Celebrating Women’s History Month in Art History

Check out these online resources available through UC Library Search. Click on the titles to view them in the catalog, or visit the Art History/ Classics Library to view new publications of women artists on display.

A time of one’s own : histories of feminism in contemporary art 

 Counterpractice : psychoanalysis, politics and the art of French feminism

Black Matrilineage, Photography, and Representation: Another Way of Knowing

 

The Art of Being Dangerous Exploring Women and Danger through Creative Expression

Women artists in the early modern courts of Europe (c. 1450-1700)

Women art workers and the Arts and Crafts movement

Griot Potters of the Folona : the History of an African Ceramic Tradition

Feminist visual activism and the body

Picturing political power : images in the women’s suffrage movement


Celebrating Black History Month- New E-Resources in Art History

Check out these materials, all available on-line.  Click on the titles to access them through UC Library Search.

Black Matrilineage, Photography, and Representation: Another Way of Knowing

The Color Pynk: Black Femme Art for Survival

Death’s futurity : the visual life of Black power

Feelin : creative practice, pleasure, and Black feminist thought

Gullah spirit the art of Jonathan Green

Negotiating Race and Rights in the Museum

 

Speaking Out of Turn: Lorraine O’Grady and the Art of Language

The Black experience in design : identity, expression & reflection

Through the Lens: The Pandemic and Black Lives Matter

 


Come Help Us Create Wikipedia and Create Change, Edit by Edit, on February 15, 2023!

Screenshot of Wikipedia Entry for the Movie Tár 1-20-23
Screenshot of Wikipedia Entry for the Movie Tár 1-20-23

Wikipedia has become so central to our lives that we count on it to represent reality, and solid fact. When we encounter a new phenomenon, we check out our trusty online friend for more information.  So, it was fascinating to me recently to see the lines blur between fiction and reality, when Wikipedia was used as a visual and social cue in the movie Tár, starring Cate Blanchett, about a famed female conductor.  In the movie, one of the clues to the coming turbulence in Lydia Tár’s life is a screen capture of a mystery editor changing items on the conductor’s Wikipedia entry. It looked and felt so real, the filming and Blanchett’s performance so rivetingly vivid, that many people believed the film was a biopic of a real person.   As Brooke LaMantia wrote in her article, No, Lydia Tar is Not Real,

“When I left the theater after watching Tár for two hours and 38 minutesI immediately fumbled for my phone. I couldn’t wait to see actual footage of the story I had just seen and was so ready for my Wikipedia deep dive to sate me during my ride home. But when I frantically typed “Lydia Tar?” into Google as I waited for my train, I was greeted with a confusing and upsetting realization: Lydia Tár is not real…the film’s description on Letterboxd — “set in the international world of classical music, centers on Lydia Tár, widely considered one of the greatest living composer/conductors and first-ever female chief conductor of a major German orchestra” — is enough to make you believe Tár is based on a true story. The description was later added to a Wikipedia page dedicated to “Lydia Tár,” but ahead of the film’s October 28 wide release, that page has now been placed under a broader page for the movie as a whole. Was this some sort of marketing sleight of hand or just a mistake I stumbled upon? Am I the only one who noticed this? I couldn’t be, right? I thought other people had to be stuck in that same cycle of questioning: Wait, this has to be real. Or is it? She’s not a real person?

Wikipedia is central to LaMantia’s questioning!  While it’s easy to understand people’s confusion in general, the Tár Wikipedia page, created by editors like you and like me, is very clear that this is a film, at least as of today’s access date, January 20, 2023… On the other hand, did you know you can click on the “View History” link on the page, and see every edit that has been made to it, since it was created, and who made that edit?  If you look at the page resulting from one of the edits from October 27, 2022, you can see that it does look like Tár is a real person, and in fact, a person who later went on to edit this entry to make it clearer wrote, “Reading as it was, it is not clear if Lydia actually exists.”  Maybe I should write to LaMantia and let her know.

I tell this story to show that clearly, Wikipedia is a phenomenon, and a globally central one, which makes it all the more amazing that it is created continuously, edit by edit, editor by editor.  There are many ways in which our own and your own edits can create change, lead to social justice, correct misinformation and more.  While it’s easy to get lost in the weeds of minute changes to esoteric entries, it’s also possible to improve pages on important figures in real-life history and bring them into our modern narrative and consciousness.  And it’s easy to do!

