Author: Lynn Cunningham
New Student Art on Exhibit in Moffitt Library
New student artwork is currently on exhibit in Moffitt Library on floors 4 & 5. Congratulations to undergraduate students, Kylie Schmidt, Avery Chung-Melino, Grace Aichen Guo, Isabella Shipley, Katrina Romulo, Serina Chavez, Pin Wei Kaywee Kuo, Cherri Jeong, Yuanzhen Song, and Wendy Zhang!
Pictured:
Boy on a Desk
Digital artwork
Katrina Romulo
Essence
Graphite, Marker
Grace Aichen Guo
Polluting Oceans
& The Ocean’s Real Monsters
Katrina Romulo
Oil Spill
Oil Paint on wood panel
Isabella Shipley
Photos: UC Berkeley Library & Lynn Cunningham
New Trial of the ‘Yale Art and Architecture ePortal’ through July 2019
UC Berkeley has a trial subscription to the new ‘Yale Art and Architecture ePortal‘ through July 2019. 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/home
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
Julia Bryan-Wilson’s “Fray: Art and Textile Politics” Awarded ASAP Book Prize
Doris and Clarence Malo Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art Julia Bryan-Wilson has been awarded the 2018 Book Prize from the Association for the Study of Arts of the Present (ASAP) for her book FRAY: Art and Textile Politics.
From the ASAP website:
“Congratulations to Professor Julia Bryan-Wilson for winning the prize for Fray: Art + Textile Politics. Amongst a very strong short list, the book prize committee recognized Fray for its inspiring mix of methodological innovation, sense of feminist and social engagement, and amazing re-articulation of contemporary art history around the material practices of textile art and craft in the United States and Chile from the 1970s to the present. Fray is a book that traces not only the emergence of an increasingly prominent artistic mode out of various craft and labor practices, but also shows how artists working with textiles–mainly women but also others operating on the margins of both the economy and the art-market–developed new material forms of expression and protest out of some of the most ancient technologies at our disposal as human beings–braiding, weaving, tying knots. Bryan-Wilson’s case studies explore the work of feminist knitting collectives, Chilean activists, emerging queer artists, and the vast numbers who contributed to the AIDS quilt. This is a book that provides a scrupulous examination of contemporary culture from the perspective of a medium whose materiality and immersion in bodily, physical labor challenge many of the stories we tell ourselves about art in an age of digital innovation and conceptual self-consciousness. At the same time, Fray assembles a picture of hemispheric contemporary art that offers scholars and critics in all the fields and area that ASAP embraces a chance to consider how female labor is valued, recognized, exploited, and made invisible. Bryan-Wilson’s work promises to change how scholars in various fields pay attention to craft-making practices and their representations in art, drama, literature, and everyday life.”
Exhibit: Art for the Asking: 60 Years of the Graphic Arts Loan Collection
Exhibit: Art for the Asking: 60 Years of the Graphic Arts Loan Collection
Art for the Asking: 60 Years of the Graphic Arts Loan Collection at the Morrison Library is on exhibit in Doe Library’s Brown Gallery until February 28th, 2019. The exhibition celebrates 60 years of the Graphic Arts Loan Collection (GALC), and includes highlights from the collection that have not been exhibited in over 20 years. Ephemera from the GALC program, including collection catalogs, newspaper clippings, posters, letters from the community, and campus memos are also on display. The exhibit also includes cases dedicated to the history of printmaking told through GALC prints, as well as cases featuring different printmaking techniques.
Exhibit Curators:
Alex de Courtois de Vicose
Lynn Cunningham
Ramon De Santiago
Aisha Hamilton
Jennifer Osgood
Scott Peterson
Opening Reception
Friday, October 5th 4-6pm
Morrison Library
The reception will feature talks by Professor Lauren Kroiz of the UC Berkeley History of Art Department and Bay Area printmaker Keith Cranmer. Tours of the exhibition will be hosted by Curator Ramon De Santiago at 4pm and 5:30pm.
A pre-reception event will take place from 2-3:30pm in the Printmaking Studio (265 Kroeber Hall), with a printmaking demonstration led by artist and Lecturer in the UC Berkeley Art Practice Department, Randy Hussong. Participants will have the option of printing their own souvenir prints at this event.
