UC Berkeley History of Art Department

04/22/2025

Congratulations to Atreyee Gupta on her new book.

Associate Professor Atreyee Gupta has announced the publication of her new book Non-Aligned: Art, Decolonization and the Third World Project in India.

A revelatory look at modernism in India, exploring art’s role in decolonization and aesthetic discourse across the Global South.

Modernism’s peak in the interwar and postwar decades coincided with the eruption of antifascist and decolonization movements globally, including the League against Imperialism, the Bandung Asian-African Conference, and the Non-Aligned Movement. Viewing artistic practices through the lens of the radical intellectual possibilities that these epoch-making events prompted, Atreyee Gupta uncovers a modernist internationalism incongruous with Westernist cultural hegemonies. Modernism, she shows, cannot be separated from concepts of freedom and autonomy generated by Third World political struggles. Gupta mobilizes concepts including liberation, anti-imperialism, development, and modernization as essential analytic categories for art history, reorienting our understanding of both global modernism and Indian art.

https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300280883/non-aligned/

04/22/2025

The department is pleased to announce the publication of Postwar Revisited: A Global Art History by Associate Professor Atyeyee Gupta and Okwui Enwezor (Editors).

Okwui Enwezor’s 2016 exhibition Postwar: Art between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965, redefined the history of art produced in those two decades. Nearly a decade later, Postwar Revisited returns to these debates to present an image of a historical period in which Western conceptions of art, aesthetics, and philosophy are all thrown into intense flux after Auschwitz and Hiroshima, while the cultural energies of decolonization generate myriad artistic and intellectual practices across the globe, which re-engage the connections of art to life itself.

https://www.dukeupress.edu/postwar-revisited

04/09/2025

The Annual Del Chiaro Lecture: Slavery and Enslavement in Antiquity – A Global Historical Investigation

May 2, 2025
5 p.m.
The Faculty Club - Howard Room

The Mario Del Chiaro Center for the Study of Ancient Italy, the Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology Program and the History of Art Department are pleased to announce: The Annual Del Chiaro Lecturer, Noel Lenski, Dunham Professor of Classics and History, Department Chair of Classics, Yale University.

Professor Lenski’s lecture is entitled Slavery and Enslavement in Antiquity – A Global Historical Investigation.

Reception to follow.

Contact Info:
Lisa Pieraccini
[email protected]

03/12/2025

Be a shining star 🌟 this , which starts tonight at 9 pm and runs through 9 pm on Thursday! Please consider a gift during this 24-hour event to support our students and research.

https://givingday.berkeley.edu/giving-day/90821/department/90939

03/06/2025

Congratulations to Anneka Lenssen, who has been selected as a recipient of the 2025 Faculty Award for Outstanding Mentorship of GSIs.

This award recognizes faculty (including both Senate and non-Senate faculty) who have provided GSIs outstanding mentorship in teaching at Berkeley and in preparing for teaching in future careers. Faculty receive this award based on nominations from their GSIs.

Anneka will be acknowledged for this award at the Graduate Mentoring Awards ceremony held on April 16, 2025, from 5:00-7:00 p.m. at the Alumni House.

02/26/2025

Join us for the History of Art Stoddard Lecture: "From the Object of Art History to the Subject of Black Studies" by Huey Copeland.

Wednesday, March 12, 2025
5 p.m.
308A Doe Library

In this lecture drawn from his new book project, Huey Copeland considers how disciplinary structures differently value and tend towards the racialized historicity of the aesthetic, above all to those blackened beings whose everywhere present yet suppressed exertions continue to provide the preconditions for the emergence of the visual, the modern world, and the work of artists on the engendering of both.

Image: A detail from Kara Walker’s 1995 The End of Uncle Tom and the Grand Allegorical Tableau of Eva in Heaven, cut paper on wall.

