Atreyee Gupta

Biography

As an art historian and curator, Atreyee Gupta examines global modernism, with a special focus on the aesthetic and intellectual flows that have cut across Asia, Africa, West Asia and Latin America from the twentieth century onwards. Her research and teaching interests converge on visual and intellectual histories of twentieth-century art; intersections among the Cold War, Non-Aligned Movement and art after 1945; and the question of the global more broadly.

She is Assistant Professor in the Department of History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley (2017–present) and co-director of the South Asia Art Initiative at the Institute for South Asia Studies (2020–present). Previously, she was the Jane Emison Assistant Curator of South and Southeast Asian Art, Minneapolis, Institute of Art (2016–2017).

Her ongoing projects include the co-edited The Postwar Reader (with Okwui Enwezor, Duke University Press, under contract) and the monograph Non-Aligned: Decolonization, Modernism, and the Third World Project, India ca. 1930–1960 (in progress). Other publications include ‘Francis Newton Souza’s Black Paintings: Postwar Transactions in Color’ (The Art Bulletin Issue 4, 2021); ‘Not Aligned: Fragments from a Global History” (MMCA Studies, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, 2020); ‘Developmental Aesthetics: Modernism’s Ocular Economies and Laconic Discontents in the Era of Nehruvian Technocracy’ in Water Histories of South Asia: The Materiality of Liquescence (Routledge, 2020); ‘Dwelling in Abstraction: Post-Partition Segues into Postwar Art’ (Third Text 31, no. 2-3, 2017).

Her research has been supported by grants and fellowships from a range of international institutions, including the Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin, Haus der Kunst Museum, Munich, Getty Research Institute and the Social Science Research Council.

She earned a BA in Art History from the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, Vadodara and a PhD from the Department of Art History at the University of Minnesota.

Born in 1980 in Calcutta (now Kolkata), Gupta currently lives and works in Oakland, USA.

SAF participation:
March Meeting 2023