JOANNA WILLIAMS RETIRES SPRING 2010
Tributes to Joanna Williams by her students
Joanna Williams retires this year after teaching Indian and South Asian art at Berkeley for some 43 years! Happily she will continue
to teach for us occasionally. Not only is Williams conversant with the visual cultures of North and of South India (and even Sri
Lanka), but she is one of the few Asian art historians who is comfortable discussing the two vast regions of South and Southeast
Asia. The dissertations she has supervised range from Khmer temples to modernism in Indian art, and stone portrait sculpture of the
Pallavas and the Cholas to Buddhist palm leaf manuscripts. Perhaps the best example of a project that brings together Williams's
love of South and Southeast Asian art is one written by one of her undergraduate advisees, My Ket Chau, for her senior thesis—"The
Power of Patterns: Double Ikat for Textile Exchange in India and Indonesia"—which won the 2008 Library Prize for Undergraduate
Research sponsored by the University. Gaining entrance to the McNair Scholars program, which prepares undergraduates for
doctoral work, My Ket, who is presently the Lifchez/Stronach Curatorial Intern at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, reminisces on
how she was inspired by Professor Williams's commitment to seeing the actual object and the process of production. In her course
on Southeast Asian art, Williams invited a Laotian weaver (along with her gigantic loom) to demonstrate to her students the intricate
process of weaving textiles!
Joanna Williams's scholarship was most recently celebrated by her youngest crop of Ph.D. students in the form of the dual panels,
"The Marga and Desi in the Art of South Asia: In Honor of Professor Joanna G. Williams" at the 38th Annual Conference on
South Asia at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which brought together such diverse topics as depictions of jataka stories at
Amaravati in South India to the Mohras, or masks of gods, from the Kullu Valley in the lower Himalayas, and to the popular outdoor
commercial site of Dilli Haat in Delhi. In celebration of Williams' retirement, a festschrift To My Mind: Essays for Joanna Gottfried
Williams, edited by one of her former students, Padma Kaimal (Ph.D., 1988), will be published as a special Artibus Asiae volume.
Jinah Kim, Vanderbilt University
Tributes to to Joanna Williams by her students
If I can count my blessings during my graduate years at Berkeley,
having Joanna as my advisor will go on top of many others,
probably the very top. It was in one of her undergraduate lecture
classes that I found my doctoral research topic. I did not know
at the time, but reflecting back on the day when I first learned
about the Buddhist manuscripts I now work on, I suspect Joanna
subtly planted it for me to discover. Given what I do with my
students when it comes to picking a research topic, I cannot but
admire Joanna's ability to guide her students to choose successful
research material without imposing. Everyone knows she is
a brilliant scholar, and I must add that she is also an amazing
advisor and mentor. Without all the long conversations over
many cups of tea, my dissertation may have never been finished.
How many times had Joanna had to listen to me rambling
about nonsensical matters! Whenever my thoughts went off
to lands afar, Joanna knew how to steer them back on track.
Her extraordinary patience and insightful responses helped me
through several difficult patches in my graduate career.
Joanna is in fact more than just an academic advisor. She is like a
parent to me. I remember one day in my second year of graduate
school when Joanna came to my apartment to inquire about my
condition and to offer to take me to a doctor. She just heard that I
was injured and was very concerned. I was not prepared to greet
anyone, especially not my advisor, but her visit and kind support
made me realize that I was not alone despite the fact that I was in
a foreign country with my family thousands miles away in Korea.
Another moment that I remember fondly is when she brought
out a little cupcake with a candle to celebrate my birthday as
a surprise when I went to talk to her about the readings for my
doctoral exam. It was such a special treat during a stressful time,
something my own mother would do. Visiting one's advisor to
discuss any academic, professional matter could be intimidating
for a graduate student. Joanna always greets her students with a
warm smile and makes them feel welcome. She shares genuine
enthusiasm and interest in her students' intellectual inquiries.
I cannot speak for others, but from my experience, Joanna's
emotional and intellectual support throughout my graduate
career and beyond has helped build my confidence in what I do.
Now that I am away from Berkeley, I miss being able to call
her up and show up at her door to have a cup of tea with her.
