Mediating Modernisms

Indigenous Artists, Modernist Mediators, Global Networks

By: Ruth B. Phillips (Editor), Norman Vorano (Editor)

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Paperback | 3 October 2025

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392 Pages

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22.86 x 15.24

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Mediating Modernisms explores the fertile exchanges between Indigenous artists living in colonial societies and the mid-twentieth mediators who carried ideas of aesthetic modernism and modernist primitivism into these worlds. Spanning South Africa, North America, Australia, Scandinavia, New Zealand, Brazil, Nigeria, and India, the case studies examine the mediators who played the role of mentors, friends, and patrons to Indigenous artists. Their relationships constituted complex mutual exchanges of aesthetic ideas and practices that inspired artists to create new fusions of modernism with Indigenous art traditions and that reflected their negotiations between affiliation to tradition and embrace of technology, newness, and metropolitan patronage. Challenging current understandings of modernist primitivism and elucidating the creation of the "global contemporary" art world, this volume reveals broader historical patterns, shared ideological and aesthetic dynamics, and the structural parallels that link mediators and Indigenous artists to globally circulating artistic ideas and geopolitical forces. Contributors. Peter Brunt, Roberto Conduru, Hanna Horsberg Hansen, Elizabeth Harney, Jyotindra Jain, Sandra Klopper, Ian McLean, Anitra Nettleton, Chika Okeke-Agulu, Ruth B. Phillips, Una Rey, Megan Tamati-Quennell, Nicholas Thomas, Norman Vorano, Mark Andrew White

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