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Anticipating BAM Reopening, Students in Collaboration
Students in Professor Julia Bryan-Wilson's contemporary art history class are collaborating with curator Connie Lewallen for the upcoming show Mind Over Matter, opening at the Berkeley Art Museum in fall 2016. The undergraduates are researching some of the objects, photographs, and ephemera in the exhibit—which focuses on the museum's rich holdings in conceptual art—and writing essays for the online exhibition catalogue. Bryan-Wilson and Lewallen have been working together for over a year to facilitate this collaboration.
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Commencement 2016
History of Art Commencement exercises will take place on Monday, May 16 at 9:00 a.m. in Zellerbach Playhouse. Save the date!
We are excited to announce that our 2016 Commencement Speaker will be Rue Mapp (A.B. UC Berkeley History of Art, 2009).
Rue Mapp is the founder and CEO of OutdoorAfro (outdoorafro.com), an organization dedicated to creating communities, events, and partnerships that support diverse participation in the Great Outdoors. The organization works to reconnect African-Americans with natural spaces and one another through recreational activities.
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"Mural Painting and the Ancient Americas" goes to the city
Professor Lisa Trever and some students in the seminar "Mural Painting and the Ancient Americas" arrive at the de Young Museum in San Francisco to study and photograph the fragments of ancient murals from Teotihuacan, Mexico on view there in the Harald Wagner collection. With the support of the Digital Humanities at Berkeley initiative and the staff of the Visual Resources Center of the Department of History of Art, the class used specialized equipment to take photographs for panoramic stitching and photogrammetry. Special thanks to Sue Grinols, Director of Photo Services and Imaging, and Dr. Matthew Robb, curator of the Art of the Americas at the de Young, for making this visit possible. Students enrolled in the seminar will use these photographs in the production of their final research projects. The surprisingly traffic-free trip from Berkeley to Golden Gate Park even allowed the group to stop for tea at the Japanese Tea Garden before beginning their photographic work!
Left to right: Yessica Porras, Kat Huggins, Michaela Guerrera, Gabriella Nunez, Verónica Múnoz-Nájar, Nathan Kelleher, Lisa Trever, and Arianna Campiani.
Photograph by Lynn Cunningham
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Department Welcomes Acting Chair Bonnie Wade
The Department is very pleased to announce the appointment of Professor Bonnie Wade as Acting Chair for 2015-17. Read her welcome to the new academic year here.
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Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby and Sugata Ray in Conversation in Berlin
Body and Empire: A Conversation
Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby
Still Thinking about Olympia’s MaidOpening with Manet’s voyage to Brazil after the second French abolition of slavery, this talk focuses on the too often overlooked black woman in Manet’s Olympia (1863) and the model Laure who posed for this painting and others. Manet’s painting stages a creole scene that makes visible France’s long reliance on slavery, but also its Revolutionary redefinition of all blacks as paid workers after the second abolition of slavery in 1848. How does thinking about the entry of blacks, specifically black women, into France’s economy of wage labor differently illuminate Manet’s painting?
Sugata Ray
Of the "Effeminate" Buddha and the Making of an Indian Art HistoryInternalizing colonial accusations of the “effeminacy” of the native male body, nineteenth-century Indian ideologues and reformers attempted to redeem the national body through a range of phallocentric body cultures. Anti-colonial art history, however, deliberately appropriated colonizing discourses of the effeminate native body to epistemologically challenge the hegemonic hyper-masculinity advocated by both the regulatory mechanisms of the British Empire and a larger nationalist body culture in colonial India. The ingenious invention of a discursive intimacy between yoga and an aesthetics of demasculinization led to the strategic resignification of the male body in early Indian sculpture as both a sign and the site of an imagined national life. Through a close analysis of art writing and photography, art pedagogy and colonial archaeology, visual practices and sartorial cultures, my talk will delineate the fin-de-siècle politics and aesthetics of demasculinization that had led to the establishment of anti-colonial Indian art history’s disciplinary and methodological concerns.
Kunstgeschichte und ästhetische Praktiken
An Initiative of the Kunsthistorisches Institut Florenz, Max-Planck-Institut at the Forum Transregionale Studien, BerlinWallotstraße 14, 14193 Berlin
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Digital Humanities Grants in History of Art
Two projects in the Department of History of Art have received grants from the new Digital Humanities at Berkeley initiative.
