UCLA Art History

05/26/2026

UCLA Department of Art History's faculty, graduate students and staff kicked off the Memorial Day weekend with a visit to LACMA's new David Geffen Galleries last Friday.

UCLA alum David Bardeen, Assistant Curator, European Painting and Sculpture and his colleague Alexandra Kaczenski, Assistant Curator, European Painting and Sculpture, guided the group through the vast and eclectic collection in the new gallery.

A huge thanks to them both for their time and expertise in describing the diverse artwork on display!

We highly recommend a visit to LACMA to view the amazing exhibit for yourself!

Remember, admission is free to county residents after 3 PM.

05/21/2026

Professor Tiffany Barber will be giving a TEDxUCLA Talk on Tuesday, May 26 entitled "Data Consciousness: The Ethics of Seeing in the Age of AI."

Art History undergrad Cylin Wang is this year’s organizer and has put together an incredible group of speakers for this year's talk.

Ten TEDx Talks around this year's theme of "Renaissance Revival" will be filmed live for an audience of 350 UCLA students and community members at Northwest Auditorium on campus from 6-9 pm.

In the entire TED Talk repertoire, fewer than a handful are delivered by art historians so the addition of Professor Barber’s talk is especially meaningful!

Check out the details here: http://bit.ly/4nDiF40

Congrats Professor Barber!

Check out this Presentation designed by CYLIN WANG.

05/15/2026

Professor Stella Nair will be presenting a talk at the Stanford Symposium on Music and the Brain on Saturday, May 23rd.

Professor Nair, will present a talk entitled “Music, Architecture, and Soundscapes in the Ancient to Early Modern Andes.”

“Listening in the Past, Sound, Space, and the Aesthetics of the Sublime” is the title of this annual event hosted by the Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics.

The symposium is a gathering of scholars, engineers, and artists who collaborated on a multi-year research initiative exploring the interaction between architectural and natural spaces, and the sounds that are created and experienced within them.

What makes a place ‘sacred’? What is it about architectural acoustics that can elicit awe? How did ritual sounds and music develop for these spaces?

For complete details, check out:
https://ccrma.stanford.edu/trt/symposia.html

05/13/2026

"No Place like Home: Eighteenth-Century London in an Age of Change," an exhibition curated by the wonderful students in Professor Zirwat Chowdhury's winter quarter Ahmanson seminar will be open at UCLA's Clark Library until June 16.

Cover design, featuring portraits of each student, by senior art history major, Juno Lumetta.

05/12/2026

Dr. Jolene Rickard gave the Department’s annual Gretchen Taylor Millson lecture on “Creative Defiance as Sensory Ecology” yesterday.

In her expansive and insightful talk, Rickard challenged us to rethink the very structures through which knowledge has been organized, such as what counts as art, what counts as theory, whose histories shape institutions, and how Indigenous knowledge systems continue to generate new intellectual and creative futures.

Dr. Jolene Rickard is a professor in the Departments of Art History and Art at Cornell University. She is one of the most influential Indigenous intellectuals working today — a Tuscarora artist, theorist, curator, educator, and member of the Hodinöhsö:ni Confederacy.

Rickard’s scholarship and creative practice have fundamentally reshaped the fields of Indigenous art history, visual studies, museum studies, and contemporary art.

We would like to thank Professor Rickard for her profoundly eye-opening talk and we hope to continue with this deeply engaging conversation!

05/07/2026

The Williams Andrews Clark Memorial Library, the UCLA Dept of Art History and the Winter 2026 Ahmanson Seminar are pleased to present "No Place Like Home, Eighteenth-Century London in a Age of Change."

This exhibit opening will be held at the Clark on Tuesday, May 12th from 3-4:30 PM.

All are welcome to attend the exhibit and a chance to meet the curators!

05/05/2026

In celebration of the 200th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the United States and Peru, on Wednesday, May 20th, the Fowler Museum, in collaboration with the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, Waystation Initiative, CMRS Center for Early Global Studies, Andean Laboratory at UCLA, and the Consulate General of Peru in Los Angeles, will host "Fowler Talks: Across Borders, Across Time," an in-person public program spanning the afternoon and evening.

The event will feature Carlos Wester La Torre and remarks by Christopher Donnan, director emeritus of the Fowler Museum and Cotsen Institute at UCLA, Silvia Forni, Shirley & Ralph Shapiro Director of the Fowler Museum, and our very own Stella Nair, professor of art history and director of the Andean Laboratory at UCLA.

