On March 3, 2020, When All That Is Solid Melts into Air: Exploring the Intersection of the Folk and the Modern—an exhibition of modern and contemporary South Asian art—opened at BAMPFA, merely days before the shelter in place guidelines were announced. But we can still see the exhibition through this new virtual tour. The exhibition emerged from a seminar titled, The Folk and/in the Modern: Critical Concepts + Curatorial Practicum in Twentieth-Century South Asian Art, co-taught by History of Art Department Assistant Professor Atreyee Gupta and former BAMPFA Director and Chief Curator Lawrence Rinder. Along with Atreyee Gupta and Lawrence Rinder, the curators for this exhibition are BAMPFA Associate Curator Stephanie Cannizzo and student curators Uttara Chaudhuri, Shuli Fang, Yiman Hu, Vanessa Jackson, Michelle Kwhak, Ashley Pattison-Scott, Ariana Pemberton, Saif Radi, Ryan Serpa, and Ellen Song. The virtual tour is also viewable on YouTube.  

Students who participated in a special curatorial component of the course Contemporary Art in the Americas, co-taught by Curator Constance Lewallen and Professor Julia Bryan-Wilson, discussed works on view at the Berkeley Art Museum. See the exhibit's online "booklet" here.

History of Art's commencement will be held on Monday, May 16 at 9:00 a.m. in the Auditorium at BAMPFA. Students and their families may contact our Undergraduate Advisor for tickets. This year's commencement speaker is Rue Mapp, Founder of Outdoor Afro, and an alumna of this department (2009). 

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.

Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby's new book, Enduring Truths: Sojourner's Shadow and Substance (U. Chicago Press, 2015) has hit the bookstores! Professor Grigsby was interviewed recently for an article that appears in today's New York Times. The Department is pleased and honored to note that Professor Grigsby's collection of Sojourner Truth and Civil War photographs and ephemera will be featured in an exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum next summer.