From Internationalizing the Art History Survey to Pluriversal WorldingsTwenty Years of Teaching Global Art HistoryMing Tiampo

The notion of the art history survey, a primarily North American phenomenon, is fundamentally flawed. It has been the subject of much reflection and experimentation from proponents of shifting the survey away from canonicity towards a broader visual culture approach, for example in a series of regional surveys at Northwestern University, or the controversial abolition of the survey at Beginning of page[p. 60] Yale University.11Dushko Petrovich Córdova, ‘Where Should Art History Go in the Future? As Survey Courses Change, the Past Evolves’, ARTnews.com, 28 July 2020 <https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/art-history-survey-courses-yale-university-1202695484/> [5 March 2025]; Rethinking the Introductory Art History Survey, ed. by Bradford R. Collins, special issue of Art Journal, 54.3 (1995) <https://doi.org/10.1080/00043249.1995.10791702>. Yale replaced the two-semester ‘Renaissance to the Present’ survey with four thematic courses in 2020: ‘Art and Politics’, ‘Global Craft’, ‘The Silk Road’, and ‘Sacred Places’. Northwestern University’s ‘Introduction to Art History’ survey was split into four classes covering American Art, European Art, Asian Art, and African Art sometime in the 1990s, before I began there as a graduate student. The only thing that art historians seem to agree upon is that our narratives and methods are dated and still stubbornly inflected by the origins of the discipline in eighteenth-century Enlightenment models and its post-Westphalian imagination of the role of culture in nation formation — otherwise translated by the students as pale, stale, and male.

I am a professor of art history at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, where I have been teaching since 2003, after having done all of my post-secondary education in the United States, at Princeton University and Northwestern University. In my first year of teaching at Carleton, I co-taught my first Art History survey course with my colleague Mitchell Frank, which we agreed would take on the task of reimagining the narratives of art history from a global perspective. As a Europeanist and an Asianist, respectively, we approached the task using what I would in retrospect term an additive model, which left intact the basic temporalities, standards, and narratives of the existing survey of (European) art history. Without a full curricular overhaul, we made selected deletions in the existing survey to make room for content from women and the global majority,22The term ‘global majority,’ underscores the fact that people of Asian, African, and Indigenous descent constitute 85 percent of the global population, and began to be used in the 1960s by authors such as Rustom Karanjia and George Shepherd Jr to describe the racialized parts of the globe who were struggling to obtain rights, resources, and sovereignty. while maintaining European art history as a core to which other narratives were anchored in order to keep students orientated. Even the course nomenclature and its temporal divisions reinforced its Eurocentricity, framing the Renaissance as the apotheosis of human creativity, and the turning point for modern man.Beginning of page[p. 61]

In retrospect, the first half of the survey, ‘From Prehistory to the Renaissance’, was more conducive to integration, as we were able to restructure the course thematically in sections such as Art and Death, Art and Power, Art as Ritual, Art and Text, and Art and Social Context, which cut across cultures and enabled comparisons. The Classical Ideal was possibly the most resistant to critical global intervention, perhaps for the same reason that the second half of the survey proved more challenging — the entrenchment of an art historical teleology that inscribed Europe as centre and aesthetic ideal. When teaching the course from a textbook, in our case Gardner’s Art Through the Ages (12th edition), this teleology haunted the class through its structure, its language, and the study images that were available to students.

Thus, rather than teaching thematically across regions, we were pushed back into art historical categories by the textbook. As a result, the lectures were organized more regionally, alternating between European and non-European histories, with an emphasis on histories of encounter with Europe due to the availability of materials, as well as to maintain narrative coherence. Two examples of this structure were the lecture on the Baroque in Italy and the North, followed by a lecture on Mughal India and Qing China addressing contacts with Europe, and a lecture on Japan and the West considering Meiji Japan, followed by a lecture on Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and Symbolism in Europe. Although each regional art history was given its own consideration, the centripetal logic that linked them Beginning of page[p. 62] back to Europe remained Eurocentric. In retrospect, however, although our intervention was flawed, my experience teaching undergraduates who came out of that course and graduate students who were teaching assistants for the course demonstrated the value of effecting change even if it is not perfect. Students coming into our second- and third-year courses began with the assumption that art history was fundamentally a global story, and graduate students in the programme went on to interrogate and decolonize art history pedagogy in their own practices.33Andrew Gayed and Siobhan Angus, ‘Visual Pedagogies: Decolonizing and Decentering the History of Photography’, Studies in Art Education, 59.3 (3 July 2018), pp. 228–42 <https://doi.org/10.1080/00393541.2018.1479823>.

