International Pop opens April 11 at Walker Art Center

MINNEAPOLIS, March 11 2015The Walker Art Center celebrates the opening of International Pop with an After Hours bash on Friday, April 10 and Opening-Day Talks with artists and scholars from around the globe on Saturday, April 11.

A groundbreaking historical survey featuring some 125 works from more than 13 countries on four continents, International Pop chronicles the global emergence and migration of Pop art from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s. Organized by the Walker and on view April 11 through August 29, 2015, International Pop will travel to the Dallas Museum of Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art through 2016.

Among the most broadly recognized phenomena of postwar art, Pop was strikingly nomadic, spreading not only through Britain and the United States but also Japan, Latin America, and both Eastern and Western Europe. From its inception, Pop migrated across borders, seizing the power of mass media and communication to reach a new class of viewers and adherents who would be drawn to its dynamic attributes. Yet, as this exhibition reveals, distinct iterations of Pop were developing worldwide that alternatively celebrated, cannibalized, rejected, or transformed some of the presumed qualities of Pop advanced in the United States and Britain. While Pop emerged in reaction to the rise of a new consumerist and media age, it also emerged in specific socio-economic contexts that inflected its development and reception: from postwar Europe to the politically turbulent United States to the military regimes of Latin America to the postwar climate of Japan with lingering United States occupation to the restricted pop cultural palette of countries in East Central Europe.

The Walker-produced exhibition catalogue offers an in-depth study of the international Pop phenomenon with essays by scholars, film critics, and curators from Argentina, Brazil, Japan, Britain, the United States, Hungary, and Italy; an extensive visual chronology; a roundtable discussion; and a selection of stunning images, many rarely seen outside their countries of origin.