The Graphic Arts Loan Collection (GALC) at the Morrison Library has been checking out art to UC Berkeley students, staff, and faculty since 1958 and it is back again this year!
The purpose of the GALC since its inception has been to put art in the hands of UC Berkeley students (and the best way to appreciate art is to live with it!), so on August 26 and 27, from 10am to 4pm, UC Berkeley students can come to the Morrison Library (101 Doe Library) and check-out up to two pieces of art from the GALC’s collection to take home and hang on their walls for the academic year. The prints will be available to students on a first come, first served basis.
If you would like to see what we have before you come to the Morrison Library, all the prints are available to browse online at the Graphic Arts Loan Collection website. Not everything in the collection will be available at the Morrison Library these days, but much of the collection will. Please note that the Graphic Arts Loan Collection will not be available to staff and faculty members during this time, but only available to UC Berkeley students. Starting August 29th students can reserve prints from the collection through the GALC website, and on September 9th, faculty and staff can begin reserving prints. Any questions about the GALC can be directed to graphicarts-library@berkeley.edu.
Carrie Mae Weems, Untitled: Trees With Mattress Culebra en el Petate, Sergio Sanchez Santamaria Faith Ringgold, Jo Baker’s Birthday
The Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB) makes available the transcripts of debates, lectures, seminars, and symposia given by luminaries from both sides of the Atlantic over the years. Here are a few of these printed lectures, now published as bilingual pamphlets by Editorial Breus, now in the UC Berkeley Library collection:
The Oral History Center’s Freedom to Marry collection features interviews from key members of the Freedom to Marry organization. Officially launched in 2003 by Evan Wolfson, the campaign worked to legalize same-sex marriage across the United States. The campaign originally worked on helping same-sex couples get married on a smaller case-by-case scale, as at the time, no state in the country had legislation protecting same-sex marriage. The first state to even do so was Massachusetts in 2004. Throughout the organization’s lifespan, same-sex marriage went from being legally unprotected on a state level to federally protected as an unequivocal right across the United States.
Freedom to Marry
However, in June 2024, the Supreme Court countered this ruling in Department of State v.Muñoz, in which it declared that the right to bring a noncitizen spouse to the United States is not constitutionally protected. This ruling could be detrimental towards married same-sex citizens and noncitizens who would have to leave the United States, a country where their marriage is legal, back to a home country where it isn’t.
Given the June 2024 Supreme Court ruling, as well as this being Pride month, it’s a great time to look back on the work that Freedom to Marry did to legalize same-sex marriage. The lessons from the organization remain as important today as they were twenty years ago. When initially proposing the Freedom to Marry campaign to potential investors, Wolfson remembers:
I would be saying things to them like, look, if you just want to sprinkle some money around and do some ordinary building programs and helping people, I’m not the right person for you. And if you want to stay in your work up till now, which has been primarily in the Bay Area, and certainly only in California, not nationally, I’m definitely not the right guy for you. But if you really want to make a difference, what you really ought to do is support a campaign to win the freedom to marry. They went, “Marry?” “Yes, marriage. Marriage is the engine of change, marriage is what we’re going to have to be fighting for. You can do good work this way, but if you want to be transformational, you need to do this.”
One major battle that Freedom to Marry faced was when Proposition 8 passed in California. This ballot proposition intended to ban same-sex marriage measure passed in 2008. At the time, this was a massive blow to Freedom to Marry’s campaign, especially due to California’s reputation as a more progressive state. Tim Sweeney, a member of Freedom to Marry’s board of directors, recalls:
We were just devastated. It was devastating. Right? In California, the progressive beacon of the west, right? And we lost handily. It wasn’t close, which would have just taken a bit of the sting out of it. But what was interesting is the number of non-LGBT people who were outraged that their friends and family that they loved and cared about were basically being told you’re second-class citizens and your love is not legitimate. It created such a wave of we’re going to commit ourselves to fix this. And we have to be willing to be with them in their anger, invite them in in a new way, let them lead with us. All of that is hard to do, I think, in a social movement because you get worried they don’t really get it, their message is not your message, are they going to do some half measure, are they going to compromise, what do they know? But you got to kind of trust that they’re with you and you got to really in some cases step aside and realize, for instance, the message you may say to yourself or within the community is different than the one the non-LGBT community needs to hear. And maybe they need to have different messengers that just talk about the journey in a way that maybe an LGBT person wouldn’t sound authentic or real on. So that was just such an interesting moment. It’s almost like after Prop 8 we needed to step back a bit and let the world realize, “Wait a minute, what happened here? This is not okay.”
