The 20th Annual Nelson Wu Memorial Lecture on Asian Art and Culture: "Elegant and Hallucinatory: Designing the Future at the Festival of India"

The annual Nelson Wu lecture, co-sponsored by East Asian Studies and the Saint Louis Art Museum.

 

In 1985, America found itself inundated with exhibitions and events focused on India, from historical stone sculpture exhibitions to colorful Kathakali dance performances and one-on-one henna demonstrations. India was everywhere. In New York, at the Smithsonian’s Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, a group of curators and visionaries invited important European and American designers to work together with craft workshops in India to produce fashion, furnishings, textiles, and fantastical interiors. They were designing the future, a future the organizers saw as driven by the handicraft skills and creativity found across the Indian subcontinent. Ettore Sottsass, Mary McFadden, Frei Otto, Bernard Rudofsky, Charles Moore, and many other well-known designers worked directly with artisans in India to produce everything from a spectacular black-and-white stone dining table to elaborately embroidered shoes, damascened tableware, and a hand-painted tent lit by candles and decorated with galloping horses. This was Golden Eye, one of over seventy art exhibitions that took place during the Festival of India in the U.S. At the intersection of art, global trade, design, craft, fashion, and the museum, this lecture invites you to meet the visionaries, curators, designers, artists, and entrepreneurs who staged this India-driven, collaborative future.

 

Rebecca M. Brown is Associate Professor in the History of Art at Johns Hopkins University, chairs Hopkins' Advanced Academic Program in Museum Studies, and currently serves as editor-in-chief of Art Journal. Her work engages colonial and post-1947 South Asian art, visual culture, museum studies, and politics. Her research on architecture and urban space in colonial India has been published in the Journal of Asian Studies, Res, the Journal of Urban History and Archives of Asian Art. Her first book, Art for a Modern India, 1947–1980 (Duke 2009) engages the question of modernity for India’s visual culture in the mid-twentieth century. Gandhi's Spinning Wheel and the Making of India (Routledge 2010) traces the genealogy of the spinning wheel from the early nineteenth century to its use in the anti-colonial movement. Her most recent book, Displaying Time: The Many Temporalities of the Festival of India (University of Washington Press 2017), examines the role of duration and time in the art exhibitions of the 1985–86 Festival. She has published articles in a range of venues including Art Bulletin, Art Journal, Interventions, Screen, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, and South Asian Studies. Her work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Council for American Overseas Research Centers, the British Academy, the Social Science Research Council, and the American Institute of Indian Studies.