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The History of Art Department's Faculty Member - Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby

Darcy

Photo left: At the Forum, from left to right: Andrew Griebeler, Antonia Young, James Smith, Seth Estrin, Laure Marest-Caffey (back row), Kailani Polzak, Jessica Stair, Samantha Henneberry, Alexandra Courtois, Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Matt Culler.

Photo right: At the Villa Medici, Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby.

Photos: Jessica Stair.
Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby
(Undergraduate Adviser)
Professor
European Art Since 1700

email: dgrigsby@berkeley.edu
address: 422 Doe Library
Berkeley, Ca 94720
phone: 510-642-1301
more info.: download Grigsby's CV (as a pdf)
BIO

Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby specializes in 18th- through early 20th-century French art and visual and material culture, particularly in relation to colonial politics. Her first book, Extremities. Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France, was published by Yale University Press in 2002. She is currently writing a second book entitled Colossal Engineering. (Reconnecting the Suez Canal, Statue of Liberty, Eiffel Tower and Panama Canal). Articles stemming from this project include “Geometry / Labor = Volume / Mass?”which appeared in October 106, Fall 2003; and “Out of the Earth. Egypt’s Statue of Liberty” in Mary Roberts and Jocelyn Hackforth-Jones, eds., Edges of Empire. Orientalism and Visual Culture, Blackwell Press, 2005.

“Revolutionary Sons, White Fathers and Creole Difference: Guillaume Guillon-Lethière’s Oath of the Ancestors of 1822,” Yale French Studies 101, 2002, was recently reprinted in Jeannene Przyblyski and Vanessa Schwartz, eds., Introduction to 19th-century Visual Culture, Routledge Press, 2004. This essay is part of another book-in-progress entitled Creole Looking which examines Franco-Caribbean cultural exchange from the 18th through the early 20th centuries. Other publications include “Nudity à la Grecque in 1799,” Art Bulletin 80, no. 2, June 1998; recently reprinted in Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, eds., Reclaiming Female Agency: Feminist Art History in the Postmodern Era, University of California Press, 2005.

Grimaldo Grigsby is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, 2005; an Andrew W. Mellon New Directions Fellowship, 2002-3; a J. Paul Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship, 1998-9; and a History of Art Undergraduate Association Award for Outstanding Contribution to Art Historical Education, 2003. She has been a member of the editorial board of Representations since Spring 1997. Her recent seminars include Visualizing Labor in 19th-century France; Photography and Empire; France’s Orientalisms; Monuments and Ruins; Delacroix and Ingres; Jacques-Louis David and the French Revolution; and Géricault and the Body Politic. Undergraduate lecture courses include Art and Colonialism, the Age of Revolution, the Spectacle of Modernity and the Introductory Survey. She is now focusing on the relationships among media and technologies in 19th-century France, including painting, photography, sculpture, drawing, prints, and engineering design.



Colossal: Engineering Modernity - Suez Canal, Statue of Liberty, Eiffel Tower, and Panama Canal



Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France
Recent Activities

The year was demanding but also exciting. In June Darcy was the Keynote Speaker at the Terra Foundation for American Art Symposium entitled, “Geographies of Art: Sur le Terrain,” held at the Musée des Impressionismes, Giverny and the Institut National D’histoire De L’art (INHA), Paris. While a Senior Member of Faculty at the Terra for the month of June, she advised Americanists and studio artists in residence; her entire family balanced walks, food, and watching the World Cup. Daily quiet time in front of Impressionist painting only yards away was a pleasure that was difficult to give up. So were the trips to the Rouen museum, the beach at Etretat; and the flea markets in small towns along the Seine. Back at U.C., she was respondent to Peter Greenaway during his presentations on painting at the Townsend Center in September. In October she hosted the interdisciplinary conference “Visible Race” in conjunction with a graduate seminar conceived as a Race Workshop. At “Visible Race” she spoke on Manet’s Execution of Maximilian. In November she delivered a lecture on the mirroring coronations of the Haitian emperor Soulouque and the French emperor Napoleon III at a conference entitled “The Long Nineteenth Century: Time, History and Culture,” held at Yale University. Her family was delighted to spend December at the Villa Medici in Rome, thanks to Todd Olson’s fellowship there. In February and early March she was busy chairing the modernist search; and in late March she had a wonderful time traveling to Rome, Naples, and Pompeii with graduate students in her Judith Stronach Travel Seminar. In April she gave a public lecture on representations of the Panama Canal at the Amon Carter Museum of Photography, in conjunction with a exhibition on photography of Panama curated by Jessica May, one of our wonderful alumni. In Texas she also caught up with her advisees Amy Freund and Heather MacDonald, who, strangely enough, along with Jessica May and Mark Rosen, constitute a Berkeley-Southwest community in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. This year she also served on graduate examination and dissertation committees of Americanists, Asianists, and Classicists as well as those of her students who concentrate on eighteenth- to twentieth-century European, Mexican, African, and American art.

This winter Grigsby was co-editor with Huey Copeland, also an alumnus, and Krista Thompson of a recent special issue of Representations entitled New World Slavery and the Matter of the Visual. To this issue she contributed “Negative-Positive Truths,” an introductory essay on Sojourner Truth’s cartes-de-visite, part of a book to be completed this summer. The editor of Periscope Publishing promises to release her long overdue Colossal by this September. And of course this is the third year she has edited this newsletter. Next academic year she is on leave and plans to write Creole Looking. Portraying France’s Foreign Relations in the Nineteenth Century. In December she will be the Keynote Speaker at the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand (AAANZ) Conference devoted to the theme of “Contact,” to be held at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand; in January she will speak at the Princeton Institute of Advanced Studies. In conclusion, she wishes to add that she is delighted to have Linda Fitzgerald back as MSO helming the department— we are so very lucky.