Author: Lynn Cunningham
Exhibit: Letters | الحروف How Artists Reimagined Language in the Age of Decolonization
Letters | الحروف How Artists Reimagined Language in the Age of Decolonization
Left to right: art by Mohammed Khadda, Ibrahim El-Salahi, and Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu (details)
Letters | الحروف How Artists Reimagined Language in the Age of Decolonization is on exhibit in Doe Library’s Bernice Layne Brown Gallery from March 13 until Aug. 31, 2023. How have modern artists in North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia made use of their inheritance of a visual cache of Arabic signs and letter-forms, and with what meanings? This exhibition, curated by students in the seminar History of Art 192Cu, “Exhibiting Calligraphic Modernism,” in collaboration with the Library, explores work by dozens of artists in multiple media, from poster design to painting, mosaic, poetry, and animation. A shared backdrop to the artwork on display are the decolonization processes and liberation struggles taking place across Asia, Africa, and Latin America in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, which sparked desires to create cultural futures in resistance to dominant imperial values and official language policies.
Exhibit Curators: Drew Atkins, Riana Azevedo, Lynn Cunningham, Sharan Dulai, Eva Elfishawy, Mohamed Hamed, Teddi Haynes, Murtaza Hiraj, Viv Kammerer, Shanti Knutzen, Marissa Lee, Anneka Lenssen, Val Machado, Jasmine Nadal-Chung, Reyansh Sathishkumar, A. Wara, Alice Xie, Jinyu Xu, Suri Zheng, and Hayley Zupancic
Exhibit dates: March 13 to Aug. 31, 2023
Location: Bernice Layne Brown Gallery, Doe Library
Opening reception
Wednesday, March 15, 2023, 5-6:30 p.m.
Morrison Library
The reception will feature brief remarks by members of the curatorial team. Tours of the exhibition will be led by student-curators beginning at 5:45 p.m. Food and drinks will be served.
A pre-reception event will take place from 2:30-4:30 p.m. in 308A Doe Library, and will include a presentation and Arabic calligraphy workshop by the Bay Area-based calligrapher Zubair Simab. Participants will have an opportunity to try writing Arabic letters with a prepared pen and ink. There are 40 slots available for the workshop. Please register here: http://ucblib.link/calligraphyRSVP.
Both of these events are open to the public.
Details:
Wednesday, March 15, 2023
Pre-reception calligraphy workshop
2:30-4:30 p.m.
308A Doe Library
Register: http://ucblib.link/calligraphyRSVP
Exhibit reception and tours
5-6:30 p.m.
Morrison Library (101 Doe Library)
If you require an accommodation to fully participate in this event, please contact Amber Lawrence at libraryevents@berkeley.edu or 510-459-9108 at least 7-10 days in advance of the program.
Sponsors/contributors: Center for Middle East Studies, Department of History of Art, and UC Berkeley Library
Arts/Visual Collections Showcase
Join us for an open house and 50th anniversary celebration of the Art History/Classics Library. We will be showcasing arts-related and visual collections from across the UC Berkeley Library in a book-fair-style event featuring collection highlights and outreach materials. Come and learn about our many arts-related library holdings.
Wednesday, November 16th
drop by anytime between 3-5 p.m.
Art History/Classics Library
Room 308 Doe Library
Art History/Classics Library Orientation Sessions for Art Practice and History of Art majors
Welcome back students! If you are interested in learning more about the wonderful arts library resources, please join us at one of our upcoming library orientation sessions. Current sessions offered include:
Friday, August 26th 3-4
Monday, August 29th 2-3
Friday, September 9th 11-12
Please rsvp at: http://ucblib.link/orientationAHC
Registration will be capped at 20 students. New dates/times will be added to the rsvp form if the current offerings reach capacity. We will meet in the Art History/Classics Library (room 308, 3rd floor Doe Library).
Passing of Professor Emerita Joanna G. Williams
From the History of Art department obituary written by Sugata Ray, Associate Professor in History of Art:
“Professor Emerita Joanna G. Williams, distinguished scholar of South and Southeast Asian art, passed away at her home in Berkeley on June 16, 2022, at the age of eighty-four. She was one of the foremost scholars of South and Southeast Asian art and architecture and, indeed, one of the most well-regarded for her seminal work on fourth- and fifth-century sculpture and architecture as well as later folk traditions.”
