CANCELLED Book Talk Sunday December 3rd from Art History Faculty Julia Bryan-Wilson

Louise Nevelson's Sculpture Drag, Color, Join, Face

Julia Bryan-Wilson, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, will discuss her new book, Louise Nevelson’s Sculpture: Drag, Color, Join, Face , with Leigh Raiford, Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies, at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive on Sunday, December 3rd at 2pm.  Click the link for more information.

From the publisher’s website:

A daring reassessment of Louise Nevelson, an icon of twentieth-century art whose innovative procedures relate to gendered, classed, and racialized forms of making

“Here is a book that is not only a transformative study of a single artist but also a record of the scholar’s own labor—and her devotion.”—Artforum

In this radical rethinking of the art of Louise Nevelson (1899–1988), Julia Bryan-Wilson provides a long-overdue critical account of a signature figure in postwar sculpture. A Ukraine-born Jewish immigrant, Nevelson persevered in the male-dominated New York art world. Nonetheless, her careful procedures of construction—in which she assembled found pieces of wood into elaborate structures, usually painted black—have been little studied.

Organized around a series of key operations in Nevelson’s own process (dragging, coloring, joining, and facing), the book comprises four slipcased, individually bound volumes that can be read in any order. Both form and content thus echo Nevelson’s own modular sculptures, the gridded boxes of which the artist herself rearranged. Exploring how Nevelson’s making relates to domesticity, racialized matter, gendered labor, and the environment, Bryan-Wilson offers a sustained examination of the social and political implications of Nevelson’s art. The author also approaches Nevelson’s sculptures from her own embodied subjectivity as a queer feminist scholar. She forges an expansive art history that places Nevelson’s assemblages in dialogue with a wide array of marginalized worldmaking and underlines the artist’s proclamation of allegiance to blackness.”


Primary Sources: BAMPFA TVTV digitization project

Nany Cain operating a cameraFor the last few years, the UC Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive has been digitizing paper records and almost 450 camera-original open-reel videotapes from Top Value Television (TVTV), a 1970s “guerrilla video” collective based in the Bay Area and later Los Angeles. Highlights from the papers and all the raw footage that was digitized is now available on an interpretive website for the project.


Theresa Hak Kyung Cha at Berkeley

Dictee: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha in Berkeley

January 31- April 22 ,the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) exhibit, “Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Avant Dictée” celebrates the prolific, short-lived career of the influential Asian American artist and writer Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Centered around Cha’s magnum opus, Dictée, the exhibit will include extra-textual art and writing from Cha’s body of work which corresponds thematically to the ten chapters of Dictée. Continue reading “Theresa Hak Kyung Cha at Berkeley”


La règle du jour

Next week’s screenings (January 14 and 19) of French filmmaker Jean Renoir’s masterpiece The Rules of the Game (La règle du jeu) at BAMPFA provide a rare opportunity to enjoy the 35mm print of this film on the big screen in its state of the art facilities. The screenings of the 1939 film, regarded by many as one of the best films ever made, also provide an opportunity to inform you of library resources like Kanopy – an on-demand streaming video service which provides access to more than 26,000 films – allowing the UCB community to watch movies on anywhere in lieu of the viewing stations in Moffitt Library’s Media Resources Center. An online database of BAMPFA’s extensive collection of film documentation called CineFiles makes it easy to pull up reviews and other information on major filmmakers. Article databases such as FIAF, Film and Television Literature Index, and the MLA International Bibliography can help you locate scholarly articles on Jean Renoir and other figures of world cinema. For readers of French, Cairn.info – an online collection of more than 400 French and Belgian journals – is a quick way to retrieve full-text articles instantly. And lastly, if you’re just looking for good old-fashioned paper books, the Library has more than 183 of those in OskiCat on Jean Renoir alone.


On exhibit at BAMPFA, “Charles Howard: A Margin of Chaos”

The Art History/Classics Library recently acquired an exhibition catalog from an exhibit currently up at the Berkeley Art Museum until October 1, 2017, Charles Howard: A Margin of Chaos.

The catalog features contributions from UC Berkeley History of Art Professor Lauren Kroiz, BAM Curator Apsara DiQuinzio, and Curatorial Assistant, Valerie Moon.

charles howard

From the publisher website:

“Charles Howard: A Margin of Chaos accompanies the first museum exhibition dedicated to American artist Charles Houghton Howard (1899–1978) since 1956. Howard, part of a circle of artists that included Alexander Calder, Gordon Onslow Ford, Grant Wood and Ben Nicholson, had an active and distinguished career in midcentury America and England. His enigmatic, meticulous paintings, often intimate in scale, bridge figurative, Surrealist and abstract currents in modern art. Though his work evolved over his career, Howard said that all of his pictures “are closely related … They are in fact all portraits of the same general subject, of the same idea, carried as far as I am able at the time.” The first scholarly publication on Howard, this fully illustrated volume includes essays by Apsara DiQuinzio, Robert Gober and Lauren Kroiz, a reprint of one of Howard’s own essays from 1946, an illustrated chronology and exhibition history.”