Swagato Chakravorty
Swagato Chakravorty (he/him/his) is an Indian American critic, scholar, and curator whose interests range across modern and contemporary art and visual culture. He is the 2021–2023 Daniel W. Dietrich II Curatorial Fellow in the Department of Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He is also a PhD candidate at Yale University in History of Art and Film and Media Studies. His dissertation is a cross-cultural study of global displacement and form in art since 1989, focusing on work by South Asian, Latin American, and African diasporic artists in dialogue with American and European modernisms.
His research has been supported by fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the US Department of Education. He has previously held research and curatorial positions at the Museum of Modern Art, the New Museum, and the Jewish Museum, New York, where he worked on exhibitions including:
- Judson Dance Theater: The Work is Never Done;
- Nari Ward: We the People;
- Jonas Mekas: The Camera was Always Running (forthcoming).
At MoMA, he co-curated a collection show, African American Artists and the Museum, as part of the Mellon-Marron Research Consortium (2015–16).
Publications include reviews in The Brooklyn Rail, Art in America, and Performa Magazine; a catalogue essay on Anthony McCall’s solid-light installations (in Simultaneous Soloists, Pioneer Works 2019), and a chapter on photography and performance in the early twentieth century (in Modern in the Making: MoMA and the Modern Experiment, 1929–1949, eds. Austin Porter and Sandra Zalman, Bloomsbury 2020). He has also written, for the LA Review of Books, about Ritwik Ghatak’s films of India’s partition in 1947 and the inadequacies of “world cinema” as a category. An article on strategies of displacement in Alfredo Jaar’s work since the 1990s has just appeared in Art Journal (Fall 2021), and an essay on John Akomfrah’s moving-image installations in relation to the paintings of JMW Turner is under review.
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Supervisors: Craig Buckley, Francesco Casetti, Pamela M. Lee
His research has been supported by fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the US Department of Education. He has previously held research and curatorial positions at the Museum of Modern Art, the New Museum, and the Jewish Museum, New York, where he worked on exhibitions including:
- Judson Dance Theater: The Work is Never Done;
- Nari Ward: We the People;
- Jonas Mekas: The Camera was Always Running (forthcoming).
At MoMA, he co-curated a collection show, African American Artists and the Museum, as part of the Mellon-Marron Research Consortium (2015–16).
Publications include reviews in The Brooklyn Rail, Art in America, and Performa Magazine; a catalogue essay on Anthony McCall’s solid-light installations (in Simultaneous Soloists, Pioneer Works 2019), and a chapter on photography and performance in the early twentieth century (in Modern in the Making: MoMA and the Modern Experiment, 1929–1949, eds. Austin Porter and Sandra Zalman, Bloomsbury 2020). He has also written, for the LA Review of Books, about Ritwik Ghatak’s films of India’s partition in 1947 and the inadequacies of “world cinema” as a category. An article on strategies of displacement in Alfredo Jaar’s work since the 1990s has just appeared in Art Journal (Fall 2021), and an essay on John Akomfrah’s moving-image installations in relation to the paintings of JMW Turner is under review.
http://swagatochakravorty.com/
Supervisors: Craig Buckley, Francesco Casetti, Pamela M. Lee
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Book Reviews by Swagato Chakravorty
Essays by Swagato Chakravorty
Between its founding in 1929 and its 20th anniversary in 1949, MoMA created the first museum departments of architecture and design, film, and photography in the country, marshaled modern art as a political tool, and brought consumer culture into a versatile yet institutional context. Encompassing 14 essays that investigate the diversity of modern art, this volume demonstrates how MoMA’s programming shaped a version of modern art that was not elitist but fundamentally intertwined with all levels of cultural production.
Book co-editors: Austin Porter, Sandra Zalman
Between its founding in 1929 and its 20th anniversary in 1949, MoMA created the first museum departments of architecture and design, film, and photography in the country, marshaled modern art as a political tool, and brought consumer culture into a versatile yet institutional context. Encompassing 14 essays that investigate the diversity of modern art, this volume demonstrates how MoMA’s programming shaped a version of modern art that was not elitist but fundamentally intertwined with all levels of cultural production.
Book co-editors: Austin Porter, Sandra Zalman