In 2013, artist Gershon Knispel, then 81, described his core ethos: “Having decided in my youth to embrace the principle of abolishing borders between nations, removing barriers between one person and another, between one people and another . . . there is no power in the world that can induce me to ‘toe the line.’” As a Jewish German child refugee and later dissident-in-exile during Brazil’s dictatorship, Knispel’s inability to “toe the line” led to a sometimes-stateless existence and marginalization within the art worlds he operated in. It also inspired his public-facing work focused on social justice in communities across Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East. Recently, artist and curator Yevgeniy Fiks has introduced the term “refugee modernism” to describe a generation of artists, such as Knispel, who grew up as refugees during the Holocaust. Knispel’s refugee modernism, his personal refusal of national identification, was a deliberate choice and an almost unfathomable one as a Jew in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust. The state of Israel made a powerful case that only a nation-state could defend Jews from the genocide that followed Europe’s abject failure to protect its Jewish minorities. Yet while Zionism ddeclared the end of Jewish refugeehood, Knispel and his work challenged that idea by refusing the idea of a state that represents only a single people, to the exclusion of others. Both acknowledging and building upon his own refugee past, Knispel sought to form transnational solidarities that would empower oppressed and marginalized voices. How does centering the narratives of artists who won’t (or can’t) conform either to dominant national models of art history or trajectories of elite cosmopolitanism open new constellations of art history as a whole? This presentation seeks to position refugeehood and paths of forced migration as a central element of both modernity and modernism, thus decentering more dominant national models of art history. This focus on refugee modernism also offers an alternative mode of thinking about “global” modernism beyond regional identities and alignments vis-à-vis an unmarked Euro-American center. For this paper, I hope to examine how statelessness has shaped the development of modern and contemporary art and consider how my research on Knispel and other Holocaust-era refugee artists can connect to a potential broader geography and timeline of refugee modernism.