Prompting a reevaluation of canonical understandings of twentieth century art history, Mapping Modernisms provides an analysis of how indigenous artists and art from Africa, Oceania, and the Americas became recognized as modern.

Mapping Modernisms brings together scholars working around the world to address the modern arts produced by indigenous and colonized artists. Expanding the contours of modernity and its visual products, the contributors illustrate how these artists engaged with ideas of Primitivism through visual forms and philosophical ideas. Although often overlooked in the literature on global modernisms, artists, artworks, and art patrons moved within and across national and imperial borders, carrying, appropriating, or translating objects, images, and ideas. These itineraries made up the dense networks of modern life, contributing to the crafting of modern subjectivities and of local, transnationally inflected modernisms. Addressing the silence on indigeneity in established narratives of modernism, the contributors decenter art history's traditional Western orientation and prompt a re-evaluation of canonical understandings of twentieth-century art history. Mapping Modernisms is the first book in Modernist Exchanges, a multivolume project dedicated to rewriting the history of modernism and modernist art to include artists, theorists, art forms, and movements from around the world.

Contributors. Bill Anthes, Peter Brunt, Karen Duffek, Erin Haney, Elizabeth Harney, Heather Igloliorte, Sandra Klopper, Ian McLean, Anitra Nettleton, Chika Okeke-Agulu, Ruth B. Phillips, W. Jackson Rushing III, Damian Skinner, Nicholas Thomas, Norman Vorano
 

"The wide-ranging and meticulously researched essays in Mapping Modernisms focus on indigenous artists from Inuit, Zulu, M?ori, Pueblo, and Aboriginal cultures, among others, around the world. . . . What emerges from Mapping Modernisms is that Modernism was not a process of diffusion from Western centers to non-Western peripheries, as it is traditionally constructed in Western narratives, but rather a complex web of mutual inuences and exchanges across the globe."