Assistant Professor of Art History Paloma Checa-Gismero explores the history and impact of art biennials in her new book, Biennial Boom: Making Contemporary Art Global (Duke University Press, 2024).

The first art biennial took place in Venice in 1895, and similarly to the Olympics and World’s Fair, it began as a way for nations to compete and represent their geopolitical power. By the 1980s, about five biennials sprouted regularly throughout the world, yet by 2000, the figure had risen to around 250. What prompted this art biennial boom at the end of the 20th century? In Biennial Boom, Checa-Gismero traces the archeology of contemporary art biennials from nationalist art showcases to some of the most influential cultural events today. The book provides insights into how biennials helped consolidate a global art world at the end of the 20th century, bringing regional art forms to global audiences at times of important geopolitical changes.

Grounded in archival and oral history fieldwork, Biennial Boom focuses on three pivotal biennials: the Bienal de La Habana (Havana, Cuba), inSITE (San Diego/Tijuana), and Manifesta (Rotterdam, Netherlands). These biennials moved beyond the nationalist art battle model into contemporary modes of exhibition that reflected post-Cold War optimism for a more interconnected world.

Checa-Gismero’s scholarship interrogates coloniality, or longstanding patterns of power, in the art world, analyzing how biennials have shaped cultural distinctions and reinforced systemic issues such as class, gender, and racial inequality, and Eurocentrism. She illustrates how exhibitions shaped “global contemporary art” — an important category within and beyond academic art worlds. Checa-Gismero shows how these processes are shaped by political and economic elites, artists, critics, curators, and viewers.

Before working as a historian of art and globalization, Checa-Gismero was an art critic and artist featured in biennials. Among other venues, her work was exhibited in Manifesta 8 and the Archivo de Creadores de Madrid. In her Honors seminar Global Contemporary Art, students engage with primary sources from the book and explore the roles of global art biennials in the changing geopolitical order.

“It’s exciting to connect my research with students’ studies, allowing them to see how art history is both reflective and transformative of the global world we live in,” she says.

At a Barnes Foundation talk and book signing on January 23, Checa-Gismero will discuss contemporary art biennials and how her book contributes to the discipline of art history within and beyond the classroom.

Listen to Checa-Gismero discuss Biennial Boom on High Theory.