Both of these events are open to the public.
Details:
Friday, October 5th
Pre-Reception Printmaking Event
2-3:30pm
Printmaking Studio
265 Kroeber Hall
Reception and Tours
4-6pm
Morrison Library
101 Doe Library
Read more about the Graphic Arts Loan Collection on the the Library News site. To browse the GALC collection and reserve prints, see the GALC homepage.
Call for Applications – DIY Art Library Internship Project
Builders! Designers! Art Lovers! Library Scientists! Design and Build an Art Books Resource in Worth Ryder Art Gallery.
A DIY Library by Art Practice Professor Stephanie Syjuco, “Free Texts – An Open Source Reading Room”, ZERO1 Art and Technology Biennial, San Jose, 2012.
The DIY Art Library -Special Internship Project is a hands-on practicum. Students will work with Gallery Director Farley Gwazda and exciting guest speakers to design, source, install, and implement a new library that will serve the arts community.
This non-lending library will be semi-permanently installed in the Worth Ryder Art Gallery, which is open to the public and staffed by our interns. Students will do independent research and interview artists, writers, and librarians about their needs and the art books that have inspired and informed their practices. We will identify, source, and organize books, periodicals, and other media for our collection. Students are encouraged to think creatively about the use of the space!
The program is structured as a one-credit pass/fail course. Open to ALL UC Berkeley Students, NOT limited to Art Practice majors or upper division students. Students may take this course concurrently with the Worth Ryder Student Internship Program, OR separately. The application process is competitive.
Students must attend weekly meetings: Wednesdays, 12:10 – 1pm, Kroeber 120.
Students are expected to participate in an installation on November 24th – 28th.
Online applications due by: 11:59 pm, Friday, August 24th, 2018
QUESTIONS? Email Farley Gwazda: gwazda@berkeley.edu
Made possible through the Arts + Design Initiative Creative Discovery Program
New Databases: Photography: The World through the Lens; Classic Mexican Cinema Online; and askART
The Library has subscribed to three new databases of visual content available to all UC Berkeley patrons:
Photography: The World through the Lens
The invention of photography represented a turning point in nineteenth-century culture and visual experience. For the first time, there was a means to capture an accurate and true portrayal of the people, places, and events that would shape history. As a complement to studies of history, culture, media, and many other disciplines, Photography: The World Through the Lens provides the visual evidence to support and supplement written sources.
Photography: The World Through the Lens assembles collections of photographs, photograph albums, photographically illustrated books, and texts on the early history of photography found in libraries and archives across the globe. The nineteenth century was about changes in family and society, invention and scientific discovery, exploration and colonization, urban versus rural life, work, leisure and travel — all this is captured in photographs. Photography: The World Through the Lens delivers around 2 million photographs from Britain, Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas.
The Golden Age of Mexican cinema is illuminated in this collection of popular movie periodicals. It includes magazines such as Cinema Reporter (1943-1965), Cine Mundial (1951-1955), and El Cine Gráfico. From the Archives of the Filmoteca of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). Mexican cinema, from its beginnings in the late 1890s to its Golden Age (1930s to 1960), was consistently the largest and most important of all the Spanish-speaking countries. Over 40,000 images from Mexican Cinema are included.
askART provides access to artists’ profiles, images, literature references, biographies, auction records, art for sale and art wanted, essays on important art movements, and statistics on the markets. Millions of auction records and results (from 1987+). 300,000+ worldwide artists.
“Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen” at BAMPFA Co-Curated by Professor Julia Bryan-Wilson
History of Art Department Professor Julia Bryan-Wilson is co-curator of the exhibit, Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen, currently on at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive until October 14, 2018.
Join exhibition co-curators Andrea Andersson, chief curator of the visual arts at the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, and Professor Julia Bryan-Wilson, for a discussion of Cecilia Vicuña’s work on July 11 at 6:00 at BAMPFA.