Given the demographics of our students in Canada, and the high percentage of students whose personal histories contain multiple geographies, teaching transnational and transcultural art history is fundamental to making all students feel seen, and also to teaching students about the long histories of cultural entanglements that make us who we are as human beings. For me, this is not just a disciplinary practice, but an exercise in civic imagination that is necessary for these times of rising ethnonationalism. My teaching practice has explored many different models for teaching transnational and transcultural art histories, from the seminar ‘Exhibiting International Abstraction’, which looked at the history of exhibitions and the articulation of postwar Internationalism, to graduate seminars critically reimagining the structures of art history survey textbooks through the lens of global art history, and a seminar that explored post-imperial histories of London and Paris through the lens of migration.44Andrew Gayed was a student in this seminar, and is now a professor at OCAD University in Toronto. Beginning of page[p. 63]

More recently, I have been working with a group of scholars in global art history to co-edit Intersecting Modernisms, a sourcebook on global modernism/s designed to provide an in-depth introduction to modernisms arising in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe, their diasporas, and that of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas and Antipodes.55The editorial collective of Intersecting Modernisms consists of Pamela Corey, Iftikhar Dadi, Salah Hassan, Mari Carmen Ramirez, John Tain, and myself. As Claire Farago writes in this volume, ‘Collaboration is a necessary and crucial part of a worlded approach because no-one has the expertise to do it alone.’ Focusing on exploring entangled histories and parallel formations, Intersecting Modernisms refutes and provides a corrective to Eurocentric canonical histories of modernisms, arguing for a globally entangled art of the twentieth century that reflects aesthetic investigations in the context of colonialism, conflict, mobility, sovereignty movements, technological innovation, and urbanization.66This section draws from Pamela Corey, Iftikhar Dadi, Salah Hassan, Mari Carmen Ramirez, John Tain, and Ming Tiampo, ‘Book Proposal: Intersecting Modernisms’ (unpublished manuscript).

I have taught a second-year undergraduate course based on this research for the past two years, foregrounding a comparative approach that is both diachronic and synchronic. The course begins with a methodological boot camp, introducing students to a conceptual toolbox that foregrounds the risks and capacities of comparison, as well as a 360-degree interrogation of the meanings of modernism/s and modernities structured around a close reading from Susan Stanford Friedman’s Planetary Modernisms.77Susan Stanford Friedman, Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity across Time, Modernist Latitudes (Columbia University Press, 2015), pp. 47–49. After that first module, the course is divided into six sections, some of which are drawn from Intersecting Modernisms: ‘Encounters with Empire’, ‘Sovereignties of the Imagination’,88This section title is taken from a collaborative project with Wayne Modest. ‘Art and Liberty: The World According to the Surrealists’, ‘Postwar Abstraction’, ‘Global Conceptualisms’,99This section title is taken from Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s (Queens Museum of Art, 1999). and ‘The World in Canada, Canada in the World’.Beginning of page[p. 64] Lectures focus on diachronic national and regional histories, while discussions that take place at the end of each module weave those narratives together with synchronic comparisons based around close looking exercises. While the histories of the global majority are foregrounded and centred in my course, I do also critically address examples from European and North American art history where useful and relevant. Students are encouraged to analyse works across regions in order to reveal historical, philosophical, political, and aesthetic patterns such as the impacts and legacies of colonialism, visual articulations of sovereignty and decolonization, the capacities of abstraction, the circulation of culture, and the relation between artistic forms and social change. One example of this is a close looking exercise I do with students on questions of gender and culture in self-representation, where I have them compare self-portraits by Frida Kahlo, Amrita Sher-Gil, and Loïs Maillou Jones, all painted in 1930s Paris. Another example is a comparison that asks students to consider the capacities of abstraction through its use in calligraphy, comparing Bokubi from Japan and Hurufiyya artists from the Middle East. We then extend our investigation of abstraction to look at how it can be used in circumstances where explicit representation could pose risks, and look at how African American artist Norman Lewis and Korean artist Lee Ungno used abstraction to bear witness to and stand with protest movements during the Civil Rights movement in the United States, and the democracy movement in South Korea.Beginning of page[p. 65]

The hope is that the textbook that we produce, which brings together cutting-edge research by scholars working in the fields of global modernisms from multiple geographic specializations, will soon be published. The book itself, and this course, are an attempt at ‘worlding’ art history through pedagogy, seeking to put multiple histories, epistemologies, cosmologies, temporalities, and perspectives in a pluriversal conversation that enables the emergence of intersecting, albeit sometimes contested narratives. As Thomas Kuhn argued in the Structure of Scientific Revolutions, textbooks are fundamental to perpetuating ‘normal science’; it is by making changes on this foundational level that we hope to enact a paradigm change with larger reverberations in public culture.1010Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (University of Chicago Press, 1962).