CANCELLED Book Talk Sunday December 3rd from Art History Faculty Julia Bryan-Wilson

Louise Nevelson's Sculpture Drag, Color, Join, Face

Julia Bryan-Wilson, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, will discuss her new book, Louise Nevelson’s Sculpture: Drag, Color, Join, Face , with Leigh Raiford, Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies, at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive on Sunday, December 3rd at 2pm.  Click the link for more information.

From the publisher’s website:

A daring reassessment of Louise Nevelson, an icon of twentieth-century art whose innovative procedures relate to gendered, classed, and racialized forms of making

“Here is a book that is not only a transformative study of a single artist but also a record of the scholar’s own labor—and her devotion.”—Artforum

In this radical rethinking of the art of Louise Nevelson (1899–1988), Julia Bryan-Wilson provides a long-overdue critical account of a signature figure in postwar sculpture. A Ukraine-born Jewish immigrant, Nevelson persevered in the male-dominated New York art world. Nonetheless, her careful procedures of construction—in which she assembled found pieces of wood into elaborate structures, usually painted black—have been little studied.

Organized around a series of key operations in Nevelson’s own process (dragging, coloring, joining, and facing), the book comprises four slipcased, individually bound volumes that can be read in any order. Both form and content thus echo Nevelson’s own modular sculptures, the gridded boxes of which the artist herself rearranged. Exploring how Nevelson’s making relates to domesticity, racialized matter, gendered labor, and the environment, Bryan-Wilson offers a sustained examination of the social and political implications of Nevelson’s art. The author also approaches Nevelson’s sculptures from her own embodied subjectivity as a queer feminist scholar. She forges an expansive art history that places Nevelson’s assemblages in dialogue with a wide array of marginalized worldmaking and underlines the artist’s proclamation of allegiance to blackness.”


Townsend Berkeley Books Chat with Aglaya Glebova

Aleksandr Rodchenko: Photography in the Time of Stalin

with Aglaya Glebova
BERKELEY BOOK CHATS
Wednesday, Nov 8, 2023 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
For more information, see the Townsend Website.

Aleksandr Rodchenko: Photography in the time of Stalin

Through the lens of Aleksandr Rodchenko’s photography, Aglaya Glebova (History of Art) charts a new and provocative understanding of the troubled relationship between technology, modernism, and state power in Stalin’s Soviet Union.

Aleksandr Rodchenko: Photography in the Time of Stalin (Yale, 2023) traces the shifting meanings of photography in the early Soviet Union, as it reconsiders the relationship between art and politics during what is usually considered the end of the critical avant-garde. Aleksandr Rodchenko (1891–1956), a versatile Russian artist and one of Constructivism’s founders, embraced photography as a medium of revolutionary modernity. Yet his photographic work between the late 1920s and the end of the 1930s exhibits an expansive search for a different pictorial language.

In the context of the extreme transformations carried out under the first Five-Year Plans, Rodchenko’s photography questioned his own modernist commitments. At the heart of this book is Rodchenko’s infamous 1933 photo-essay on the White Sea-Baltic Canal, site of one of the first gulags. Glebova’s careful reading of Rodchenko’s photography reveals a surprisingly heterodox practice and brings to light experiments in adjacent media, including the collaborative design work Rodchenko undertook with Varvara Stepanova, his partner in art and life.

Glebova is joined by Harsha Ram (Slavic Languages & Literatures and Comparative Literature). After a brief discussion, they respond to questions from the audience.

Registration Requested


Native American Heritage Month Art Resources

November is National Native American Heritage Month. Check out these online resources about Native American Art.  Come see additional titles on display in the Art History/ Classics Library.

The Sweet Smell of Home                                 Unsettling Native Art Histories…                                Women and Ledger Art

 

Shifting Grounds                                        Mapping Modernisms                                                  Making History

 

Indigenuity                                       Art for an Undivided Earth                                         Art for a New Understanding


New Publication from Faculty Lisa Pieraccini

Consumption, Ritual, Art, and Society Interpretive Approaches and Recent Discoveries of Food and Drink in Etruria

Art History Faculty Lisa Pieraccini has a new publication out titled Consumption, Ritual, Art and Society: Interpretive Approaches and Recent Discoveries of Food and Drink in Etruria (2023)

It will soon be available from UC Berkeley Library for loan.

From the Publisher:

Food determines who we are. We are what we eat, but also how we eat, with whom we eat, where we eat and, in some cases, even why we eat. Food production and consumption in the ancient world can express multiple dimensions of identity and negotiate belonging to, or exclusion from, cultural groups. It can bind through religious praxis, express wealth, manifest cultural identity, reveal differentiation in age or gender, and define status. As a prism through which to investigate the past, its utility is manifold. The chapters gathered together in this ground-breaking book explore the intersections between food, consumption, and ritual within Etruscan society through a purposeful cross-disciplinary approach. It offers a unique and innovative selection of up-to-date analysis from a variety of Etruscan food-related topics. From banqueting, feasting, fish rites, and symbolic consumption to bio-archaeological data, this volume explores a new and exciting field in ancient Italian archaeology.