After the loss in California, support for LGBT rights increased due to the sheer amount of media coverage of the loss nationally. A Pew poll from 2010 cited that over 60% of Americans supported same-sex marriage, a drastic difference from polls in the 1990s that cited 60% of Americans against same-sex marriage. But by 2012, President Barack Obama made his support for same-sex marriage clear, stating that his views had “evolved” since his first presidential term. Thalia Zepatos, the Director of of Research and Messaging for Freedom to Marry recalls in her 2016 interview the impact of Obama’s statement:
I think really two things happened. One was that Governor [Martin] O’Malley really got involved in the campaign, but the big one was that our long-term effort to really engage the White House and President Obama came to fruition, you know not long before the election and President Obama made his statement in support of same-sex marriage, and within twenty-four hours, polling support for marriage among black voters in Maryland went up by twenty points. I mean, it was the biggest single day increase I’ve ever seen anywhere and I think it contributed just in a very great way.
By 2015, 37 states had legalized same-sex marriage, but it would not be a federal right until the Supreme Court case of Obergefell v. Hodges, which argued that same-sex marriage was a right under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause and Equal Protection Clause. On June 26, 2015, the Supreme Court announced its ruling: same-sex marriage was guaranteed as a fundamental right. The same night, the White House was bathed in rainbow lights, an unmistakable show of support for the ruling. Jo Deutsch, Freedom to Marry’s federal director from 2011-2015, recounted this event:
It was a truth that, from every level, we had won. It was an acknowledgement from the President of the United States that our lives and our marriages mattered, in a just obvious way…This is the symbol of America and the symbol of the President of the United States, all in rainbow color. It was just breathtaking and so beautiful…We had come so far through our lives from asking can we walk down the street holding hands, or can we actually, in an introduction, say this is my wife? And now to this moment, there we were in front of the White House, in all of its colorful glory, with all of these people holding hands. I can’t tell you how many proposals we saw, with people just dropping to their knees right and left. It was like, another one dropping to their knees, and everybody started to clap. It was just phenomenal.
The White House in 2015
As the end of Pride month nears, it is important to remember that it hasn’t even been 10 years since the legalization of same-sex marriage in the United States. In many other countries around the world it is still taboo or even illegal. When we celebrate Pride month, it’s important to remember the work that many people and organizations did to ensure LBGTQIA rights, especially as they continue to face challenges. Celebrations can only happen as a result of triumph over tribulations, and should be remembered together.
Katie Gonzales is currently a third-year student at UC Berkeley studying English and Anthropology. She works as a student editor for the Oral History Center.
About the Oral History Center
The Oral History Center of The Bancroft Library preserves voices of people from all walks of life, with varying political perspectives, national origins, and ethnic backgrounds. We are committed to open access and our oral histories and interpretive materials are available online at no cost to scholars and the public. You can find our oral histories from the search feature on our home page. Search by name, keyword, and several other criteria. Sign up for our monthly newsletter featuring think pieces, new releases, podcasts, Q&As, and everything oral history. Access the most recent articles from our home page or go straight to our blog home.
Christine Santos, recipient of the 2023/24 Art Practice and University Library Printmaking Award, is a 2024 graduate of the Art Practice Department at the University of California Berkeley. Two of Christine’s prints, Rainbow State Fantasies and Urgent Lexicon Pinay, have been added to the Graphic Arts Loan Collection and can be borrowed by students at UC Berkeley starting this fall.
Below is an Artist Statement from Christine about her work:
I work in digital painting and recently photocopy art, printmaking, and installation. Pulling from state digital archives and my digital snapshots, I digitally manipulate and assemble them to address colonial omission, aesthetic failure, and non-imperial formations. Connections to speculative fiction, DIY culture, cyberfeminism, and Pop Art movement can be made from my work. For example, Archival Densities is an installation series using altered state records from the Digital Archive of Hawai’i to stage fictional events of resistance. I received theAY 2023 – 2024 Center of Race and Gender Student Research Grant to conduct photographic research at Hawai’i’s Bishop Museum to advance my screen print work in Archival Densities. This includes Rainbow State Fantasies, which is now a part of the Graphics Arts Loan Collection.