02/14/2025

The Phi Beta Kappa Society is excited to announce that Professor Shannon Jackson is a 2025-2026 Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar! https://www.pbk.org/visitingscholars/2025-2026

Since 1956, the Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar Program(link is external) has been offering undergraduates the opportunity to spend time with some of America's most distinguished scholars. Each year, top scholars in the liberal arts and sciences are selected to visit universities and colleges where Phi Beta Kappa chapters are located. Visiting Scholars spend two days on each campus meeting informally with undergraduates, participating in classroom lectures and seminars, and giving one major lecture open to the academic community and general public.

For more information about the 2025-2026 Visiting Scholar Program see the Phi Beta Kappa press release. https://www.pbk.org/2025-2026-phi-beta-kappa-visiting-scholars

Congratulations, Shannon!

02/12/2025

Join us for our History of Art Lecture Series: “Africans in Byzantium: Kings, Merchants, and Holy Men”. By Dr. Andrea Myers Achi.

Thursday, Feb. 27
5 p.m.
308a Doe

In Fall 2023, The Metropolitan Museum of Art presented the critically acclaimed exhibition Africa & Byzantium, which explored complex connections between North and East African communities and Byzantium. This landmark exhibition included significant loans from thirty-six lenders, including prominent institutions in Tunisia and Egypt. Reviews highlighted not only the visual splendor of the artworks but also the growing interest in the African individuals who commissioned, traded, or were depicted in Byzantine art.

This talk builds on the research conducted for the Africa & Byzantium exhibition, offering new case studies that examine the visual and literary portrayals of Africans within the Byzantine context. Dr. Achi will also address the challenges of revealing these often-overlooked narratives from an art historical perspective and provide insights into the broader implications for understanding cultural interactions in the medieval world.

Speaker Bio: Dr. Andrea Myers Achi is the Mary and Michael Jaharis Associate Curator of Byzantine Art in the Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. In her role, she specializes in the art and archaeology of Late Antiquity and Byzantium, with a particular interest in illuminated manuscripts and ceramics. She has brought this expertise to bear on exhibitions like Art and Peoples of the Kharga Oasis (2017), Crossroads: Power and Piety (2020), The Good Life (2021), Africa & Byzantium (2023), and Afterlives: Contemporary Art in the Byzantine Crypt (2024) at The Met and in numerous presentations and publications. In addition to her scholarship and robust curatorial practice, she has held leadership roles at the Medieval Academy of America, the International Center of Medieval Art, and on internal committees at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

01/15/2025

We Were Here: The Untold History of Black Africans in Renaissance Europe

February 14, 2025
2 - 5 p.m.
Nestrick Room (142 Dwinelle Hall)

The Department of Italian Studies is proud to present and discuss the film We Were Here - The Untold History of Black Africans in Renaissance Europe with the director Fred Kuwornu

The film sheds light on the overlooked presence of African and Black individuals in Renaissance Europe, highlighting their depiction in masterpieces by some of the era’s most celebrated artists. How did they come to Europe? Why were they portrayed? Were they truly all servants or slaves? If the Black faces portrayed in these Renaissance masterpieces could speak, what would they tell us? Directed by award-winning filmmaker Fred Kudjo Kuwornu and produced by Do The Right Films, this multilingual documentary takes viewers on an expansive journey through the UK, Italy, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, and France, offering a compelling reexamination of European art history and its cultural legacy. Featuring insights from leading scholars in Art History, Black Studies, and History, alongside Black activists and curators, the film provides a rich, layered perspective on a neglected chapter of European history. We Were Here has already attracted international attention, having been exhibited in the Central Pavilion curated by Adriano Pedrosa at the 60ᵗʰ International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, which attracted 700,000 visitors. The documentary has received critical acclaim for its fresh, thought-provoking exploration of race, art, and identity in the Renaissance.