See the full obituary on the department website.
In honor of her life and work in the field of South and Southeast Asian art and architecture, we share here some of her publications in the field, and her image collections from her travels shared via the Artstor Public Collections.
ISBN : 0-520-32182-0
Kingdom of the sun: Indian court and village art from the Princely State of Mewar
ISBN : 0939117398
ISBN : 9780939117390
Moffitt Library Student Art Exhibit 2020-2021
Moffitt Library Student Art Exhibit 2020-2021
We would like to announce the selections for 2020-2021 Moffitt Library Student Art
Exhibit. Due to the campus closure, the exhibit could not yet be installed in Moffitt Library, as per usual. You can find the full online exhibit at the Student Art in Moffitt website. We hope to install the artworks in Moffitt Library once health conditions permit and the library is open to the public again.
A special thanks goes to H.Art, the History of Art Undergraduate Association at UC Berkeley, for helping with the call for artworks and with the final selections for the exhibit.
Below is a sampling of works from the exhibit. Congratulations to all of the students!
We look forward to seeing your works on the walls of Moffitt soon:
You & I
Acrylic on Canvas
Gabby Nguyen
Graduation year: 2022
Major: Psychology and Art Practice
Graduation year: 2022
Major: Psychology and Art Practice
Who Descends?
SilkScreen on Cotton Paper
Henry Davis
Graduation year: 2021
Major: Global Studies
SilkScreen on Cotton Paper
Henry Davis
Graduation year: 2021
Major: Global Studies
Life’s a Beach
Graphic design
Kiana Aryan
Graduation year: 2020
Major: Linguistics, Cognitive Science
Graphic design
Kiana Aryan
Graduation year: 2020
Major: Linguistics, Cognitive Science
Growing Thoughts
Oil on canvas
Albert Cartagenes
Graduation year: 2022
Major: Art Practice and Art History
Oil on canvas
Albert Cartagenes
Graduation year: 2022
Major: Art Practice and Art History
Trial of Art & Architecture ePortal
UC Berkeley has a trial subscription to the ‘Yale Art and Architecture ePortal‘ through July 22, 2020. The portal includes access to eBook versions of many publications on art and architecture from Yale University Press and beyond. The site can be accessed from a campus IP address or through the VPN at: https://www.aaeportal.com
Here is more information about the portal from the publisher website:
“This innovative and dynamic electronic platform provides individuals and institutions with access to important art and architectural history scholarship. With grant funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Yale University Press has developed this site to make key backlist and out-of-print titles on a wide variety of subjects more broadly available and easily discoverable within an interactive platform. The ePortal also features scholarship from other leading university presses and museum publishers, creating a meaningful and robust educational experience.”
Some of the features of the Yale Art and Architecture ePortal include:
Read offline by printing or saving chapters as PDFs
Highlight and take notes within online reader
Share links to chapters or books with students
Embedded image zoom within online reader
Full-text searching capabilities
Image searing capabilities
On Display: Recent Publications by Art Practice and History of Art Faculty
Now on display on the Art History/Classics Library new books shelf:
Fifteen new publications written by, edited by, or featuring contributions by faculty members from Art Practice, History of Art, and Librarian Emerita, Kathryn M. Wayne.
