Alexandra Munroe
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum New York, Curatorial, Samsung Senior Curator, Asian Art and Senior Adviser, Global Arts
Alexandra Munroe is an Asia scholar and museum professional focusing on art, culture and institutional global strategy.
She is currently Samsung Senior Curator, Asian Art, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. A pioneering authority on modern and contemporary Asian art and transnational art studies, she has led the Guggenheim’s Asian art program since its founding in 2006. She serves on the Curatorial Working Group for the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Museum Project and convenes the Asian Art Council, a curatorial think tank. Under her leadership, the museum has presented ground-breaking exhibitions and scholarly publications on Asian art in a global context and has expanded its mission to study, acquire and exhibit art from beyond the Western world.
Before joining the Guggenheim in 2006, Munroe was Vice President of Arts and Culture, Japan Society, an American organization dedicated to cultural and policy exchange between Japan and the United States, and was director of its museum. She led the society’s expansion of contemporary arts programming through such award-winning exhibitions as Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subcultures (2005) curated by Takashi Murakami, and organized the society’s first inter-Asia exhibition, Transmitting the Forms of Divinity: Early Buddhist Art from Korea and Japan, which The New York Times selected as #1 Best Show of 2003. The New York Times Magazine has featured three of Munroe’s exhibitions as cover stories; in addition, her exhibitions have landed on the covers of Art in America, Artforum, ArtNews, Bijutsu Techo, Yishu among numerous other art and news journals.
Munroe is a trustee of the Aspen Music Festival and School; Institute of Fine Arts, New York University; Intelligence Squared US; Longhouse Reserve; and the US-Japan Foundation. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and is a former member of the Association of American Museum Directors (AAMD).
She currently serves on the advisory boards of Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong; Jnanapravaha Mumbai; LEAP Magazine, Beijing; Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai; Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing and sits on the Visiting Committee of the Thomas J. Watson Library at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Address: New York, NY
She is currently Samsung Senior Curator, Asian Art, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. A pioneering authority on modern and contemporary Asian art and transnational art studies, she has led the Guggenheim’s Asian art program since its founding in 2006. She serves on the Curatorial Working Group for the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Museum Project and convenes the Asian Art Council, a curatorial think tank. Under her leadership, the museum has presented ground-breaking exhibitions and scholarly publications on Asian art in a global context and has expanded its mission to study, acquire and exhibit art from beyond the Western world.
Before joining the Guggenheim in 2006, Munroe was Vice President of Arts and Culture, Japan Society, an American organization dedicated to cultural and policy exchange between Japan and the United States, and was director of its museum. She led the society’s expansion of contemporary arts programming through such award-winning exhibitions as Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subcultures (2005) curated by Takashi Murakami, and organized the society’s first inter-Asia exhibition, Transmitting the Forms of Divinity: Early Buddhist Art from Korea and Japan, which The New York Times selected as #1 Best Show of 2003. The New York Times Magazine has featured three of Munroe’s exhibitions as cover stories; in addition, her exhibitions have landed on the covers of Art in America, Artforum, ArtNews, Bijutsu Techo, Yishu among numerous other art and news journals.
Munroe is a trustee of the Aspen Music Festival and School; Institute of Fine Arts, New York University; Intelligence Squared US; Longhouse Reserve; and the US-Japan Foundation. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and is a former member of the Association of American Museum Directors (AAMD).
She currently serves on the advisory boards of Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong; Jnanapravaha Mumbai; LEAP Magazine, Beijing; Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai; Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing and sits on the Visiting Committee of the Thomas J. Watson Library at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Address: New York, NY
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Featured artists and collectives include Ai Weiwei, Big Tail Elephant Group, Cai Guo-Qiang, Cao Fei, Chen Zhen, Gu Dexin, Huang Yong Ping, Kan Xuan, Libreria Borges, Liu Xiaodong, New Measurement Group, Qiu Zhijie, Shen Yuan, Yu Hong, Xu Bing, and Zhang Peili. An appendix includes a selected history of contemporary art exhibitions in China, artist biographies, and a bibliography.
