International Pop is a groundbreaking historical survey that chronicles the global emergence of Pop art from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s. Critically acclaimed by such publications as The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, the exhibition presents more than 125 works drawn from over 13 countries on four continents and features over 100 artists including familiar names such as Andy Warhol, David Hockney, Roy Lichtenstein, and Gerhard Richter alongside perhaps lesser known artists in America including Ushio Shinohara, Cildo Meireles, Edgardo Giménez, and Tadanori Yokoo.

International Pop, on view at the Dallas Museum of Art October 11, 2015 through January 17, 2016, is the first exhibition to explore such a vast and diverse array of Pop-related production. It asserts that Pop was not a singular artistic style or brand, but a roving spirit moving with unprecedented force through culture at large in the 1960s through a new abundance of everyday commodities, mass media production, and mainstream advertising.

Although Pop is among the most broadly recognized phenomena of postwar art, primarily identified with Britain and the U.S., as a cultural movement the Pop impulse was strikingly nomadic, contagiously spreading through Japan, Latin America, and both Eastern and Western Europe. From its inception, Pop migrated across borders and media, seizing the power of mass media and communication to reach new audiences who would be drawn to its dynamic attributes.

“Pop art was a global movement that began more than six decades ago, and this exhibition complements the global collection at the DMA, which spans five millennia, providing a new and focused view of a revolutionary moment in art history,” said Gabriel Ritter, the DMA’s Nancy and Tim Hanley Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art. “International Pop reassesses the conventional scope and understanding of Pop art in exciting new ways. It challenges our preconceived notion that Pop was primarily a U.S. and British invention, and instead shows us how truly pervasive and varied this aesthetic was.”

International Pop emphasizes the distinct iterations of Pop art developed worldwide with particular focus on the socio-historical contexts from which it emerged, from the social democracies of Europe; to the politically and socially turbulent U.S.; to the military regimes of Latin America; to the postwar climate of Japan; and the restricted pop cultural palette of countries in Eastern and Central Europe. This multimedia installation is organized along five different thematic sections (“New Realisms,” “The Image Travels & the Archive Shifts,” “Distributions & Domesticity,” “Pop & Politics,” “Love & Despair”) as well as geographic sections dedicated to Argentina, Brazil, Great Britain, Japan, and Germany.