Fred Kudjo Kuwornu is a multi-hyphenate socially engaged artist, filmmaker and scholar whose work is deeply influenced by his background as a person of African descent. Born and raised in Italy, Kuwornu is based in New York. His unique background is reflected in his triple citizenship, holding Italian, Ghanaian, and U.S. passports. By consistently bridging the past and present, the hegemonic and subaltern, the seen and unseen, Kuwornu’s practice emerges as a vital contribution to contemporary visual culture, understanding the complex interplay between history, identity, race, and representation in our globalized world. Kuwornu’s curatorial vision can be understood as a form of historical remixing in which he reconfigures archival materials and contemporary narratives to enlighten a rethinking of perspectives. His works have been exhibited at prestigious venues including the Central Pavilion at the Venice Art Biennale (2024), Museum of Moving Image in New York, Library of Congress, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, George Eastman Museum and numerous international film festivals.

Sponsor(s): Department of Italian Studies, Department of History of Art, Istituto Italiano di Cultura of San Francisco, Designated Emphasis in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies, The Mary C. Stoddard Fund, The Cyrus and Michelle Hadidi Fund, Townsend Center for the Humanities

01/14/2025

The department is pleased to announce the publication of Ribera’s Repetitions Paper and Canvas in Seventeenth-Century Spanish Naples by Professor Todd Olson.

The seventeenth-century Valencian artist Jusepe de Ribera spent most of his career in Spanish Viceregal Naples, where he was known as “Lo Spagnoletto,” or “the Little Spaniard.” Working under the patronage of Spanish viceroys, Ribera held a special position bridging two worlds. In Ribera’s Repetitions, art historian Todd P. Olson sheds new light on the complexity of Ribera’s artwork and artistic methods and their connections to the Spanish imperial project.

Drawing from a diverse range of sources, including poetry, literature, natural history, philosophy, and political history, Olson presents Ribera’s work in a broad context. He examines how Ribera’s techniques, including rotation, material decay (through etching), and repetition, influenced the artist’s drawings and paintings. Many of Ribera’s works featured scenes of physical suffering—from Saint Jerome’s corroded skin and the flayed bodies of Saint Bartholomew and Marsyas to the ragged beggar-philosophers and the eviscerated Tityus. But far from being the result of an individual sadistic predilection, Olson argues, Ribera’s art was inflected by the legacies of the Reconquest of Spain and Neapolitan coloniality. Ribera’s material processes and themes were not hermetically sealed in the studio; rather, they were engaged in the global Spanish Empire.

Pathbreaking and deeply interdisciplinary, this copiously illustrated book offers art history students and scholars a means to see Ribera’s art anew.

https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-09754-1.html(link is external)

01/14/2025

Robert Schwartzwald (U. of Montreal) and Sherry Simon (Concordia U.): Rediscovering Édouard Roditi: The 20th Century of a Dazzling Mind

Tuesday, February 4
5 pm
Library of French Thought (4229 Dwinelle)

Critic, translator, poet, essayist, Édouard Roditi (1910-1992) was a singular witness to the twentieth century. Roditi was born in Paris and had Sephardic ancestors of Greek, Spanish, and Italian origins on his father’s side and Catholic and Ashkenazi Jewish connections on his mother’s. A published surrealist poet by eighteen, Roditi would become an interpreter at the Nuremberg trials, a highly regarded literary translator, a contributor to many LGBTQ publications from Arcadie to Gay Sunshine, and a perceptive social analyst whose outspoken views irritated American, Soviet, and French authorities by turns. From his family history and childhood to Berlin in the immediate post-war years, French decolonization, and essays on writers such as André Breton, Hart Crane, Italo Svevo, and Maurice Sachs, Roditi’s writings over six decades are a unique account of a life lived at the flashpoints of history and at the margins of society, providing acute and unsparing observations of literature and political events.

12/31/2024

As we bring 2024 to a close, we remain ever grateful to our local and global community.

We wish you a year of health and happiness, reflection and affirmation, as well as the readiness to embrace all that 2025 has ahead.

Greetings and gratitude from The History of Art Department at UC Berkeley
…exploring the art of the world …engaging the world through art

Donate to History of Art
https://give.berkeley.edu/fund/FN7212000

12/17/2024

History of Art Alumni Spotlighted in California Magazine

The Cal Alumni Association's latest magazine issue, California, has published a wonderful article about our alums who have become curators.