Edited by Alexandra Munroe with Philip Tinari and Hou Hanru
With contributions by Jane DeBevoise, Katherine Grube, Lu Mingjun, Stephanie H. Tung, Anthony Yung, and Xiaorui Zhu-Nowell
The Gutai Art Association (active 1954–72) was the most influential artistic collective in postwar Japan and among the most important international avant-garde movements of the 1950s and ’60s. Founded by Yoshihara Jirō in Ashiya, near Osaka, the group spanned two generations, totaling 59 artists over its 18-year history. Against the backdrop of Japan’s World War II militarism and defeat, the American Occupation, and Japan’s postwar reconstruction as a democratic state on the world stage, Gutai’s radical experiments broke through borders between painting and performance, object and process, and between art, the ordinary public, and everyday life. Gutai: Splendid Playground demonstrates Gutai’s range of bold and innovative creativity; examines its aesthetic strategies in the cultural, social, and political context of postwar Japan; and aims to further establish Gutai in an expanded, transnational history and critical discourse on modern art.
ISBN: 978-0-89207-489-1
The first North American museum retrospective devoted to artist, philosopher, and poet Lee Ufan, Lee Ufan: Marking Infinity charts Lee’s creation of a visual, conceptual, and theoretical language that has radicalized and expanded the possibilities for sculpture and painting.
Deeply versed in modern philosophy, Lee is an influential writer on aesthetics and contemporary art and is recognized as the key theorist of Mono-ha, an antiformalist, materials-based art movement that developed in Tokyo in the late 1960s. This richly illustrated catalogue features the artist’s most iconic sculptures, paintings, and works on paper from the 1960s to the present and an anthology of the artist’s writings, including seminal essays on contemporary art published here in English for the first time. This volume also includes a scholarly essay by Alexandra Munroe; a meditation on Lee’s poetics by Tatehata Akira, poet, critic, and President, Kyoto City University of the Arts; and a narrative chronology of the artist’s life and work compiled by Tokyo-based scholar Mika Yoshitake. ISBN: 978-0-89207-418-1 AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE HERE
"The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–1989 " illuminates the dynamic and complex impact of Asian art, literary texts, and philosophical concepts on American artistic practices from the late 19th century through the present. Released to accompany a major survey at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, The Third Mind traces how the classical arts of India, China, and Japan and the systems of Hindu, Taoist, Tantric Buddhist, and Zen Buddhist thought that were collectively admired as “the East” were known, reconstructed, and transformed by American cultural, intellectual, and political forces. ISBN: 978-0-89207-383-2
Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe accompanies the most comprehensive exhibition to date of the innovative body of work by Chinese-born artist Cai Guo-Qiang—best known for his spectacular artworks using gunpowder. It presents a chronological and thematic survey that carts the artist’s creation of a distinctive visual and conceptual language across four mediums: drawing made from gunpowder fuses and explosive powders laid on paper and ignited; explosion events, documented by videos, photographs, and preparatory drawings; large-scale installations; and social projects, wherein the artist works with local communities to create an art event or exhibitions site, documented by photographs. Featuring works from the 1980s to the present, this volume illuminates Cai’s significant formal and conceptual contributions to contemporary international art practices and social activism. Generously illustrated with more than 230 images, this volume includes essays by Alexandra Munroe, David Joselit, Miwon Kwon, and Wang Hui—along with 54 documented plate entries. It is the defining scholarly publication of the artist thus far.
ISBN: 978-0-89207-371-9
Published by the Guggenheim Museum, New York
Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture is a the companion catalogue to the exhibition Little Boy, curated by artist Takashi Murakami. The 448-page hardcover book interprets the complex intuitive twist of postwar Japanese art while defining its high-spirited and naturally buoyant escape from human tragedy and the events of World War II. Murakami also coins the term “superflat” to chronicle the two-dimensional aspect of manga (comics) and anime (animated television and cinema). He argues how the international boom in pop media influenced Japanese fine art as well as the social implications of superflat with regard to the true impact of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 on Japanese art and culture. “Little Boy” is the code name for one of the atomic bombs that devastated Japan. Pictured at left: Alexandra’s personal copy, inscribed by Takashi Murakami.