About to Happen / Cecilia Vicuña
ISBN: 9781938221156
From the publisher website, Siglio Press:
“Beginning and ending at the edge of the ocean at the sacred mouth of the Aconcagua River, About to Happen serves as a lament as well as love letter to the sea. In this artist’s book, Chilean-born artist and poet Cecilia Vicuña weaves personal and ancestral memory while summoning the collective power to confront the economic disparities and environmental crises of the 21st century.
Collecting the detritus that washes up on shore, Vicuña assembles out of the refuse tiny precarios and basuritas—little sculptures held together with nothing more than string and wire, which she sometimes makes as offerings to be reclaimed by the sea. These acts of creation and erasure mirror the ways in which her work inhabits and enlivens the liminal spaces between the remembered and forgotten, the revered and the discarded, the material and the dematerialized.
About to Happen, which accompanies an exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, and the Berkeley Art Museum, traces a decades-long practice that has refused categorical distinctions and thrived within the confluences of conceptual art, land art, feminist art, performance and poetry. Vicuña’s nuanced visual poetics—operating fluidly between concept and craft, text and textile—transforms the discarded into the elemental, paying acute attention to the displaced, the marginalized and the forgotten.
Cecilia Vicuña (b. 1948, Santiago, Chile) is a poet, visual and performance artist, and filmmaker whose multi-disciplinary and multi-dimensional works bridge art and life, the ancestral and the avant-garde. Vicuña’s work emphasizes transformative acts and “metaphors in space”: an image becomes a poem, a film, a song, a sculpture or a collective performance. Beginning often with a delicate line (drawn or written) or a piece of string, she weaves complex works that are rich with political and social awareness as well as aesthetic beauty.”
Art History/Classics Receives Gift from Donors Helen and Raj Desai
Donors and long-time friends to the Department of Art History, Helen and Raj Desai, have donated a large set of books from their personal collection to the Art History/Classics Library. The collection contains rare exhibition catalogs and books on South Asian art and architecture, as well as other prized items such as a signed, three-volume set on the Plan of St. Gall by our department founder, Walter Horn.
Helen Crane Desai is an alumni of the Department (BA 1952, MA 1954) and her husband, Raj Desai, did his MS in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department. The Desais have established the Rajnikant T. and Helen Crane Desai Endowed Fund for Graduate Fellowships in Art History. Their numerous gifts to the Department over the years include generous support to the Joanna G. Williams Endowment for the art and visual culture of South and Southeast Asia and the James Cahill Fund for the study of Asian art. Other gifts to campus include to the L&S Leadership Fund, the BAMPFA, the International House, and the Institute for South Asia Studies.
The Art History/Classics Library is grateful to Helen and Raj Desai for their generous donation.
Here are some highlights from their generous gift:
New Publication by Assistant Professor Anneka Lenssen: Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents
History of Art department Assistant Professor Anneka Lenssen has published Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents with co-editors Sarah Rodgers and Nada Shabout.
See Professor Lenssen speak about her new book at NY MoMA on May 23, 6:00-8:00. In conversation with Anneka Lenssen, Sarah Rogers, Nada Shabout, co-editors of the book, and Iftikhar Dadi, Cornell University, with introduction by Glenn D. Lowry, MoMA.
From the publisher website, Duke University Press:
“Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents offers an unprecedented resource for the study of modernism: a compendium of critical art writings by twentieth-century Arab intellectuals and artists. The selection of texts—many of which appear here for the first time in English—includes manifestos, essays, transcripts of roundtable discussions, diary entries, exhibition guest-book comments, letters, and more. Traversing empires and nation-states, diasporas and speculative cultural and political federations, these documents bring light to the formation of a global modernism, through debates on originality, public space, spiritualism and art, postcolonial exhibition politics, and Arab nationalism, among many other topics. The collection is framed chronologically, and includes contextualizing commentaries to assist readers in navigating its broad geographic and historical scope. Interspersed throughout the volume are sixteen contemporary essays: writings by scholars on key terms and events as well as personal reflections by modern artists who were themselves active in the histories under consideration. A newly commissioned essay by historian and Arab-studies scholar Ussama Makdisi provides a historical overview of the region’s intertwined political and cultural developments during the twentieth century. Modern Art in the Arab World is an essential addition to the investigation of modernism and its global manifestations.”
