Post-Mao Dreaming. Special Art Event--Joan & Jerome Cohen

Joan and Jerome Cohen will give a slide presentation and speak about the "Post-Mao Dreaming" exhibition currently at the Smith College Museum of Art in Northampton, MA. This collection of works, recently given to Smith College Museum of Art by the Cohens, provides a window into the era when Chinese artists, emerging from the constraints of 30 years of Maoist Communism (1949–1979), began to reclaim their individuality. The Cohens witnessed both the excessive restrictions of the late-Mao period and the gradually increasing freedom artists achieved. Many of the works in the exhibition date to the late 1970s and early 1980s, a time of transition in Chinese art. The political thaw of this period allowed a shift from state-mandated socialist realism to the exploration of historical Chinese art forms (such as ink painting) that paralleled innovations in form and subject matter. "Post-Mao Dreaming" features works produced between 1971 and 2005 by key artists of the period, representing both the reclamation of tradition and the breaking of new artistic ground.

Joan Lebold Cohen, art historian/photographer, has been writing about contemporary Chinese art and curating exhibitions since the 1970s. Her book, New Chinese Painting, 1949-1986, was the first book to introduce the new generation of artists after the Cultural Revolution.

Jerome A. Cohen is the founding director of East Asian Legal Studies at Harvard Law School. Currently, he is Professor of Law at New York University and Adjunct Senior Fellow for Asia Studies at the Council of Foreign Relations and Of Counsel at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton, and Garrison.