ISBN: 0-300-10285-2
Published by Yale University Press, New Haven and London
Mu Xin was one of the leading expatriate artist-intellectuals of our time. A formidable figure in the cultural and intellectual history of Chinese modernism, Mu Xinwas admired for his unique synthesis of Chinese and Western aesthetic sensibilities. This beautifully illustrated catalogue focuses on a group of 33 landscape paintings that Mu Xin painted in 1978–79, in the immediate aftermath of the Cultural Revolution. Prior to this catalogue, many of these works had never been exhibited or published in the West. In addition, the book features Mu Xin’s Prison Notes, some 66 calligraphic sheets that were written when the artist was in solitary confinement in China in 1972. This catalogue accompanied an exhibition co-organized by the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, and the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago in 2001–02.
ISBN: 0-300-09075-7
Published by Yale University Press, New Haven and London
YES Yoko Ono accompanies the first major museum retrospective of the work of this pioneering artist. In her prolific 40-year career, Ono has embraced a wide range of mediums, defying traditional boundaries and creating revolutionary forms of music, film, and the visual arts since the 1960s, when she emerged as an avant-garde force in New York, Tokyo, and London. This richly illustrated volume is the first comprehensive art book devoted to her challenging and influential work. It includes essays by eminent international scholars and critics that not only explore Ono’s life and career, including her contributions to the Fluxus movement and Conceptual art, but also enrich our understanding of her complex role as visual artist, filmmaker, poet, composer, performance artist, activist, and rock star. An anthology of Ono’s writings and an illustrated chronology further mark this book as the most extensive survey ever published on the art and life of Yoko Ono. The book includes a CD with new music by Yoko Ono, performed by Ono, her son Sean Lennon, and others.
ISBN: 0-8109-4587-8
Published by Harry N. Abrams, New York
This volume is a crucial overview of an artist whose pioneering work prefigures much current cutting-edge photography.
ISBN: 0-918471-50-8
Published by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Distributed Art Publishers, New York
Focusing on key art movements and artists’ groups that defined postwar art and discourse, this history charts the intellectual, aesthetic, and stylistic developments of avant-garde art in postwar Japan.In addition to introductory essays by video artist Nam June Paik and architect Arata Isozaki, it features an anthology of selected writings and artists’ statements dating from 1945, a glossary and extensive bibliography, compiled by Reiko Tomii. This publication was published on the occasion of a 1994–95 touring exhibition at Yokohama Museum of Art; Guggenheim Museum SoHo, New York; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
ISBN: 0-8109-2593-1
Published by Harry N. Abrams, New York
Published by Takashimaya Co., Ltd, New York and Tokyo
Published by the Center for International Contemporary Arts, New York
With an essay by Alexandra Munroe and appendices compiled by Reiko Tomii
Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective was the first comprehensive art-historical study on Kusama when it appeared in 1989 as the catalogue to the artist’s first major exhibition in the West, curated by Alexandra Munroe.
ISBN: 0-9623764-0-X
Talks
Zeng Fanzhi, Cao Chong’en, Cao Fei, Fang Lijun, Feng Mengbo, Shao Fan, Ai WeiWei & Wang Guangyi
Originally Published on Guggenheim.org
Largest Exhibition of Contemporary Art from China Spanning 1989 to 2008 Ever Mounted in North America
Exhibition: Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World
Venue: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, New York
Location: Rotunda Levels 1–6, Tower Levels 5 and 7
Dates: October 6, 2017 to January 7, 2018
Symposium held in conjunction with exhibition of same title, Asian American Arts Center, New York (November 23, 1991).
Featured artists and collectives include Ai Weiwei, Big Tail Elephant Group, Cai Guo-Qiang, Cao Fei, Chen Zhen, Gu Dexin, Huang Yong Ping, Kan Xuan, Libreria Borges, Liu Xiaodong, New Measurement Group, Qiu Zhijie, Shen Yuan, Yu Hong, Xu Bing, and Zhang Peili. An appendix includes a selected history of contemporary art exhibitions in China, artist biographies, and a bibliography.
