Book launch: Biennial Boom: Making Contemporary Art Global

Book launch of Biennial Boom: Making Contemporary Art Global. Author Paloma Checa-Gismero in conversation with ICA Director Zoë Ryan.

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Please join us to celebrate the publication of Biennial Boom: Making Contemporary Art Global (Duke UPress, 2024) with a cocktail reception followed by a conversation between its author, Paloma Checa-Gismero (Art History, Swarthmore College), and Zoë Ryan (Director, ICA). This event is generously sponsored by the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. 

Biennial Boom traces an archeology of contemporary art biennials to uncover the processes that prompted these exhibitions to become the global art world’s defining events at the end of the twentieth century. The book shows how early-boom biennials reflected a post-Cold War optimism for a pacified world by which artistic and knowledge production would help mend social, political, and cultural divisions. In reflecting this optimism, biennials facilitated the conversion of subaltern aesthetic genealogies into forms that were legible to a nascent cosmopolitan global elite—all under the pretense of cultural exchange. By outlining how early biennials set the basis for what is now recognized as “global contemporary art,” Checa-Gismero intervenes in previous accounts of the contemporary art world in order to better understand how it became the exclusionary, rarified institution of today.

Use code E24CHGSM for 30% off when purchasing at dukepress.edu