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 

Students in History of Art 101, "Theories and Methods for a Global History of Art" meet their THREE new professors! This course is team-taught by Beate Fricke, Sugata Ray, and Lisa Trever.

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 w... [show more]

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.

Five members of the Department will present papers at the College Art Association's annual meetings in New York, February 11-14, 2015.  

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. 

The volume Past Presented: Archaeological Illustration and the Ancient Americas, to which our faculty member Lisa Trever contributed an essay on late eighteenth-century tomb illustrations, is being awarded the Association for Latin American Art's annual book award on February 12, 2014, at the College Art Association meeting in Chicago. This award, supported by the Arvey Foundation, is for the best scholarly book published on the art of Latin America from the Pre-Columbian era to the present.

Welcome to Lauren Kroiz and Lisa Trever, who joined the faculty this fall.  Professor Kroiz is a specialist in 19th and 20th century American art and  visual culture.  Professor Trever is a Pre-Columbianist focusing on the ancient Andes—specifically the Moche of Peru—with expertise also in ancient Mesoamerica and strong interests in Latin American art history.  The Department is also searching for an Assistant Professor of Global Modern Art.