Tag: New Acquisitions
Exploring the Arts during Black History Month
“The A&AePortal is committed to featuring groundbreaking and authoritative books on African Americans and the arts. Here are some highlights—see what might be helpful in your teaching, coursework, or research!” – from the A&Ae Portal Website.
Explore the Arts and Architecture E Portal from Yale University Press provided to you by UC Berkeley Library. Click the link to see these and other titles about the African American and Black Diaspora.
Visit the Art History/ Classics library to view more new books on Black and African American Artists now on display in 308 Doe.
CANCELLED Book Talk Sunday December 3rd from Art History Faculty Julia Bryan-Wilson
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.”
New Publication from Faculty Julia Bryan-Wilson

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
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

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
Women Photographers Book Selections from the Richard Sun Donation
Here is a selection of books of the works of women photographers recently donated by Richard Sun. Additional books from the donation are now on display in the Art History/Classics library. Click the links to see their records in UC Library Search.
Stranger: Olivia Arthur Mourka: Martha Swope Hot Days in Camp Hansen: Mao Ishikawa
Liz Johnson Artur Moving Away: Ishiuchi Miyako Myself Mona Ahmed: Dayanita Singh
Memorandum: Ana Paula Estrada Every Night Temo Ser La Dinner: Sofia Ayarzagoitia Picture Book: Hannah Hock
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
New Alumni Publications
Check out these new publications written and edited by Alumni from the Art History Department:
Mont Allen (PhD 2014), The Death of Myth on Roman Sarcophagi: Allegory and Visual Narrative in the Late Empire
Patricia Fortini Brown (PhD 1983), The Venetian Bride: Bloodlines and Blood Feuds in Venice and its Empire
Sarah Louise Cowan (PhD 2019), Howardena Pindell: Reclaiming Abstraction (Release Date 11/2022)
Todd Cronan (PhD 2005), Red Aesthetics: Rodchenko, Brecht, Eisenstein
Nina Dubin (PhD 2006), MELTDOWN! Picturing the World’s First Bubble Economy
Robin Greeley (PhD 1996), A Companion to Modern and Contemporary Latin American and Latina/o Art
Anthony Gruden (PhD 2008), Like a Little Dog: Andy Warhol’s Queer Ecologies
Aaron M. Hyman (PhD 2017), Rubens in Repeat: The Logic of the Copy in Colonial Latin America
Stephanie Pearson (PhD 2015), The Triumph and Trade of Egyptian Objects in Rome: Collecting Art in the Ancient Mediterranean
Orna Tsultem (PhD 2009), A Monastery on the Move: Art and Politics in Later Buddhist Mongolia
Karl Whittington (PhD 2010), New Horizons in Trecento Italian Art
Barbara Wisch (PhD 1985), A Companion to Early Modern Rome, 1492-1692
Marnin Young (PhD 2005), Felix Feneon: The Anarchist and the Avant-Garde