department of history of art, UC Berkeley
South Asia Art Initiative, Institute for South Asia Studies, UC Berkeley
Dr. Atreyee Gupta is Assistant Professor of Global Modern Art and South and Southeast Asian Art in the History of Art Department at the University of California, Berkeley. She was trained at the University of Minnesota and the Faculty of Fine Arts, Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, India. Her area of expertise is Global Modernism, with a special emphasis on the global aesthetic and intellectual flows that have cut across Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America from the twentieth century onwards. Her research and teaching interests cluster around visual and intellectual histories of twentieth-century art; the intersections among the Cold War, the Non-Aligned Movement, and art after 1945; new media and experimental cinema; and the question of the global more broadly.
Gupta is presently completing Non-Aligned: Decolonization, Modernism, and the Third World Project, India ca. 1930–1960, a book 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. Her coedited books include Postwar – A Global Art History, 1945–1965 (with Okwui Enwezor).
In the past, Gupta has published essays on postcolonial art, the Cold War, and the Non-Aligned Movement in journals such as Art Journal, Yishu, Third Text, and MMCA Studies of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul. 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” (“Art History and the Global Challenge: A Critical Perspective,” Artl@s Bulletin 6, no. 1); and the question of translation that emerges therein (28 Magazine 12). She has spoken internationally on the Non-Aligned Movement and the visual arts and delivered keynotes at conferences, museums, and nonprofit organizations.
Before coming to Berkeley in 2017, Gupta was the Jane Emison Assistant Curator of South and Southeast Asian Art at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Her curatorial projects at University of California, Berkeley include When All That Is Solid Melts into Air (Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, March 4–May 24, 2020), which she co-curated with BAMPFA Director and Chief Curator Lawrence Rinder and undergraduate and graduate students in the seminar The Folk and/in the Modern: Critical Concepts + Curatorial Practicum in Twentieth-Century South Asian Art. The exhibition draws on her research to tell the story of the momentous social and artistic transformations that unfolded in the relationship between the “modern” and the “folk” within the political and historical context of postcolonial India.
Affiliated with the Institute for South Asia Studies and Center for Southeast Asia Studies, Gupta 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.
Gupta’s research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, New York; the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; the Goethe Institut and Haus der Kunst, Munich; the Art Histories and Aesthetic Practices at Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin, an initiative of the Kunsthistorisches Institut Florenz, Max-Planck-Institut; and the Townsend Center for the Humanities, the University of California, Berkeley.