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

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.”


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

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


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