 


New Publication from Faculty Julia Bryan-Wilson

Liza Lou
Julia Bryan-Wilson, Doris and Clarence Malo Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, has a new book out, available at the UC Berkeley Library.

The most comprehensive book on the work of Liza Lou, whose popular and critically acclaimed installations made entirely of beads consider the important themes of women, community, and the valorization of labor.

Liza Lou first gained attention in 1996 when her room-sized sculpture Kitchen was shown at the New Museum in New York. Representing five years of individual labor, this groundbreaking work subverted standards of art by introducing glass beads as a fine art material. The project blurred the rigid boundary between fine art and craft, and established Lou’s long-standing exploration of materiality, process, and beauty. Working within a craft métier has led the artist to work in a variety of socially engaged settings, from community groups in Los Angeles, to a collective she founded in Durban, South Africa. Over the past fifteen years, Lou has focused on a poetic approach to abstraction as a way to highlight the process underlying her work.

In this comprehensive volume that considers the entirety of Lou’s singular vision, curators, art historians, and artists offer important perspectives on the breadth of the work.


New Publication by Faculty Lisa Pieraccini

 Etruria and Anatolia : material connections and artistic exchange

Lisa Pieraccini, Lecturer of First Millennium BCE Italy, Reception, Collecting, has published a new book, available from the UC Berkeley Library. It is also available as an e-book. 

From the publisher’s website:

Striking similarities in Etruscan and Anatolian material culture reveal various forms of contact and exchange between these regions on opposite sides of the Mediterranean. This is the first comprehensive investigation of these connections, approaching both cultures as agents of artistic exchange rather than as side characters in a Greek-focused narrative. It synthesizes a wide range of material evidence from c. 800 – 300 BCE, from tomb architecture and furniture to painted vases, terracotta reliefs, and magic amulets. By identifying shared practices, common visual language, and movements of objects and artisans (from both east to west and west to east), it illuminates many varied threads of the interconnected ancient Mediterranean fabric. Rather than trying to account for the similarities with any one, overarching theory, this volume presents multiple, simultaneous modes and implications of connectivity while also recognizing the distinct local identities expressed through shared artistic and cultural traditions.


New Publication by Faculty Margaretta Lovell

Painting the Inhabited Landscape by Margaretta Lovell
Margaretta Lovell, Professor of American Art and Architecture, has a new book published, available in the UC Berkeley Library.  There will be a Berkeley Book Chat with Margaretta Lovell, joined by David Henkin, Wednesday, October 4th from 12:00 to 1:00pm in 220 Stephens Hall.  Registration is requested for attendance.
“Painting the Inhabited Landscape is an American art history that in its depth of research and its absolute assurance in method and goals matches or surpasses anything done by any global modernist art historian today. It is a significant contribution to the study of nineteenth-century world history in visual and material studies, and will be of interest to anyone looking at the formation of global modernism, technologies, and capital markets.”—Bruce Robertson, coauthor of Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction
“Painting the Inhabited Landscape is by far the most insightful study of Lane and his art to date. Margaretta Lovell’s close examination of Lane’s life, art, and the historical contexts within which he worked represents not only a quantum leap for our understanding of Lane and his world but also a new standard of scholarship for the field of American art.”—Alan Wallach, author of Exhibiting Contradiction: Essays on the Art Museum in the United States

Ishiuchi Miyako Photobooks From Richard Sun Donation

Come see the photography books of Ishiuchi Miyako on display in the Art History/ Classics Library.  Follow the link to read a brief biography of the artist from the SFMOMA website.  These books are part of Richard Sun’s generous donation of photography books.  Click the links below to view their records in UC Library Search.

Grain and Image                 Hasselblad Award                Moving Away                   Endless Night               Yokosuka Story


Books from the Richard Sun Photography Donation

Come see books recently on display from the Richard Sun Photography Book Donation.  These items are now shelved in the Art History/ Classics Library.  Click the titles to see their records in UC Library Search.

Another Country                                               Abendlied                                                               Balika Mela

Roxane II                                                            The Sign of Life                                             Manifest

She Dances on Jackson                                         Moises                                                                  Passion


Celebrate Earth Week with Art/Ecology Texts Online

Here are some featured e-Resources from the Art & Architecture ePortal.  Click the titles below to view them on the portal.

"THE ANTHROPOCENE AND THE HUMANITIES" book cover
"THE ANATOMY OF NATURE" book cover

THE ANATOMY OF NATURE: GEOLOGY AND AMERICAN LANDSCAPE PAINTING, 1825–1875

Rebecca Bedell
Princeton University Press
Jan, 2002

"ART AND ECOLOGY" book cover
"WASTELAND" book cover

WASTELAND: A HISTORY

Vittoria Di Palma
Yale University Press
Aug, 2014

"IMPLICATION" book cover

IMPLICATION: AN ECOCRITICAL DICTIONARY FOR ART HISTORY

Alan C. Braddock
Yale University Press
Mar, 2023

"FREDERIC CHURCH" book cover

FREDERIC CHURCH: THE ART AND SCIENCE OF DETAIL

Jennifer Raab
Yale University Press
Nov, 2015