The Pacific as Agent: Beyond Atlantic-centered Narratives in the Contemporary Art of the Circum-Pacific World

There is no doubt that American art history, with few exceptions, is oriented toward the Atlantic, tied to European artistic traditions, and indebted to its historical methodologies. The northern Atlantic’s historical movements and artistic exchanges have provided universal models for modern art histories of North America and other societies across the Pacific world. This is so even for contemporary art history, which has claimed for some time to be concerned with globalization and empire and challenge Eurocentrism in Modernist narratives. We see this in monographs such as Serge Guilbaut’s How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art and in textbooks such as Art Since 1900. Even Terry Smith’s globally-conscious Contemporary Art: World Currents begins with the Euro-American avant-garde before setting off for Europe and Russia and eventually arriving in Asia. Such texts routinely omit, marginalize, and exoticize the Pacific Ocean, ignoring the Ocean’s profound agency that has shaped American imperialism and globalization and the critical roles played by Asians and Pacific Islanders in the peopling of the Americas. This panel invites papers that address the exclusion of the Pacific in art histories and reorient our gaze to a different horizon. It welcomes papers engaging such questions as: How can we picture the Pacific as an agent rather than the mere background for modern/contemporary art history? How might we remap continental and colonial geographies across the Pacific world? How can we move beyond tokenism to situate the work of Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, and diasporic subjects in American art history?