Professor Lisa Trever submitted a successful proposal to integrate digital components into her fall 2015 course "Mural Painting and the Ancient Americas." This seminar will explore the traditions of palace, temple, and tomb painting in ancient and pre-Hispanic Mexico, Guatemala, Peru, and the American Southwest, as well as modern and contemporary legacies of mural painting in Latin America and the United States. The Course Development Grant will allow the class to experiment with digital technologies for rendering digital models of ancient murals and for capturing site visits to murals in the Bay Area. This project is supported through the collaboration of digital curators and research specialists in the department's Visual Resources Center and the Archaeological Research Facility.
In addition, Professor Elizabeth Honig and the VRC have received funds from the Digital Humanities initiative to create a repurposable platform that can be used to catalog the works of any visual artist. Built using Drupal, this platform will be made freely available to other scholars. This grant will be an extension of Dr. Honig’s project janbrueghel.net, which is also a collaboration with colleagues from the Duke University Math department and is funded by the National Science Foundation.
Digital Humanities at Berkeley is a partnership between the Office of the Dean of Arts and Humanities and Research IT in the Office of the CIO. It is supported by a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with additional support from the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research.
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Lisa Trever Wins Engaged Anthropology Grant
Lisa Trever has received an Engaged Anthropology Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation to return to Peru and organize a series of scholarly events and community-focused projects tied to her dissertation fieldwork. She writes about the experience here.
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New Semester, New Courses
The 2014-15 academic year is off to a strong start with the offering of many new courses. Among them is Professor Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby and Professor Lisa Trever's joint seminar in The Bancroft Library: Photography, Archaeology, and Maya Ruins: The Frenchman Desiré Charnay in Mexico. Here, Grigsby and students examine and describe Charnay's 1859 double plate photograph from the site of Mitla (Oaxaca). Photograph by Lisa Trever.
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Undergraduate Major Redesigned
The Department is pleased to announce the redesign of the Undergraduate Major in History of Art.
As History of Art's Chair, Professor Christopher Hallett, notes, the new major reflects the full range of the Department’s internationally recognized teaching and research, offers students more opportunities to engage with non-western artistic traditions, and seeks to enhance student preparation for careers in arts-related areas.
Students will be able to sign up for the new major from the beginning of Fall Semester 2014. Those who declared the major in Spring 2014 may speak with an Undergraduate Advisor about switching to the new major.
For Professor Hallett's message and the requirements of the new major, please visit the Undergraduate Program page.
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Department Welcomes New Faculty Member Anneka Lenssen
The Department is pleased to welcome Anneka Lenssen as our latest new Assistant Professor, in this case of Global Modern Art. Anneka earned her PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art program (working with Professor Caroline Jones) and the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture (working with Professor Nasser Rabat). Even before finishing her PhD, she was hired by the American University in Cairo, where she has been directing their new Visual Cultures Program this academic year. Not surprisingly, Anneka’s time in Cairo (and before that in Lebanon and Syria) has given her unprecedented access to her research materials and an up-front seat at major social transformations: Anneka specializes in modern painting, contemporary visual practices, and cultural politics in the Middle East since the Second World War. Her research examines problems of artistic representation in relation to the globalizing imaginaries of empire, nationalism, communism, decolonization, non-alignment, and Third World humanism. Arising from her MIT doctoral dissertation, her current book project is a study of avant-garde painting and the making of Syria as a contested territory between 1920 and 1970. It traces emerging ideas about artistic form and social activation within new regimes of political representation, from French Mandate rule after the first war to the mass mobilizations of youth-oriented ideological parties to Cold War cultural diplomacy. She teaches courses engaging with modern art and global mass culture, abstraction and aniconism, theories of aesthetic autonomy, translational practices, and historiography. Anneka was previously on the board for the Association of Modern and Contemporary Art from the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey (AMCA) and currently serves on the Editorial Board of ARTMargins. She is also working with colleagues Nada Shabout and Sarah Rogers in co-editing a volume of art writing from the Arab world in translation, tentatively titled Arab Art in the Twentieth Century: Primary Documents, to be published as part of the International Program at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2017. Her reviews and essays have appeared in Artforum, Bidoun, and Springerin, as well as exhibition catalogs for Darat al-Funun in Amman and the Sharjah Biennial.