If you are interested in learning more, and being part of this central resource, we warmly welcome you and invite you to join us on Wednesday, February 15, from 1-2:30 for our 2023 Wikipedia Editathon, part of the University of Calif0rnia-wide 2023 Love Data Week.  No experience is required—we will teach you all you need to know about editing!  (but, if you want to edit with us in real time, please create a Wikipedia account before the workshop).  The link to register is here, and you can contact any of the workshop leaders (listed on the registration page) with questions.  We look forward to editing with you!


Coming Soon: Love Your Data, from Editathons to Containers!

UC Berkeley has been loving its data for a long time, and has been part of the international movement which is Love Data Week (LDW) since at least 2016, even during the pandemic!  This year is no exception—the UC Berkeley Libraries and our campus partners are offering some fantastic workshops (four of which are led by our very own librarians) as part of the University of California-wide observance.

Love Data Week 2023 is happening next month, February 13-17 (it’s always during the week of Valentine’s Day)!

University of California 2023 Love Data Week calendar with UC Berkeley offerings

UC Berkeley Love Data Week offerings for 2023 include:

GIS & Mapping: Where to Start

Wikipedia Edit-a-thon (you can also dip into Wikidata at other LDW events)

Introduction to Containers

Textual Analysis with Archival Materials

Getting Started with Qualitative Data Analysis

All members of the UC community are welcome—we hope you will join us!  Registration links for our offerings are above, and the full UC-wide calendar is here.   If you are interested in learning more about what the library is doing with data, check out our new Data + Digital Scholarship Services page.  And, feel free to email us at librarydataservices@berkeley.edu.   Looking forward to data bonding next month!


Undergraduate Library fellows offering research assistance

Library fellows Sofia Hernandez ‘24, left, and Avery Klauke ‘24 discuss entry points and access in Doe Library 190  on Oct. 12, 2022.
Sofia Hernandez ’24, left, and Avery Klauke ’24 are among the undergraduate Library fellows providing research help as part of a recently launched pilot. (Photo by Jami Smith for the UC Berkeley Library)

Students: Need help with your research?

Starting this month, undergraduate Library fellows are offering in-person peer library research assistance. Fellows are available 1-3 p.m. Mondays and Wednesdays through Nov. 30.

Make an appointment.


Summer reading: Turn the Ship Around!

Book cover for Turn the Ship Around Turn the Ship Around! A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders
L. David Marquet

WHY–We live in a world filled with anger and grievance over conflicting notions about the relationship between individuals and communities. That relationship is defined by notions of liberty, a word that is not a synonym for freedom, for liberty requires duties. But “liberty” is not the same in time. In classical antiquity, fascism, and post-communist autocracies, the individual is subordinate to a community, so liberty reflects the collective’s freedom from impurity or attack. In modern times, commerce supersedes violence as a way of allocating goods, so liberty is defined by the actions and desires of individuals. Give too much leave to individuals, and you get nihilism and fragmentation. Give too much leave to community, and you get stultification and totalitarianism. Thus, we must learn to live within a dialectical tension. And you will need to understand its contradictions so as to cut its Gordian knots. To that end, two readings on theory and one on practice.

YIN–A liberal comparison of ancient versus modern liberty: Benjamin Constant’s 15-page essay titled “The Liberty of Ancients Compared with that of Moderns” (1819).

YANG–A deeply conservative version of the same: Leo Strauss’ 49-page essay titled “The Liberalism of Classical Political Philosophy” (1959.) (electronic copy requires CalNet authentication)

BANG–A book about how a commander on a nuclear submarine changed a top-down martinet culture into a community of leaders: L. David Marquet’s 274-page book titled Turn the Ship Around! A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders (2013).

ARTURO PEREZ-REYES
Professional Faculty
Haas School of Business

That’s it for this year’s Summer Reading! Tune in again next year!


Summer reading: Whole Earth Catalog

Book cover for Whole Earth Catalog The Whole Earth Catalog
Stewart Brand, editor

The Whole Earth Catalog is a publication full of marvels that reveals a time in the world when a generation was seeking and creating all the implements for living. While it was being published, it was about how to live and make a new world on planet Earth – with a vision that arose from the alternative ideologies and DIY zeitgeist of the 1960’s in California and elsewhere. The catalog called itself a “tool for living.” Its goal was to open up all the esoteric, folk, or professional knowledge in the world so everyone could learn how to create whole, sustainable lives.

