Exhibitions Beyond Boundaries: Transnational Exchanges through Art, Architecture, and Design 1945-1985

Exhibitions Beyond Boundaries: Transnational Exchanges through Art, Architecture, and Design 1945-1985

After World War II, museum and gallery exhibitions, industrial and trade fairs, biennials, triennials, festivals and world's fairs increasingly came to be used as locations for the exercise of "soft power," for displays of cultural diplomacy between nations and as spaces for addressing areas of social and political contestation. Exhibitions Beyond Boundaries opens with a substantial introduction to the key debates, followed by case studies that advance the field of exhibition histories both geographically and methodologically, focusing on postwar transnational exchange and the wider networks engendered through exhibitions. Chapters trace relations across Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, the Pacific, and the United States of America, drawing on a range of approaches and perspectives, principally from art and design history but also from social, economic and political history, and museum studies. Featured case studies include the presentation of African-American Art at FESMAN '66 and FESTAC '77, the US's 1961 Small Industries Exhibition in Colombo, Israel's early appearances at the Venice Biennale, the Vatican Pavilion at the 1964-1965 New York World's Fair, and Hong Kong's Pavilion at Expo 70 in Tokyo. “As recent studies have shown, the history of exhibitions expands far beyond a disciplinary perspective of architectural, design, or cultural history. While scholarship on the history of international exhibitions between the 1850s and 1980s in the West is flourishing, the network of agents and institutions that has generated the consolidation of the global communication system still needs to be examined. This edited volume, entitled Exhibitions Beyond Boundaries: Transnational Exchanges through Art, Architecture, and Design 1945-1985 , edited by Harriet Atkinson, Verity Clarkson, and Sarah A. Lichtman, is a major contribution to a research field that has remained on the margins of mainstream scholarship... It will undoubtedly become a source of reference for future scholars, exploring the new, in-between disciplinary narratives of a globalized world.” ― Journal of Design History, March 2024 Harriet Atkinson is a historian of design and culture, and Researcher at the Centre for Design History at the University of Brighton, UK. She is currently Principal Investigator on the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project, '"The Materialization of Persuasion": Modernist Exhibitions in Britain for Propaganda and Resistance, 1933 to 1953' and has written extensively on the history and theory of exhibitions. She is the author of Festival of Britain (Bloomsbury, 2012) and co-editor, with Jeremy Aynsley, of The Banham Lectures (Bloomsbury, 2009), and with Verity Clarkson and Sarah A. Lichtman, of Exhibitions Beyond Boundaries (Bloomsbury, 2022). Verity Clarkson is a design historian and Senior Lecturer at the University of Brighton, UK. Her research explores post-war visual and material culture, investigating transnational connections between arts organizations, government bodies and audiences with a particular focus on the organization and reception of exhibitions. She has published on post-1945 exhibitions, trade fairs and art historiography in the context of British Cold War cultural diplomacy. She is co-editor, with Harriet Atkinson and Sarah A. Lichtman, of Exhibitions Beyond Boundaries (Bloomsbury, 2022). Sarah A. Lichtman is Assistant Professor of Design History at Parsons School of Design, The New School, USA, where she directs the Master of Arts program in the History of Design and Curatorial Studies, offered in affiliation with Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York, USA. She is co-editor, with Pat Kirkham, of Screen Interiors: From Country Houses to Cosmic Heterotopias (Bloomsbury, 2021); with Harriet Atkinson and Verity Clarkson, of Exhibitions Beyond Boundaries (Bloomsbury, 2022), and has published widely on design and gender. Lichtman is also currently Managing Editor of the Journal of Design History .