Edited by Alexandra Munroe with Philip Tinari and Hou Hanru
With contributions by Jane DeBevoise, Katherine Grube, Lu Mingjun, Stephanie H. Tung, Anthony Yung, and Xiaorui Zhu-Nowell
The Gutai Art Association (active 1954–72) was the most influential artistic collective in postwar Japan and among the most important international avant-garde movements of the 1950s and ’60s. Founded by Yoshihara Jirō in Ashiya, near Osaka, the group spanned two generations, totaling 59 artists over its 18-year history. Against the backdrop of Japan’s World War II militarism and defeat, the American Occupation, and Japan’s postwar reconstruction as a democratic state on the world stage, Gutai’s radical experiments broke through borders between painting and performance, object and process, and between art, the ordinary public, and everyday life. Gutai: Splendid Playground demonstrates Gutai’s range of bold and innovative creativity; examines its aesthetic strategies in the cultural, social, and political context of postwar Japan; and aims to further establish Gutai in an expanded, transnational history and critical discourse on modern art.
ISBN: 978-0-89207-489-1
The first North American museum retrospective devoted to artist, philosopher, and poet Lee Ufan, Lee Ufan: Marking Infinity charts Lee’s creation of a visual, conceptual, and theoretical language that has radicalized and expanded the possibilities for sculpture and painting.
Deeply versed in modern philosophy, Lee is an influential writer on aesthetics and contemporary art and is recognized as the key theorist of Mono-ha, an antiformalist, materials-based art movement that developed in Tokyo in the late 1960s. This richly illustrated catalogue features the artist’s most iconic sculptures, paintings, and works on paper from the 1960s to the present and an anthology of the artist’s writings, including seminal essays on contemporary art published here in English for the first time. This volume also includes a scholarly essay by Alexandra Munroe; a meditation on Lee’s poetics by Tatehata Akira, poet, critic, and President, Kyoto City University of the Arts; and a narrative chronology of the artist’s life and work compiled by Tokyo-based scholar Mika Yoshitake. ISBN: 978-0-89207-418-1 AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE HERE
"The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–1989 " illuminates the dynamic and complex impact of Asian art, literary texts, and philosophical concepts on American artistic practices from the late 19th century through the present. Released to accompany a major survey at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, The Third Mind traces how the classical arts of India, China, and Japan and the systems of Hindu, Taoist, Tantric Buddhist, and Zen Buddhist thought that were collectively admired as “the East” were known, reconstructed, and transformed by American cultural, intellectual, and political forces. ISBN: 978-0-89207-383-2
Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe accompanies the most comprehensive exhibition to date of the innovative body of work by Chinese-born artist Cai Guo-Qiang—best known for his spectacular artworks using gunpowder. It presents a chronological and thematic survey that carts the artist’s creation of a distinctive visual and conceptual language across four mediums: drawing made from gunpowder fuses and explosive powders laid on paper and ignited; explosion events, documented by videos, photographs, and preparatory drawings; large-scale installations; and social projects, wherein the artist works with local communities to create an art event or exhibitions site, documented by photographs. Featuring works from the 1980s to the present, this volume illuminates Cai’s significant formal and conceptual contributions to contemporary international art practices and social activism. Generously illustrated with more than 230 images, this volume includes essays by Alexandra Munroe, David Joselit, Miwon Kwon, and Wang Hui—along with 54 documented plate entries. It is the defining scholarly publication of the artist thus far.
