Displaying Time

From the fluttering fabric of a tent, to the blurred motion of the potter’s wheel, to the rhythm of a horse puppet’s wooden hooves—these scenes make up a set of mid-1980s art exhibitions as part of the U.S. Festival of India. The festival was conceived at a meeting between Indira Gandhi and Ronald Reagan to strengthen relations between the two countries at a time of late Cold War tensions and global economic change, when America’s image of India was as a place of desperate poverty and spectacular fantasy. Displaying Time unpacks the intimate, small-scale durations of time at work in the gallery from the transformation of clay into ceramic to the one-on-one, personal encounters between museum visitors and artists.

Using extensive archival research and interviews with artists, curators, diplomats, and visitors, Rebecca Brown analyzes a selection of museum shows that were part of the Festival of India to unfurl new exhibitionary modes: the time of transformation, of interruption, of potential and the future, as well as the contemporary and the now.

Rebecca M. Brown is a scholar of colonial and post-1947 South Asian art and visual culture at Johns Hopkins University. She has served as a consultant and a curator for modern and contemporary Indian art for the Peabody Essex Museum, the Walters Art Museum, and the Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation. She chairs the Advanced Academic Program in Museum Studies at Johns Hopkins. Her courses are often cross-listed with Political Science, East Asian Studies, Museums and Society, and Women, Gender and Sexuality. Her publications include Goddess, Lion, Peasant, Priest: Modern and Contemporary Indian Art from the Shelley and Donald Rubin Collection (exhibition and catalog, 2011), Gandhi’s Spinning Wheel and the Making of India (Routledge 2010), Art for a Modern India, 1947–1980 (Duke University Press 2009), A Companion to Asian Art and Architecture (coedited with Deborah S. Hutton, Wiley-Blackwell 2011), and Asian Art (coedited with Deborah S. Hutton, Blackwell 2006).Sivaramakrishnan K. :

Kalyanakrishnan "Shivi" Sivaramakrishnan is Dinakar Singh Professor of India and South Asia Studies, professor of anthropology, professor of forestry and environmental studies, and codirector of the Program in Agrarian Studies, Yale University.Yang Anand A. :

Anand A. Yang is professor of international studies and history at the University of Washington. He is coeditor of Interactions: Transregional Perspectives on World History (Hawai'i, 2005), coeditor of Thirteen Months in China: A Subaltern Indian and the Colonial World (Oxford, 2017), and author of Empire of Convicts: Indian Penal Labor in Colonial Southeast Asia (California, 2021).Kaimal Padma :

Padma Kaimal is Batza Professor of Art and Art History at Colgate University. She is the author of Scattered Goddesses: Travels with the Yoginis (Association for Asian Studies, 2013) and Opening Kailasanatha: The Temple in Kanchipuram Revealed in Time and Space (Washington, 2021).

Rebecca M. Brown is associate professor of the history of art at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of Gandhi’s Spinning Wheel and the Making of India and Art for a Modern India, 1947–1980, and coeditor of A Companion to Asian Art and Architecture.

"Brown. . . boldly unfurls novel ways of thinking through, and with, exhibitory practices of the past, the present, and the future."

"Displaying Time can be read as an innovative and engaging approach to exploring, through its overarching theme of temporality, the complexities of staging a large-scale international festival event and will be of interest to those concerned with the presentation of art and cultural histories through museum and exhibition practices. It is also valuable through its offering to the reader the means to ‘refocus their temporal lenses’ in order to gain a deeper understanding and appreciation of the web of moments and durations, flows and interruptions, linear, cyclical and layered temporalities, and the temporal resonances that are all constituents of such exhibitions and events."

Vasiliki Sirakouli:

"Rebecca M. Brown’s Displaying Time: The Many Temporalities of the Festival of India launches a productive way of understanding and interpreting festivals and contributes to South East Asian studies, especially Indian art in North America in the twentieth century."

"Rebecca Brown's seminal study of the Festivals of India is a wonderfully crafted and illuminating account of cultural diplomacy and its artistic tensions. It is essential reading for anyone concerned with South Asia, the political and artistic complexity of exhibitions, and the exhibitionary complex broadly defined."—Natasha Eaton, author of Mimesis across Empires: Artworks and Networks in India, 1765-1860

"Brown’s application of western theorists to the nitty gritty of exhibition organization makes for a solid foundation upon which future studies of such mega cultural projects will be based."—Vishakha Desai, Columbia University

"Displaying Time is an original and compelling contribution to scholarship on South Asian art and exhibition practices. Focusing on the Festival of India in the United States, Brown emphasizes art as an event, performance, and time-based form and explores the aesthetics of duration, repetition, and animation. It is essential reading."—Sonal Khullar, author of Worldly Affiliations: Artistic Practice, National Identity, and Modernism in India, 1930-1990