Kindly RSVP, all are welcome!

05/04/2026

The Architecture Working Group is pleased to announce that their next event will be held on Thursday, May 14, 2026 at 12:00 PM PT via Zoom.

With the support of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, the CMRS Center for Early Global Studies, and the UCLA Department of Art History, we will be joined by Dr. Luis Gordo Peláez, Associate Professor in the School of Art, Design and Art History at California State University, Fresno.

Dr. Peláez is an architectural historian who studies the history of cultural production and built environment of the early modern transatlantic Hispanic world.

Dr. Peláez will present a talk entitled “Building Guanajuato: Architecture and Infrastructure in a Late Colonial Mining City.”

Please register in advance for the talk using this link: https://tinyurl.com/AWG-Luis-Gordo-Pelaez.

04/29/2026

It is with immense pleasure that we announce the Getty Foundation’s new Connecting Art Histories program: “Art, Science, and Traditional Knowledge: Theory and Practice of Community-Engaged Interdisciplinary Research in Art History,” coordinated by Claudia Mattos Avolese (Tufts), Thiago Sevilhano Puglieri (UCLA), and Adam Sellen (UNAM). This initiative aims to train art historians and students from related fields to conduct participatory research with traditional communities in Latin America. We are currently selecting nine graduate students from Latin America to participate in the program, and we would greatly appreciate your assistance in disseminating our call.

É com imenso prazer que divulgamos o novo programa Connecting Art Histories da Fundação Getty: “Arte, Ciência e Conhecimento Tradicional: Teoria e Prática da Pesquisa Interdisciplinar e Engajada com Comunidade em História da Arte”, coordenado por Claudia Mattos Avolese (Tufts), Thiago Sevilhano Puglieri (UCLA) e Adam Sellen (UNAM). Esta iniciativa visa treinar historiadores da arte e estudantes de áreas afins a desenvolver pesquisas participativas com comunidades tradicionais na América Latina. Estamos selecionando nove estudantes de pós-graduação da América Latina para participarem do programa e gostaríamos de contar com sua colaboração para divulgação da nossa chamada.

Es un gran placer para nosotros presentarles el nuevo programa Connecting Art Histories de la Fundación Getty: “Arte, Ciencia y Conocimientos Tradicionales: Teoría y Práctica de la investigación interdisciplinaria en Historia del Arte Comprometida con la Comunidad”, coordinado por Claudia Mattos Avolese (Tufts), Thiago Sevilhano Puglieri (UCLA) y Adam Sellen (UNAM). Esta iniciativa tiene como objetivo formar a historiadores del arte y estudiantes de áreas afines para que desarrollen investigaciones participativas con comunidades tradicionales de América Latina. Estamos seleccionando a nueve estudiantes de posgrado de América Latina para que participen en el programa y nos gustaría contar con su colaboración para difundir nuestra convocatoria.

04/23/2026

Please join us at the next Department Colloquium featuring Susan Dackerman on Wed. May 6th at 1 PM in Dodd 275.

She will be presenting "The Paleontology of Print: Lithographic Limestone and the Nature of Reproducibility."

When in 1796, the Munich playwright Alois Senefelder developed a method of printing from the surface of the local Bavarian limestone, he was utilizing a material that had been reproducing indexical images for millions of years. The Jurassic-era limestone slabs were riddled with fossilized flora and fauna.

The same year as Senefelder’s invention, from study of the same Bavarian limestone, the French naturalist Georges Cuvier recognized that some fossils in the stone were petrifications of species that were no longer extant, establishing the idea of extinction. Prior to Cuvier, fossils were imagined to be images made by Nature itself.

Senefelder’s use of the local limestone was preceded by the stone’s use by regional sculptors such as Hans Daucher, who around 1500 turned from marble to the native limestone because the characteristics of the stone suited precision carving. Many of the fossil-laden stone sculptures subsequently were used as templates to cast bronze copies, conceptually replicating the stone’s capacity to cast fossils.

Nearly 300 years later, the stone’s generative potential again was exploited to make printed multiples known as lithographs.

This presentation imagines how examining the history of early modern sculpture and prints alongside the history of paleontology enables us to see how Nature, and the contemporaneous historical theories that explicate it, have informed the work of artists, as well as shaped the history of print and replication.

All are welcome!