A new monument honoring suffragists Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony will be the first monument honoring nonfictional women in New York's Central Park. While designing the work, sculptor Meredith Bergmann consulted with historians Nell Irvin Painter, Margaret Washington and UC Berkeley History of Art Professor Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, who in turn met with her graduate students Delphine Sims, Vanessa Jackson, Ryan Serpa and Grace Kuipers. Bergmann credits Prof. Grigsby and her students with providing valuable input in regard to the representation of Sojourner Truth. An unveiling ceremony will happen on August 26 at 8am EST. Go to monumentalwomen.org to watch the livestream of the event and for more information on the Women's Rights Pioneers Monument and the Monumental Women Campaign. A recent NYT article provides details about the campaign and monument.

Scholar and writer Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby has been selected to receive the Clark Art Institute’s 2017 Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing. Grigsby is the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor in the Arts and Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley. The award presentation will take place on Saturday, April 7, 2018 during an event at the Milton Resnick and Pat Passloff Foundation in New York City. “The Clark Prize raises awareness of the importance of writing that bridges scholarly and popular interest in the arts and seeks to encourage support for such writing among publishers, editors, and the public,” said Olivier Meslay, the Felda and Dena Hardymon Director of the Clark. “Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby’s writing is deeply rooted in serious academic tradition, but easily connects to the public through compelling prose and thoughtful analysis. We are delighted to recognize her work with the Clark Prize.” Grigsby, who was born in the Panama Canal Zone, focuses her scholarship onthe history of art and material culture in France and the United States from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century, especially in relation to colonialism, slavery, and constructions of race.... [show more]

This exhibition ends on Sunday, October 23. A review by Maria Porges, local artist and writer and Associate Professor at California College for the Arts, has recently been published. 

The Berkeley Art Museum will be mounting an exhibition, Sojourner Truth, Photography, and the Fight Against Slavery, based on the materials used by Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby for her book, Enduring Truths: Sojourner's Shadows and Substance (University of Chicago Press, 2015). The exhibition is scheduled to run from July 27 to October 23, 2016; see the UC Berkeley press release for more information about it and a good brief review of the exhibition, "How Sojourner Truth Used Photography to Help End Slavery" is at Smithsonian.com; it's included in the August 12th KQED The Do List (starting at 3:04).

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. 

In 1996, the late Richard and Rhoda Goldman provided generous funding for five Distinguished Professorships in the College of Letters and Science, establishing an endowed chair in each of the College’s divisions. The Professorship is awarded for excellence in scholarship and commitment to the University’s teaching mission. The Department of History of Art is very pleased to announce that Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby has been named as the Goldman Distinguished Professor in the Division of Arts and Humanities, 2015-2020. 

Body and Empire: A Conversation

Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby
Still Thinking about Olympia’s Maid

 Opening 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 History

Internalizing 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 Em... [show more]

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. 

Congratulations to Professor Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby on the publication of her new book, Colossal: Engineering Modernity - Suez Canal, Statue of Liberty, Eiffel Tower, and Panama Canal, by Periscope Press.

Congratulations to Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, a 2013 recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award. The Distinguished Teaching Award is the campus’s most prestigious honor for teaching.