10.3 Interactions Within and Across Cultures in Global Contemporary Art

Not long ago, "modern art" in textbooks meant New York, Paris and London. That has changed fast. Former colonies became independent nations with their own art scenes, the Cold War ended, China became a major art market, and the internet let anyone see work made anywhere. Many artists in this topic were born in one country and work in another, so their art is about living between cultures.

Artists have also pushed back on whose stories art history tells. Since the 1960s, women, artists of color, Indigenous artists and LGBTQ artists have pointed out how often the "great masters" were all white men, and how a supposedly neutral, universal view of art left many people out. Feminist and postcolonial thinking gave critics tools to ask who is shown, who is missing and who gets to speak.

The Swing (after Fragonard) (Yinka Shonibare; 2001 CE; mixed-media installation). Shonibare, a British-Nigerian artist, recreated Fragonard's 1767 Rococo painting as a life-size headless mannequin on a swing, kicking off a slipper. Her dress is made of Dutch wax-print fabric, made in Europe for Indonesian buyers but adopted as a symbol of African identity. The missing head recalls aristocrats guillotined in the French Revolution, and the cloth links the wealthy leisure of the painting to colonial trade.

Pink Panther (Jeff Koons; 1988 CE; glazed porcelain). Specialist craftsmen made this large figurine of a partly undressed blonde woman, styled like a pin-up, hugging the cartoon Pink Panther. Koons merges the luxury European porcelain figurine with American celebrity and cartoon culture, and asks whether kitsch belongs in museums.

Lying with the Wolf (Kiki Smith; 2001 CE; ink and pencil on paper). On large sheets of paper, a nude woman lies embracing a wolf. Smith reworks Little Red Riding Hood, where the wolf is a threat, and Saint Genevieve, patron saint of Paris, said to tame wolves, into an image of trust between woman and nature.

Trade (Gifts for Trading Land with White People) (Jaune Quick-to-See Smith; 1992 CE; oil and mixed media on canvas). Smith, of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation, made this in the 500th anniversary year of Columbus's arrival. A canoe floats over a collage of Native newspaper clippings and drips of paint. Above, a line of trinkets, from sports-team items with Native mascots to toy tomahawks and headdresses, mocks the old trade of cheap goods for land, as if offering them back.

Old Man's Cloth (El Anatsui; 2003 CE; aluminum and copper wire). Anatsui, a Ghanaian artist in Nigeria, joined thousands of flattened liquor-bottle caps with copper wire into a shimmering metal cloth that recalls kente. Liquor recalls the trade goods once exchanged for enslaved people. It hangs in different folds every time it is installed.

Pisupo Lua Afe (Corned Beef 2000) (Michel Tuffery; 1994 CE; mixed media). Tuffery, a New Zealand artist of Samoan heritage, riveted flattened corned-beef tins into a life-size bull. "Pisupo," from "pea soup," is the Samoan word for canned food. Imported corned beef replaced traditional foods in ceremonial gifts, bringing health problems and dependence.

Preying Mantra (Wangechi Mutu; 2006 CE; mixed media on Mylar). Kenyan-born Mutu collaged a reclining hybrid female figure, part human and part animal, from cut magazine images. She lies on a patterned blanket resembling Kuba cloth, holding a snake. The work critiques how media and colonial history have portrayed Black women's bodies.

Rebellious Silence, from the Women of Allah series (Shirin Neshat (artist); photo by Cynthia Preston; 1994 CE; ink on photograph). Neshat left Iran before the 1979 revolution and returned in 1990 to a changed country. She appears in a black chador, a rifle barrel dividing her face, which is covered in Persian calligraphy of a poem by an Iranian woman writer. It neither simply praises nor condemns, but questions Western and Iranian views of Muslim women.

En la Barberia no se Llora (No Crying Allowed in the Barbershop) (Pepon Osorio; 1994 CE; mixed-media installation). Puerto Rican-born Osorio turned an empty Hartford, Connecticut storefront into a barbershop crowded with chairs, photos, flags, toys and religious objects, made with local Puerto Rican residents. Videos, including men crying, question the rule that boys learn in places like the barbershop: men don't cry.