFT POWER, GAIL DEXTER LORD AND NGAIRE BLANKENBERG Washington, DC: American Alliance of Museums Press (2015), 264 pp., Paperback, ISBN: 978-1-94196-303-6, US $29.95