ISBN: 978-0-89207-371-9
Published by the Guggenheim Museum, New York
Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture is a the companion catalogue to the exhibition Little Boy, curated by artist Takashi Murakami. The 448-page hardcover book interprets the complex intuitive twist of postwar Japanese art while defining its high-spirited and naturally buoyant escape from human tragedy and the events of World War II. Murakami also coins the term “superflat” to chronicle the two-dimensional aspect of manga (comics) and anime (animated television and cinema). He argues how the international boom in pop media influenced Japanese fine art as well as the social implications of superflat with regard to the true impact of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 on Japanese art and culture. “Little Boy” is the code name for one of the atomic bombs that devastated Japan. Pictured at left: Alexandra’s personal copy, inscribed by Takashi Murakami.
ISBN: 0-300-10285-2
Published by Yale University Press, New Haven and London
Mu Xin was one of the leading expatriate artist-intellectuals of our time. A formidable figure in the cultural and intellectual history of Chinese modernism, Mu Xinwas admired for his unique synthesis of Chinese and Western aesthetic sensibilities. This beautifully illustrated catalogue focuses on a group of 33 landscape paintings that Mu Xin painted in 1978–79, in the immediate aftermath of the Cultural Revolution. Prior to this catalogue, many of these works had never been exhibited or published in the West. In addition, the book features Mu Xin’s Prison Notes, some 66 calligraphic sheets that were written when the artist was in solitary confinement in China in 1972. This catalogue accompanied an exhibition co-organized by the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, and the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago in 2001–02.
ISBN: 0-300-09075-7
Published by Yale University Press, New Haven and London
YES Yoko Ono accompanies the first major museum retrospective of the work of this pioneering artist. In her prolific 40-year career, Ono has embraced a wide range of mediums, defying traditional boundaries and creating revolutionary forms of music, film, and the visual arts since the 1960s, when she emerged as an avant-garde force in New York, Tokyo, and London. This richly illustrated volume is the first comprehensive art book devoted to her challenging and influential work. It includes essays by eminent international scholars and critics that not only explore Ono’s life and career, including her contributions to the Fluxus movement and Conceptual art, but also enrich our understanding of her complex role as visual artist, filmmaker, poet, composer, performance artist, activist, and rock star. An anthology of Ono’s writings and an illustrated chronology further mark this book as the most extensive survey ever published on the art and life of Yoko Ono. The book includes a CD with new music by Yoko Ono, performed by Ono, her son Sean Lennon, and others.
ISBN: 0-8109-4587-8
Published by Harry N. Abrams, New York
This volume is a crucial overview of an artist whose pioneering work prefigures much current cutting-edge photography.
ISBN: 0-918471-50-8
Published by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Distributed Art Publishers, New York
Focusing on key art movements and artists’ groups that defined postwar art and discourse, this history charts the intellectual, aesthetic, and stylistic developments of avant-garde art in postwar Japan.In addition to introductory essays by video artist Nam June Paik and architect Arata Isozaki, it features an anthology of selected writings and artists’ statements dating from 1945, a glossary and extensive bibliography, compiled by Reiko Tomii. This publication was published on the occasion of a 1994–95 touring exhibition at Yokohama Museum of Art; Guggenheim Museum SoHo, New York; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
ISBN: 0-8109-2593-1
Published by Harry N. Abrams, New York
Published by Takashimaya Co., Ltd, New York and Tokyo
Published by the Center for International Contemporary Arts, New York
With an essay by Alexandra Munroe and appendices compiled by Reiko Tomii
Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective was the first comprehensive art-historical study on Kusama when it appeared in 1989 as the catalogue to the artist’s first major exhibition in the West, curated by Alexandra Munroe.
ISBN: 0-9623764-0-X
Zeng Fanzhi, Cao Chong’en, Cao Fei, Fang Lijun, Feng Mengbo, Shao Fan, Ai WeiWei & Wang Guangyi
Originally Published on Guggenheim.org
Largest Exhibition of Contemporary Art from China Spanning 1989 to 2008 Ever Mounted in North America
Exhibition: Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World
Venue: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, New York
Location: Rotunda Levels 1–6, Tower Levels 5 and 7
Dates: October 6, 2017 to January 7, 2018
Symposium held in conjunction with exhibition of same title, Asian American Arts Center, New York (November 23, 1991).
From the new video series: Eyes on Fire with Alexandra Munroe