Read the story, written by Dano Nissen'18 here:
https://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/2024-fall-winter/cal-curators/

12/05/2024

The audiobook Eclipse and Revelation, written by Henrike C. Lange and Tom McLeish, and narrated by Christopher Hallett is being offered at 50% off.

Two questions guide this seven-year project: First, how can we approach the phenomenon, representation, and interpretation of total solar eclipses? Second, how can we heal the historical divide separating the natural sciences from the humanities, arts, history, music, and theology?The result of this...

12/04/2024

Aglaya Glebova's book, Aleksandr Rodchenko: Photography in the Time of Stalin (Yale UP, 2022), has been shortlisted for the 2024 Best First Book Award by The American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL). Congratulations Aglaya.

11/07/2024

Dining With the Dead, a lecture by Lisa Pieraccini

Wednesday, November 13, 2024
255 Dwinelle
4 TO 5PM

THE AUA WELCOMES PR. LISA PIERACCINI

Lisa C. Pieraccini works on the material culture of the ancient
Mediterranean with special emphasis on ancient Italy. Her
interests in ancient Mediterranean art reflect global and cross
disciplinary approaches to understanding the past.

11/05/2024

Join us for the History of Art Lecture Series: “Keith Piper’s 13 Killed and the Challenge to the Art School” by Eddie Chambers.

November 13, 2024
5 p.m.
308A Doe

Abstract: In the early 1980s, Keith Piper, then an art student at Nottingham Trent Polytechnic, produced a remarkable piece of work. The work was titled “13 Killed” and was a tribute, a memorial, to the short lives of thirteen youngsters of Black Caribbean heritage, who perished in a dreadful house fire in New Cross, southeast London, in 1981. There were suspicions among Black people that the fire was a result of a racist firebombing of the party that was taking place in the house that became such a catastrophic inferno. Using assemblage and mixed media, Piper created an astonishing work that addressed the tragedy but also, importantly, went against the grain of the dominant art school ethos that sought to perpetuate an ivory tower ethos and shied away from forthright social interventions in the art school studio. Over four decades after the making of the work, this talk will examine “13 Killed”, its original context, and the ways in which it represented a formidable challenge to the art school.

Bio: Eddie Chambers is holder of the David Bruton, Jr. Centennial Professorship in Art History at the University of Texas at Austin. He has been professionally involved in the visual arts for four decades first as an artist, then as a writer of art criticism and art curator.

10/15/2024

Race Before Algorithms: On Medieval Talismans | A lecture by Lamia Balafrej

October 29, 2024
5 - 7 p.m.
308A Doe

Medieval talismans have generally been defined as efficacious, prognostic artifacts, endowed with protective or therapeutic qualities—all in all, as powerful yet politically rather benign objects. Few scholars have expanded the discussion to consider, critically, what remains a talisman’s essential operation: creating, indeed sensing, a distinction between insider and outsider. This talk will explore potential examples of talismanic discrimination from the Mediterranean to Southwest Asia with an emphasis on frontier talismans, considered in tandem with medieval conceptions of race, ethnicity, and foreignness. A comparison with predictive algorithms, known for perpetuating racial bias, will also prove helpful in teasing out the medieval specificities of race-making technologies, while providing a transhistorical, contrastive framework for understanding race as technology.

Bio: Lamia Balafrej is Associate Professor of the Arts of the Islamic World at UCLA. Her current book project, Slavery in the Machine, explores intersections of technology, unfreedom, and figuration from the Mediterranean to Southwest Asia, with a comparative, transhistorical perspective. Slices of this research have appeared as articles on gender, slavery, and technology (2023), automated slaves and nonefficient machines (2022), and images of domestic slavery and skin color (2021). Her interest in the relation of body and instrument grew out of her first book, The Making of the Artist in Late Timurid Painting (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), which examined the work of visual intricacy in light of Persianate notions of authorship, medium, and representation.