I should confess that it is not a free cup of tea that I am after. It
is the wisdom that I would like to inherit from Joanna, whose
compassion for her students I hope to emulate one day and will
cherish forever.
Padma Kaimal, Colgate University
When the students I teach at Colgate University ask me about
graduate school, I tell them that what matters most is finding
the right advisor – someone whose work you admire, someone
who supports their students through the process of grant and job
applications, someone you can trust enough that you can listen
with an open mind to their criticism, someone with whom you
can really learn. Personal chemistry will be a huge part of the
successful formula, I say and pause to make eye contact. I want
them to remember that point. Learning pivots around social,
subjective, and emotional grounding. Everything depends on
the applicant finding that click with a brilliant and responsible
scholar. Get that to click and you will have every chance for
your graduate training to proceed smoothly with nothing more
than simple, hard work.
Not that I knew any of this when I applied to graduate school
myself. I just got lucky. I arrived innocent of all sorts of useful
knowledge for an interview with Joanna Williams before
Berkeley had accepted my application to work with her. The
conversation seemed so easy at first as we found common
ground in undergraduate study at Swarthmore and in cheerful
anticipation about acquiring new languages. So when this busy,
important scholar gave me a chance to ask more questions, I
wasted her time with a question about the swimming pools at
Cal. For some reason, she let me in anyway.
And once I got to Cal's History of Art department, Joanna made
it easy for me to learn. She asked fascinating questions, she
threw me dozens of chances to succeed, and she told me about
it calmly when I failed. This way she taught me how to turn
inside-out the literature on South Asian art. She taught me to
venture into any other field that might feed that study including
epigraphy, text-based history, literary studies, Sanskrit, Tamil,
Hindi, archeology, and geography. She got me to understand
how the primacy of the visual is what distinguishes art history
from those "cousin" fields, and that we could lay claim to the
study of everything visual, from temples to movies to children's
toys. She taught me that other people in the same field were
allies, not rivals, and that the highest goal for scholarship was
that it be useful to others. At least that is what I took from our
conversations and those are the principles that have guided my
research and my teaching for the last 25 years. The best I can
hope for any graduate students is that they find someone who
makes learning this rewarding.
Tryna Lyons, independent scholar
I first met Joanna in Delhi in 1984, when she was a Program
Officer for the Ford Foundation. It was my initial visit to India
and the unfamiliar monsoon weather had rusted my wristwatch,
which meant that I was late for our appointment. The raised
eyebrow at my belated appearance, along with the shrug that
let it pass, introduced me to two qualities that distinguish her,
both as a teacher and a scholar. They are a willingness to take
risks (with an untried student or a thorny topic), and a natural
generosity held in check by insistence on high standards.
The many admirers of Joanna's scholarship are astonished by its
range (spanning regions and millennia) and its exceptional depth.
While concerned with the distinctive artistic traits of peripheral
groups (the Vakatakas versus the Guptas, the folk artist as against
the luminary of a royal atelier), she retains an abiding interest in
the cultural entirety that is South Asia. In her willingness to revisit
topics of earlier consideration, I see a commitment to working
out that delicate balance between identifying the essential and
essentialising marginal identities.
The special art historical opportunities in South Asia, where
important ancient finds are regularly made, include a number of
lively traditional arts that mirror and incorporate contemporary
ways of life. This continuity in cultural production, which
is the precise opposite of the museum culture of salvage and
preservation, is something Joanna stresses in her teaching—
along with the necessary tools for dealing with it, which include
linguistic skills and extended stays in the region. There are no
shortcuts possible here, nor is there room for the lazy or weakhearted.
Unlike many scholars who combine restricted research focus
with a narrow-minded insistence that their own small area is
best, Joanna delights in exploring new interests in India and
beyond. I don't know of another scholar who roams so widely
(and eruditely), or who encourages her students to do the same.
Those students have pursued divergent paths, from Buddhist
sculpture in Indonesia to ongoing painted-scroll traditions
in South India. As products of Joanna's long and productive
tenure at Berkeley, the best of them have inherited her legacy of
generosity, tact and scholarly accomplishment.
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BIO
Ph.D Harvard (Fine Arts), 1970.
