Announcements

The Department of Art History extends a warm welcome to Shannon Jackson as Chair of Art History.

We also welcome our new Graduate students:

History of Art congratulates PhD student Krishna Shekhawat for winning a 2023 DARTS Grant, endowed by the Decorative Arts Society of Orange County in California, from the Decorative Arts Trust. The grant will support Krishna’s visit to the Mehrangarh Museum Trust in India to study an 18th-century gilded mahadol. We laud this recognition and support for Krishna’s work.

The Department of History of Art, University of California, Berkeley, invites applications for an Assistant Professor in Indigenous and/or Pre-colonial and/or Colonial Art and Visual Cultures of Latin America, tenure-track.

History of Art congratulates PhD student Christine Delia for winning funding from the University of California MX’s 2023 call for proposals for Short-Term Research in Mexico by UC graduate studentsThe aim of these funded short-term stays is to support graduate students at the University of California in accomplishing specific laboratory, library, or field research, at partner institutions in Mexico.

We are proud to celebrate recent fellowships, awards, and positions won by some of our spectacular graduate students. Congratulations, all!!!

Fellowships and Grants

Elizabeth Fair 

– Smithsonian American Art Museum Fellowship

– The Mayers Fellowship, The Huntington Library

Lesdi Goussen Robleto

– Summer Dissertation Writing Grant for Arts & Humanities

– Collection and Archive Fellow at 500 Capp Street

The annual newsletter is now here! Thanks to everyone who contributed texts and photographs, thanks to staff for assistance, thanks to Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, and Justin Underhill, editors, and thanks especially to Julie Wolf for her great work as designer. And thank you BA alumni interviewees for sharing your amazing stories.  

What can 16th-century India teach us about 21st-century California? Sugata Ray’s book Climate Change and the Art of Devotion explores the impacts of climate change on art, architecture, and religion in northern India during the repeated monsoon failures of the 16th through 19th centuries.

Ray arrived at Berkeley in 2012, when California’s drought was reaching crisis proportions. He began to wonder how our perceptions of water and land change during times of environmental upheaval.

Congratulations to the members of the Class of 2023 who participated in our Commencement ceremony!

I am delighted to share that my student, Hana Kozuka, has been selected as a winner for the Charlene Conrad Liebeau Research Prize. Hana was a student in my R1B from last semester, "Bodily Possession: The Collection Impulse and the Origins of Modern Medical Museums in the Western World," which explored the long history of medicalized bodies and the often painful legacies of display and spectacle that inhere in many of our institutions.

The department is pleased to announce the publication of Painting the Inhabited Landscape, Fitz H. Lane and the Global Reach of Antebellum America (2023). From the Penn State University Press website:  The impulse in much nineteenth-century American painting and culture was to describe nature as a wilderness on which the young nation might freely inscribe its future: the United States as a virgin land, that is, unploughed, unfenced, and unpainted. Insofar as it exhibited evidence of a past, its traces pointed to a geologic or cosmic past, not a human one.