Author: Lynn Cunningham
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.
Kingdom of the sun: Indian court and village art from the Princely State of Mewar

Moffitt Library Student Art Exhibit 2020-2021
Moffitt Library Student Art Exhibit 2020-2021

Graduation year: 2022
Major: Psychology and Art Practice

SilkScreen on Cotton Paper
Henry Davis
Graduation year: 2021
Major: Global Studies

Graphic design
Kiana Aryan
Graduation year: 2020
Major: Linguistics, Cognitive Science

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:

Prints from the Graphic Arts Loan Collection Now on Display in the Art History/Classics Library
We are delighted to announce that a new exhibition of art borrowed from the Library’s Graphic Arts Loan Collection (GALC) is now on display in the hallway of the Art History/Classics Library. Amongst a number of noteworthy prints you will find a 16th C. view of Rome’s Palatine Hill from the workshop of the Antwerp-based Hieronymus Cock, a 19th C. landscape by renowned Japanese ukiyo-e artist Hiroshige Ando, one of Chagall’s many depictions of “lovers”, one of Le Corbusier’s La main ouverte (Open Hand) lithographs, and the serigraph Untitled, Trees with Mattress by Carrie Mae Weems. Please come and see them for yourself!
Art History/Classics Library Orientation Sessions
Art History/Classics Library orientation sessions
Please join us for a brief tour of our subject library, as well as an orientation of our online resources. All are welcome! This would be especially useful for all transfer students and new Art History and Art Practice majors. Feel free to drop in on any of the following dates. We will meet in the Art History/Classics Library (room 308 Doe). We hope to see you there!
Thursday, September 5th
2:15-3:00
Monday, September 9th
1:15-2:00
Friday, September 13th
3:15-4:00
Two New Titles from Professor Sugata Ray
Two new books are available from History of Art Professor Sugata Ray.
Water Histories of South Asia: The Materiality of Liquescence
Edited by Sugata Ray, Venugopal Maddipati
From the Routledge website:
“This book surveys the intersections between water systems and the phenomenology of visual cultures in early modern, colonial and contemporary South Asia. Bringing together contributions by eminent artists, architects, curators and scholars who explore the connections between the environmental and the cultural, the volume situates water in an expansive relational domain. It covers disciplines as diverse as literary studies, environmental humanities, sustainable design, urban planning and media studies. The chapters explore the ways in which material cultures of water generate technological and aesthetic acts of envisioning geographies, and make an intervention within political, social and cultural discourses. A critical interjection in the sociologies of water in the subcontinent, the book brings art history into conversation with current debates on climate change by examining water’s artistic, architectural, engineering, religious, scientific and environmental facets from the 16th century to the present.
This is one of the first books on South Asia’s art, architecture and visual history to interweave the ecological with the aesthetic under the emerging field of eco art history. The volume will be of interest to scholars and general readers of art history, Islamic studies, South Asian studies, urban studies, architecture, geography, history and environmental studies. It will also appeal to activists, curators, art critics and those interested in water management.”
Climate Change and the Art of Devotion: Geoaesthetics in the Land of Krishna, 1550-1850
By Sugata Ray
From the University of Washington Press website:
“In the enchanted world of Braj, the primary pilgrimage center in north India for worshippers of Krishna, each stone, river, and tree is considered sacred. In Climate Change and the Art of Devotion, Sugata Ray shows how this place-centered theology emerged in the wake of the Little Ice Age (ca. 1550–1850), an epoch marked by climatic catastrophes across the globe. Using the frame of geoaesthetics, he compares early modern conceptions of the environment and current assumptions about nature and culture.
A groundbreaking contribution to the emerging field of eco–art history, the book examines architecture, paintings, photography, and prints created in Braj alongside theological treatises and devotional poetry to foreground seepages between the natural ecosystem and cultural production. The paintings of deified rivers, temples that emulate fragrant groves, and talismanic bleeding rocks that Ray discusses will captivate readers interested in environmental humanities and South Asian art history.”