This book explores the rich and surprisingly understudied relationship between Black and Asian artists and the worlds they initiate through their work. Spanning North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa, it explores the relationships that were formed between Black and Asian artists at critical historical junctures—from civil rights struggles in the United States and the development of South Korea amid US military occupation in the 1960s and 1970s to debates over multiculturalism and critiques of globalization in the 1990s and 2010s. Through geometry, a language of magnitudes and alignments, Kee opens up new ways of seeing how artworks shape our lives and politics by getting us to commit some of our most valuable resources — time and attention — to one another.

The jury noted that The Geometries of Afro Asia builds on Kee’s important, long-standing dedication to intersectional and interdisciplinary analysis and pedagogy. They found this to be an important book that offers profound insights that will have an enduring impact on art history and practice.

Joan Kee is Professor in the History of Art at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Her  books also include Contemporary Korean Art: Tansaekhwa and the Urgency of Method (2013), Models of Integrity: Art and Law in Post Sixties America (2019). Kee is a contributing editor at Artforum and an editor-at-large for the Brooklyn Rail, who has written extensively on modern and contemporary art, including articles on the impact of legal jurisdiction on contemporary Chinese art and on how photography problematizes the concept of “peacetime.” Her work has been supported by the Clark Art Institute, the Kresge Foundation, the National Gallery of Art, the Hyundai Tate Research Center, and the Museum of Modern Art.