Professor Joanna Williams holds a joint appointment in History of Art and South and Southeast Asian Studies. Her research interests include both South Asian and Southeast Asian sculpture and painting. Her courses have covered ancient Indian art, the Hindu temple, Indian miniature painting, and the arts of Southeast Asia. She has spent 12 years in the region, 2 in New Delhi as a Program Officer for Culture and Education for the Ford Foundation.
RECENT ACTIVITIES
For the last five years, Williams has been largely fighting old fires from her past: in 2004 a conference in the Netherlands on Gupta-Vakataka art, celebrating new Vakataka discoveries near Nagpur; at a 2005 workshop in Berlin on ritual and aesthetics, she presented a paper on temple consecration ceremonies in Orissa; at a 2006 workshop in Seoul, Korea, she reassessed Far Eastern pilgrims’ accounts of Buddhist sites; and at a 2007 conference on aesthetics in Ankara, Turkey, she argued that the Indian aesthetic system of emotional moods or rasas is trans-cultural. She also participated in a 2009 CAA roundtable discussion on the process of canon-formation in the art of India. Her major new project was an exhibition of courtly and village arts from the state of Udaipur at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, in 2007; the exhibition had a collaborative catalog titled Kingdom of the Sun. And now she is contemplating retirement in 2010, worrying most about the future of South and Southeast Asian Art at Berkeley.
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SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
Books:
Editor, Kaladarshana: American Studies in the Art of
India. New Delhi:
American Institute for Indian Studies, 1981.
The Art of Gupta India, Empire and Province. Princeton:
Princeton Univ.
Press, 1982.
Palm-Leaf Miniatures: The Art
of Raghunath Prusti of Orissa. New Delhi: Abhinav,
1991. (co-author J.P. Das)
The Two-Headed
Deer" Illustrations of the Ramayana in Orissa.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
The Kingdom of the Sun accompanying an exhibition of the courtly and rural arts of the state of Mewar. February, 2007, Asian Art Museum, San Francisco
Selected Articles:
"The Sculpture of Mandasor," Archives
of Asian Art XXVI (1972-3), 50-66.
"Iconography
of Khotanese Painting," East & West (Rome)XXIII
(1973), 109-54.
"A Recut Ashokan Capital and
the Gupta Attitude toward the Past," Artibus Asiae
XXXV (1973), 225-40.
"Sarnath Gupta Steles
of the Buddha's Life," Ars Orientalis X (1975),
171-92.
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"The Date of Barabudur in Relation
to Other Central Javanese Monuments," in Barabudur:
History & Significance of a Buddhist Monument,
ed. L. Gomez & H. Woodward, Berkeley, 1981
"Vakataka Art and the Gupta Mainstream," in The Gupta Age, ed B. Smith & E Zelliott:
New Delhi, 1983.
"Siva & the Cult of
Jagannatha, Iconography & Ambiguity," in Discourses
on Siva, ed. M. Meister. 1984.
"Unfinished Images,"India Internat.
Centre Quarterly XIII, no1 (1986), 90-105.
"Criticizing & Evaluating the Visual Arts in
India, Journal of Asian Studies, 47 (1988),
3-28.
"From the Fifth to the twentieth Century
and Back," College Art Journal (1990), 363-69.
"Jatayu the Valiant Vulture in the Vernacular
Art of Eastern India," in Legends of Rama: Artistic
Visions, ed. V. Dehejia. Bombay: Mar. 1994,
117-126.
"The Monkey with the Flaming Tail:
a Rural Festival in Eastern India," Report of the
San Francisco Craft & Folk Art Museum, 1994.
"Construction of Gender in the Paintings and
Grafitti of Sigiriya," in Representing the Body:
Gender Issues in Indian art, ed. Vidya Dehejia. New
Delhi: Kali for Women, 1997, 56-60.
"Mandasor, on the Edge of What? in The Vakataka Heritage, ed. Hans Bakker, ed. Hans Bakker Eghert Forsten, Groninen, the Netherlands, 2004, pp. 133-141.
"The
Pure Spring: a Cosmogram at Khallikot," 331-345 in Interrogating History: Essays for Hermann Kulke, ed. Brandtner, Martin and Panda, Shishir Kumar. New Delhi: Manohar, 2006.
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