Color Corpus: Francis Newton Souza’s Black Art and Other Paintings скачать в хорошем качестве

Color Corpus: Francis Newton Souza’s Black Art and Other Paintings

In the summer of 1966, Francis Newton Souza’s exhibition Black Art and Other Paintings opened at London’s Grosvenor Gallery, unveiling a striking series of monochromatic black canvases. Painted between 1964 and 1965, these works initially appeared as austere, immersive fields of black, evoking the aesthetic universalism of postwar abstraction. Yet beneath the surface, faint traces of figures and landscapes emerged—perceptible only through a prolonged, bodily engagement with the act of seeing. Viewers had to bend, shift, and adjust their vision, enacting a form of optical labor that resisted passive perception. Why did Souza privilege this embodied mode of viewing over the presumed universality of vision that underpinned modernist abstraction? What did the color black signify for a South Asian artist navigating the intersections of colonial histories, decolonization, and diasporic identity? While black in the North Atlantic artistic imagination had long been linked to infinity, spirituality, and transcendence, Souza’s Black Art instead grounded the color in the urgent materiality of political struggle. Emerging in the wake of mid-century nonalignment and global civil rights movements, these paintings invite us to reconsider the entanglements of pictorial and political representation. They challenge us to reimagine the coordinates of decolonization and creative expression along a far more capacious axis than art history has traditionally acknowledged. About the Speaker: Atreyee Gupta is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, specializing in Global Modern Art and Modern and Contemporary South and Southeast Asian Art. Her research focuses on the aesthetic and intellectual networks that have shaped artistic practices across Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America since the twentieth century. Her forthcoming book, Non-Aligned: Art, Decolonization, and the Third World Project in India, ca. 1930–1960 (Yale University Press, 2025), examines the artistic and intellectual resonances of the Non-Aligned Movement and its roots in earlier Afro-Asian anti-colonial networks. She also co-edited Postwar—Towards a Global Art History, 1945–1965 (Duke University Press, 2025) with the late Okwui Enwezor. Her current project, One Hundred Years in Present Tense: Art in South Asian America, ca. 1893–1993, explores the intersection of Third World artistic and political movements with the history of South Asian diasporic art in the United States. Gupta’s research engages the “global” as a material, intellectual, and political formation shaped by decolonization. Her essays on global modernism, the Cold War, and the Non-Aligned Movement have appeared in The Art Bulletin, Art Journal, Third Text, October, and Yishu, among others. She has also contributed to discussions on global art history methodologies (Is Art History Global?, 2006), histories of the “global” (Artl@s Bulletin, 2017), and the challenges of translation in artistic discourse (28 Magazine, Gaza, 2018). At UC Berkeley, Gupta has led curatorial projects such as When All That Is Solid Melts into Air (Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, 2020) and the digital residency Crisis Creativity: Mithu Sen and Brendan Fernandes (2020), organized through the UC Berkeley South Asia Art Initiative. She co-founded the Initiative in 2018 and served as its co-director from 2020 to 2023. Affiliated with multiple interdisciplinary centers at UC Berkeley—including the Center for Contemporary India, the Center for Race and Gender, and the Institute for South Asia Studies—Gupta teaches courses on modern and contemporary Asian and Asian American art, decolonization, curatorial practice, and global modernisms.