Duke University Press continues to be a leader in publishing cutting-edge art scholarship with this soon-to-be-released title by Paloma Checa-Gismero, Biennial Boom: Making Contemporary Art Global (Duke University Press, 2024), the index for which was recently compiled by Southwest Humanities. In this wide-ranging monograph, Checa-Gismero “traces an archeology of contemporary art biennials to uncover the processes that prompted these exhibitions to become the global art world’s defining events at the end of the twentieth century.” Taking as her focus the initial instances of three well-known international biennials—the Bienal de La Habana, inSITE, and Manifesta—the author shows “how these biennials reflected a post-Cold War optimism for a pacified world by which artistic and knowledge production would help mend social, political, and cultural divisions,” ultimately arguing that such “biennials facilitated the conversion of subaltern aesthetic genealogies into forms that were legible to a nascent cosmopolitan global elite—all under the pretense of cultural exchange.” This important contribution to contemporary art historical work will be of interest to scholars of globalization and neoliberalism, cultural theorists and critics, as well as art historians. Biennial Boom is scheduled to be published on 6 August 2024. For more information about this essential new work, please take a look at the publisher’s website here.
SOUTHWEST HUMANITIES 