It is a catalog in the sense that it has products, contact information, and vendors and publications small and large, but it’s maybe really a dream for everyday people seeking to learn how to do everything from living off the land to hunting mushrooms; to building dome houses; to handling emergency childbirth; to buying a space clock; to how to open communication with other intelligent life in the universe; or where to find cheap government surplus pickup trucks. It had mailing addresses for absolutely everything, like where to send away for earth for building houses; where to order a copy of The Très Riches Heures of Jean, Duke of Berry, or a copy of Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth, etc., etc., etc. It also contained insets of short essays (by Ken Kesey, for one), and funky illustrations (by R. Crumb, for one) written by idiosyncratic people about the new kind of living. The catalog’s products and illustrations are magical for people chasing a world of love and food and machinery and freedom and…everything. Quoted purpose of the Whole Earth Catalog: “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.”

JEAN DICKINSON
Slavic, E. European, and Central Asian Catalog & Metadata Librarian

This book is part of the 2022 Berkeley Summer Reading List. Stay tuned for more weekly posts!


Summer reading: The Great Bay

Book cover for The Great Bay The Great Bay
Dale Pendell

The Great Bay, a novel by Dale Pendell (1947-2018), opens with humanity on the threshold of collapse of the planetary anthropogenic infrastructure based on technology and fossil fuel. A global pandemic driven by a microbe with very high contagion and very high mortality has dramatically reduced the world’s population. The pandemic is over after the first few pages and the remainder of the book explores the aftermath – and what an extraordinary exploration it is. The geographic feature that gives the book its title, the Great Bay, formed over several centuries of melting polar ice, rising sea levels, and heavy rain. It is what will certainly happen in central California when sea level rises even a relatively small amount – a large inland bay will form, connected to the Pacific Ocean by way of the Sacramento River, present-day San Francisco Bay, and the Golden Gate. This Great Bay forms a geographic centerpiece and anchor for the stories of community that take place in that region, although the stories have universal significance. In the course of thousands of years, as human civilization reconstitutes after its precipitous collapse, it does so in smaller communities and without a focus on technology. Such a focus might not even be possible, given that the relatively easily accessible mineral resources we have enjoyed for centuries would have been exhausted. Thus, different aspects of the human psyche are cultivated, and what might be called spiritual or shamanic connections with reality are developed to a high level. Less technology, more shamanism, a resulting different metaphysical frame on the nature of mind, all contribute to a vastly different course for civilization, and a vastly different take on reality.

DAVID PRESTI
Teaching Professor of Neurobiology and Psychology
Department of Molecular and Cell Biology

This book is part of the 2022 Berkeley Summer Reading List. Stay tuned for more weekly posts!


Summer reading: The Nutmeg’s Curse

Book cover for The Nutmeg's CurseThe Nutmeg’s Curse
Amitav Ghosh

In this deeply researched and beautifully written book, Amitav Ghosh convincingly argues that our current planetary climate crisis is the predictable outcome of centuries of Western, resource-driven colonialism, along with the concomitant marginalization and sometimes extermination of Indigenous cultures. This geopolitical world order – which early on focused on the commodification of nutmeg and other spices, followed by tea, sugarcane, opium, and finally fossil fuels – continues to this day. Our current crises – of climate, community, and spirit – can be seen as the result of a mechanistic view of the Earth, one where nature exists primarily as a resource for humans to exploit, rather than as a living force filled with agency and meaning. The book ends on a hopeful note of bringing attention to the re-enlivening of nature, a way of thinking about the geosphere and biosphere that takes seriously the world views of the Indigenous cultures that have suffered tremendously in the course of this history. My favorite book of 2021.

DAVID PRESTI
Teaching Professor of Neurobiology and Psychology
Department of Molecular and Cell Biology

This book is part of the 2022 Berkeley Summer Reading List. Stay tuned for more weekly posts!


Summer reading: Minor Feelings

Book cover for minor feelingsMinor Feelings
Cathy Park Hong

Like many poets turned essayists, Kathy Park Hong’s attention to language at the granular level makes her writing especially barbed in its critiques of American racism, and rich in observational detail. Her essay collection Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning leads readers through layers of the “minor feelings” of the title, and helps readers to understand the complicated position Asian Americans occupy in a society that so often tokenizes or fails to understand the diversity of Asian American experience and identity. By engaging readers in thinking about the concept of shame and how it works, Hong also becomes a voice helping to liberate a community from feeling that same sense of shame.

KAYA OAKES
Lecturer
College Writing Programs

This book is part of the 2022 Berkeley Summer Reading List. Stay tuned for more weekly posts!