Featured:
Picture Industry : a Provisional History of the Technical Image, 1844-2018, chapter by Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby
Eco-art History in East and Southeast Asia, chapter by Gregory P. Levine
How Art Can Be Thought : a Handbook for Change, by Allan deSouza
Seehearing the Enlightened Failure / Cecilia Vicuña, featuring essay by Julia Bryan-Wilson
Climate Change and the Art of Devotion : Geoaesthetics in the Land of Krishna, 1550-1850, by Sugata Ray
Picasso 1932 : Love, Fame, Tragedy : the EY Exhibition, with contributions by T.J. Clark
Hello Leonora, Soy Anne Walsh, by Anne Walsh, with contributions by Julia Bryan-Wilson
Sharon Hayes, co-authored by Julia Bryan-Wilson
Sir, by Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle
Mario García Torres: Illusion Brought Me Here, co-authored by Julia Bryan-Wilson
A Material World : Culture, Society, and the Life of Things in Early Anglo-America, co-edited by Margaretta Markle Lovell
Heaven on Earth : Painting and the Life to Come, by T.J. Clark
Water Histories of South Asia : the Materiality of Liquescence, co-edited by Sugata Ray
Pieter Bruegel and the Idea of Human Nature, by Elizabeth Alice Honig
An Analysis of the Saltillo Style in Mexican Sarapes, by Katharine Drew Jenkins; edited by Kathryn M. Wayne; essay by Ira Jacknis
Recent Acquisition: An Analysis of the Saltillo Style in Mexican Sarapes, Edited by Librarian Emerita, Kathryn M. Wayne
Now available: An Analysis of the Saltillo Style in Mexican Sarapes, by Katharine Drew Jenkins
Includes a reproduction of Katharine Drew Jenkins’ thesis (M.A. in Decorative Art–University of California, Berkeley, Jan. 1951).
Edited by Librarian Emerita, Kathryn M. Wayne,
and including an essay by Berkeley Research Anthropologist, Ira Jacknis.
Two New Art Practice Faculty Publications
Available now in the Berkeley Library – two new publications by Art Practice faculty members, Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle and Anne Walsh.
Sir, by Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle
From the publisher website, Litmus Press:
“SIR is based upon the conceptual premise of a name that undefines the defined. Hinkle meditates on historical perceptions of the black male body and its contextualizing geographies in relationship to her brother, an African-American man born in 1980 named Sir. SIR interrogates naming in the African Diaspora to examine collective historical trauma, transgressive perceptions of the black male body, forms of gendering, and familial modes of survival within a hostile geography.”
Hello Leonora, Soy Anne Walsh, by Anne Walsh, with contributions by Julia Bryan-Wilson
From the publisher website, MIT press:
“Over the past decade, artist Anne Walsh has created an ongoing, multipart response to surrealist painter Leonora Carrington’s novel The Hearing Trumpet (written in the early 1960s, published in 1974). Walsh’s interdisciplinary works, encompassing video, writing, and performance, chronicle her time with the nonagenarian author and, ultimately, her assumption of the identity of the aging artist. Hello Leonora, Soy Anne Walsh is a visual and written “adaptation” of Carrington’s feminist novella, offering a narrative in fragments: a middle-aged artist named Anne Walsh falls in love with the 92-year-old author of a book about a 92-year-old woman who is placed in a sinister and increasingly surreal retirement home.
Walsh courts the author, travels to Mexico to meet her, fantasizes about adapting the book for film, and spends the next decade searching for The Hearing Trumpet‘s form and cast. Having discovered in Carrington’s novel a thrilling, subversive example of old age, Walsh casts herself as an “Apprentice Crone.” She stalks old people and takes selfies with them. She becomes a mother, passes through menopause. She sings her daughter’s Disney movie songs at “elder theater” classes. She studies and rehearses the trauma, the affliction, the indignity that is old age, and she writes to Leonora Carrington.
The story is told through facsimiles of hand-written letters, annotated research notes, post-it note flow charts, cast lists, scripts, and a photographic essay that loosely narrates Walsh’s visits to Carrington in Mexico City, with additional texts by writer Dodie Bellamy, art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson, and poet and critic Claudia La Rocco.”
Anne Walsh will be celebrating the publication of her book on Wednesday October 23 at 7 p.m. at East Bay Booksellers (formerly Diesel Books), and she will be featured at a Berkeley Book Chat event hosted by the Townsend Center for the Humanities, Wednesday, Nov 13, 2019 | 12:00 pm to 1:00 pm, Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall
New Resource: Artifex Press Database of Digital Catalogues Raisonnés
The UC Berkeley Library now subscribes to a new database of digital catalogues raisonnés by Artifex Press. UC Berkeley faculty, staff, and students now have access to the full collection of Artifex Press publications, including catalogues raisonnés on:
Chuck Close
Jim Dine
Tim Hawkinson
Sol LeWitt
Agnes Martin
Lucas Samaras
James Siena
These titles can be accessed directly from the Artifex Press website via the VPN or Proxy, or linked from the Oskicat catalog on the individual titles.