Rainbow State Fantasies is a screen print monoprint that complicates the popular romanized colonial idea of the “South Seas Island Paradise”. The failed aesthetic of the American curio postcard image of Diamond Head, Hawai’i and suggestive tropical plant silhouettes articulate a visual resistance to this colonial imagination that lingers in Hawai’i’s socioeconomic material culture related to tourism media. Resistance pedagogy and history informs this work as well as Urgent Lexicon: Pinay, the accompanying screen print to this award. Urgent Lexicon: Pinay is inspired by the process of reading Pinay Power by Melinda de Jesus. In this print, I made a handwritten account of the times “pinay” is mentioned and layered it to the point of abstraction.
The Art Practice & University Library Printmaking Award is given to the undergraduate student in the Department of Art Practice who has demonstrated an astute understanding of printmaking techniques, as well as an advanced ability to express themselves through the medium of printmaking. This award was established in 2018 by the Department of Art Practice and the University Library, and is given to one or two students each academic year.
The Library now has access to the online archive 1980s Culture and Society, which brings together resources from archival collections in the US, UK, Australia, and Canada.
“From the rise of Conservatism, the threat of nuclear war, and the AIDS crisis, to rampant consumerism, economic crises, and technological advancements, the 1980s was a turbulent and complex decade in which some individuals reaped significant benefits whilst others experienced severe poverty and hardship. Drawing on material from the late 1970s through to the early 1990s, this resource focuses on the voices of under-represented groups, grassroots organizations, and countercultural movements, addressing themes such as sexuality and identity, Black resistance movements, Indigenous land rights, subcultures, and health and social issues.
“These themes are represented within a broad range of sources which feature a variety of perspectives. For example, campaign materials, newspapers and newsletters from grassroots organizations and local communities provide a keen insight into social and political activism during the 1980s, whilst government papers and speeches from the Reagan and Thatcher administrations demonstrate the rise in political conservatism that dominated the decade. Collections of zines highlight the rich creativity and productivity of 80s subcultures, whilst mainstream and consumer culture is epitomised in fashion catalogues, photojournalism and gaming ephemera.” (Source)
The Library now has access to all five modules of Colonial America, a digital archive produced by AM (formerly Adam Matthew Digital). This resource provides an extensive collection of primary source documents related to the history of Colonial America, spanning from the 16th to the 18th century. The resource offers a comprehensive collection of materials that includes correspondences, diaries, maps, pamphlets, and other types of documents. These sources provide valuable insights into the social, political, and economic aspects of life during the colonial period in North America.
The Library has recently acquired access to The Amnesty International Archives, which “publishes the records of Amnesty International from the second half of the twentieth century. The material contains minutes, reports, correspondence, first-hand accounts, publicity materials and circulars relating to human rights violations of all kinds in all parts of the world. Amnesty International’s remit of campaigning for an end to human rights abuses means that this archival material inherently relates to the themes of oppression, cruelty and degradation.” (Source)
Some of the collections include documents from outside the organization.
Celebrate Pride Month with our handpicked selection of books by LGBTQ+ authors and characters! Discover powerful stories that shine a light on diverse identities and experiences in the LGBTQ+ community and check out more at our Overdrive.
Dive into AAPI Month with our lineup of awesome books by Asian American & Pacific-Islander authors and characters! Get ready to explore their unique stories and perspectives, celebrating the richness of their culture, and find more at UCB Overdrive.
The Library has acquired access to Egypt and the Rise of Nationalism, an online collection of British government documents “that capture and reflect an era spanning from the first appearance of a nationalist sensibility to its gradual entrenchment in public life through protests, journalistic agitprop, lobbying activities, sporadic violence, and then — almost as a denouement — through an ordered political process, in the context and perspective of Britain’s evolving policy regarding Egypt.” (source)
The resource includes more than 4000 primary source documents dating from the 1870s until approximately 1924.
The Graphic Arts Loan Collection (GALC) at the Morrison Library has been checking out art to UC Berkeley students, staff, and faculty since 1958 and it is back again this year!
The purpose of the GALC since its inception has been to put art in the hands of UC Berkeley students (and the best way to appreciate art is to live with it!), so on August 26 and 27, from 10am to 4pm, UC Berkeley students can come to the Morrison Library (101 Doe Library) and check-out up to two pieces of art from the GALC’s collection to take home and hang on their walls for the academic year. The prints will be available to students on a first come, first served basis. 
The Library now has access to the online archive 
