In the past few decades, cultural institutions in the West have increasingly felt pressure to return artifacts acquired through questionable means during the colonial era.
colonialism
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How Cartography Helped Make Colonial Empires
If you want to claim a territory, it’s good to have a map to show what’s yours. Defining Lines: Cartography in the Age of Empire at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University examines how maps were a form of political control and public perception by Western colonial powers from the 16th and 20th centuries.
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The Real Reason(s) Indians Are Obsessed with Switzerland
BERKELEY, Calif. — Alicia Eler’s recent Hyperallergic post “Searching for the Switzerland of India” raises a host of issues regarding the colonial legacies at play in modern India without dissecting any of them.
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Indigenous Action Highlights British Museum’s Role in Colonialism
Last Friday, January 11, Idle No More London staged a UK solidarity action in London’s British Museum. Standing in solidarity with the Idle No More movement, which originated last November with the First Nations, Metis, and Inuit communities in Canada, members of Idle No More London chose the museum that is widely believed to be the largest repository of colonial artifacts in the world as the site for their protest action.
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Adrift in Shanghai’s Sin City
(Liu Dao) or island6, a Shanghai-based international collective of “multimedia artists, performers, writers, curators and tech-geeks” personify the aspirations of contemporary China by skirting verboten political flashpoints and keeping their content short, sweet, flirtatious, erotic and electronic.
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The Many Views of Christopher Columbus
October 12, observed yesterday as a holiday, is most commonly known as Columbus Day in the United States, but is also recognized as Dia de la Raza throughout Latin America, as well as Indigenous People’s Day. Fraught with controversy, the various iterations of this holiday reflect the range of perspectives on Christopher Columbus and his legacies. The Columbus Day of my youth celebrates the heroic “discoverer” of the Americas, playing up mythical stories of his genius on insisting the world was round, and often neglecting the icky bits about the ensuing genocide of the indigenous peoples of the Americas.
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Brooklyn Museum’s New Acquisition Shines Light on Unlikely 18th C Racial Revolutionary
The Brooklyn Museum has an extensive collection of Spanish Colonial painting, but the institution’s relatively new curator of European art Richard Aste knew the museum lacked the same depth in their British colonial works. Recently, Brooklyn’s premiere fine art institution announced the acquisition of a new work by Agostino Brunias, “Free Women of Color with their Children and Servants in a Landscape” (ca. 1764-1796), which will partially fill that gap but there is something else about the painting that makes it interesting to the contemporary viewer, namely its multicultural subjects.