As part of “Reading Cities, Sensing Cities: A Global Urban Humanities Interdisciplinary Colloquium,” Assistant Professor Lauren Kroiz will present on Romare Bearden’s Berkeley mural, an important work of public art that is the source of the ubiquitous multi-ethnic logo found on everything from City of Berkeley trucks to stationery and brochures.  The colloquium is part of the Global Urban Humanities Initiative, a joint project of the Arts & Humanities Division and the College of Environmental Design. Our aim with this speaker series is to provide a gathering place where people from different disciplines can learn about each other’s work on global cities. Kroiz’s presentation will reflect on the relationship of painting, the construction of place, and regional planning. In her Fall 2014 course Regionalism, Nationalism, Globalism, Kroiz examines critical models of place and its influence developed in the twentieth and twenty-first century, exploring authors and artists including Lewis Mumford, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Thomas Hart Benton, and Richard Diebenkorn. Kroiz’s current research focuses on the ways regionalist educational projects linked art and citizenship in the United States during the 1930s and 40s.

Kroiz’s book Creative Composites: Race, Modernism, and the Stieglitz Circle, was awarded the 2010 Phillips Book Prize and was published by University of California Press in 2012.