Johns Hopkins University

Faculty Member, History of Art

About

Rebecca M. Brown's work traces and challenges the epistemologies that undergird our understanding of South Asian visual culture, focusing particularly on material culture dating after 1750, and extending to objects in earlier periods as they have been exhibited and studied in the last two centuries. Having published on colonial urban space in Patna, the paradox of modern Indian art, and the genealogy of the imagery of spinning, she is currently working on two projects. One challenges our understanding of early 19th century painting, situating depictions of people doing everyday tasks in a syncopated temporal rhythm of interconnected colonial, artistic, courtly, and commercial flows. The second project raises the exhibitionary ghosts of the over 70 art shows staged as part of the Festival of India in the US (1985-86). This research pieces together the complex construction of India's art for a US audience at the end of the Cold War and in the midst of major global capital expansion. It also traces the enduring legacy of these exhibitions in contemporary scholarship and museum practices.

Books: Art for a Modern India, 1947-1980 (Duke UP, 2009); Gandhi's Spinning Wheel and the Making of India (Routledge 2010). Edited volumes: Asian Art (2006), A Companion to Asian Art and Architecture (2011; both Blackwell, both coedited with Deborah S. Hutton). Articles in Interventions, Res, Archives of Asian Art, Journal of Urban History, Screen, South Asian Studies, Interventions, Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, and Journal of Asian Studies.

Photo: Jeff Roffman

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