Clare Davies: One World through Art: Abby Weed Grey and the Parapolitics of Non-Western Art in the 1960s and 70s

In her lecture, Davies examines American collector Abby Weed Grey’s involvement in promoting contemporary art from the Middle East and South Asia both within the U.S. and internationally over the course of the 1960s and 1970s. In addition to amassing a significant collection of 700 works of non-Western art, Grey helped organize a series of internationally touring exhibitions including Fourteen Contemporary Iranians (1962–65); Turkish Art Today (1966–70); and Communication through Art (1964), three exhibitions that opened simultaneously in Istanbul, Tehran, and Lahore. She also sponsored the American section of the India Triennial of Contemporary World Art (1968). A 1972 exhibition entitled One World Through Art included over a thousand works from Grey’s collection and was hosted at the Minnesota State Fair Grounds. In her lecture, Davies examines some of the ways in which Grey helped model American involvement in Cold-War era parapolitics of artistic exchange.

Part of the conference Freedom in the Bush of Ghosts