Susan S. Bean ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ Visual Arts of Modern South Asia

NEW !

From the back cover:

Until recently polychrome terracruda (air-dried clay) sculpture has been virutally absent from exhibitions and scholarship on South Asian art history. This is about to change.

“Clay Works is a revelation. Susan Bean’s tour-de-force book brings into focus the vibrant, living quality of unfired clay…It will fundamentally transform the way art historians think about the most elemental of media, clay.”

“A paradigm-changing and deeply nuanced study that prompts profound engagement with the significance of raw clay’s dynamic nature.”

“Moves the art form of terracruda from the margins of South Asian art history into the mainstream…”

Bloomsbury Publishing, London and New Delhi, 2026


From the Land of the Thunder Dragon: Textile Arts of Bhutan (Serindia and Peabody Essex Museum, 2008) is available at Amazon and www.pem.org
From the Land of the Thunder Dragon: Textile Arts of Bhutan (Serindia and the Peabody Essex Museum, 2008)
Midnight to the Boom: Painting in India after Independence (Thames & Hudson and Peabody Essex Museum, 2013) is available from Amazon and the Peabody Essex Museum Shop
Midnight to the Boom: Painting in India after Independence (Thames  & Hudson and the Peabody Essex Museum 2013)
Yankee India (2001) available on Amazon and at www.pem.org
Yankee India: American Commercial and Cultural Encounters with India in the Age of Sail (Mapin Publishing and the Peabody Essex Museum, 2001)   

Recent 

“The Impacts of Bengal’s Textiles in America.” In Sonia Ashmore, Tirthankar Roy, and Niaz Zaman, eds., Textiles from Bengal: A Shared Legacy. Ahmedabad: Mapin Publications, 2025.

“Connecting Cultural Worlds: An Embroidery from India Celebrating Portugal’s Monarchy,” Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Blog, July 28, 2023    https://www.gardnermuseum.org/blog/connecting-cultural-worlds-embroidery-india-celebrating-portugals-monarchy.

“Making, Using, Disposing, Remaking…: Sacred Arts of Re-Creation in Southern Asia” in Religions special issue Scattering and Destroying: On the Unforeseen Consequences of Collecting and Reuse in South Asian Art, Janice Leoshko,  Catherine Asher and Padma Kaimal, eds. 2022  https://doi.org/10.3390/rel13070657 

Reprinted: “Calcutta Banians for the American Trade: Portraits of Early Nineteenth Century Bengali Merchants” (1999) in Readings on Modernism from 75 Years of Marg. Shukla Sawant, ed. Marg vol. 74, nos. 2 & 3, 2022-2023.

Reprinted: “Gandhi and Khadi: The Fabric of Indian Nationalism” (1989) in The Textile Reader, second edition. Jessica Hemmings, ed. London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2022.