Bay Area Book Festival, April 28-29
The Bay Area Book Festival will take place this year on April 28-29 throughout Downtown Berkeley. The festival will also include a Screening and Conversation Series in collaboration with the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.
Here is a sampling of art-related talks at the Bay Area Book Festival. See their website for a full schedule.
Geoff Dyer on Street Photography and Beyond, Interviewed by Errol Morris
Geoff Dyer interviewed by Errol Morris
Sunday, April 29
11:45 AM – 1:00 PM
The English writer Geoff Dyer’s eclectic, critically acclaimed body of work includes novels, memoirs, literary criticism, and essays on travel, jazz, film, and more, each marked with his inimitable wit. He’s known for defying genres, and his latest, “The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand,” includes 100 essays about 100 photographs by the famed street photographer. Dyer’s responses to the photographs are predictably unorthodox, often hilarious, and always insightful. Billy Collins (former U.S. poet laureate) said the book “amounts to an extensive tour of Winogrand’s photographs conducted by a savvy, observant, and highly entertaining guide.” Academy Award-winning documentarian Errol Morris, who also has authored a book on photography, will interview. Don’t miss this discussion with two powerful, funny, whip-smart speakers.
Aline Kominsky-Crumb: A Life in Comics
Aline Kominsky-Crumb interviewed by Peggy Orenstein
Sunday, April 29
11:45 AM – 1:00 PM
Aline Kominsky-Crumb is an icon of cartooning and a pioneer in feminist expression through this medium. Her subversive depictions of femininity, along with her collaborations with husband Robert Crumb, have been widely featured in the underground scene. Growing up enraptured by the counter-culture movement, Kominsky-Crumb has always sought new ways to defy and inspire, and she actively seeks to “deconstruct the myth or romanticism around being a woman.” Journalist Peggy Orenstein interviews the award-winning artist and storyteller, who comes to us from her home in France.
Viet Thanh Nguyen on Art and Politics
Viet Thanh Nguyen interviewed by Karen Tei Yamashita
Saturday, April 28
1:30 PM – 2:45 PM
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 2016 for his novel “The Sympathizer,” Viet Thanh Nguyen—fiction writer, essayist, activist, and UC Berkeley doctoral alum—has become an outspoken voice for refugee rights and justice for immigrants. In 2017 he received a MacArthur Genius Grant, and while he was commended for “challenging popular depictions of the Vietnam War and exploring the myriad ways that war lives on for those it has displaced,” his latest efforts move outward to the plight of refugees across the world. His lauded story collection “The Refugees” explores immigration, identity, love, and family. His latest project, “The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives,” brings together a host of prominent writers. He joins us to today to talk with Karen Tei Yamashita, novelist and essayist on the immigrant experience, about the role of the writer in society, the importance of art to politics, and the power of the written word.
The Transformative Power of Art: Making The Dam Keeper
Robert Kondo, Dice Tsutsumi
Saturday, April 28
1:30 PM – 2:45 PM
In 2014, audiences had to guard their heart-strings against Pixar’s short film “The Dam Keeper,” which told the story of Pig, a young boy who lives in a windmill and must keep a menacing fog away from his town. The responsibility weighs even heavier because Pig has no friends. Not until a new kid shows up at school and introduces Pig to artistic expression does his loneliness begin to dissipate. Join the men behind the film to discuss art, friendship, and creative dreams. This graphic novel is masterful on both literary and artistic levels: Be prepared to be swept away! (Remember, anyone under age 18 is let in free—no wristbands necessary!)
Brenda Hillman and Geoffrey G. O’Brien: A Conversation
Brenda Hillman, Geoffrey G. O’Brien, introduced by Rachel Richardson
Saturday, April 28
1:30 PM – 2:45 PM
What is the role of creative political resistance in a time of ascendant fascism? Historically, books, poems, and art have proven powerful enough to change the course of history. California poets Brenda Hillman and Geoffrey G. O’Brien discuss their new books and the critical function of art as activism. From the elegy to the love poem, from the individual to the collective, these poets will explore how words give us strength.