UCLA Art History

09/24/2026

On Thursday, October 22nd at 3 PM. The Department of Art History will host an Art Council Lecture Series talk featuring Abbey Stockstill (University of Virginia).

Her talk entitled "None Like It in Islam": Material Aesthetics Between Andalusi Production and Maghrib Patronage will look at the art of medieval North Africa is to enter a scene in which familiar motifs, transformed by material and arrangement, compose a new visual world.

An artistic explosion occurred in the twelfth-century Mediterranean, as emergent dynasties from the western extremes of the region brought together new avenues of material exchange, craftsmanship, and ideologies. Despite this wave of production, modern scholarship has struggled to articulate the impact of this period, falling back on outmoded tropes of artistic “influence” and equating ornamental expense with quality. This talk explores how this dynamic has obscured the real innovation of the period, and argues for a more subtle, intermedial aesthetic vision.

All are welcome!

09/17/2026

Professor Zirwat Chowdhury will be presenting a talk entitled Lessing’s Hogarth, Hogarth’s Paulson, at Hogarth Symposium 2026 on Wednesday, October 14 in New Haven, CT.

This symposium is organized by the Lewis Walpole Library in collaboration with the Yale Center for British Art, Yale Library, and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, this symposium celebrates the generous gift by Professor Paulson (1930-2024) of his papers together with a legacy endowment to establish a fellowship at the Lewis Walpole Library in memory of his son, Andrew Meredith Paulson.

Speakers will present creative new research in Hogarth studies across multi-disciplinary perspectives. Panel themes will include “Paulson’s Hogarth,” “Drawing,” “Nation and Empire,” and “Social and Political Critique.”

For more information and to see the program schedule of this 3-day event, please check out:

Organized by the Lewis Walpole Library in collaboration with the Yale Center for British Art, Yale Library, and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, this symposium celebrates the generous gift by Professor Paulson (1930-2024) of his papers together with a legacy endowment to establish a fe...

09/16/2026

Professor Tiffany Barber will co-host and moderate a panel on Tues. Sept. 29 at Black Portraiture[s]: Los Angeles: The Black Built Environment being held Sept. 28-30.

They will examine the historicity and rich panoply encompassing the Black built environment, both physical and imagined. Exploring the concept and its relationship to photography, architecture, urban planning, and visual culture, artists have reconceived and reconstructed visions of our built environment while exploring themes conversant with the spiritual and ritualistic continuities of the African diaspora.

Moreover, this convening will explore the artistic contributions to forms of memory, visual legacies of Black townships, and the charges of conceived spaces therein. The conference will present and encourage research and scholarship on continuities between modern and contemporary visual and structural approaches, centering the audacity of Black-built environments from within the Diaspora’s politics, architecture, art, film, music, migrations, and global iterations.

This event is co-hosted by New York University, Getty, and UCLA. For more info and to register:

Black Portraiture[s] will be offering a hybrid option for those who cannot attend in person. Black Portraiture[s]: Los Angeles: The Black Built Environment will examine the historicity and rich…

09/15/2026

Professor George Baker along with Katy Barkan wrote on the new LACMA in the current Artforum.

Titled, “Love Among the Ruins” (in the print version) or “Regressions and Revelations” online at Artforum.com.

In the piece, he asks "The Biomorphic Museum: Why this (unstable) form now?"

Find out for yourself!

The online version can be found here: https://www.artforum.com/features/george-baker-lacma-1234757878/

George Baker wanders the sinuous paths of the newly resurrected LACMA.

09/14/2026

UCLA Art Council Lecture Series in Art History kicks off the 2026-27 academic year with Ellie Mackin Roberts on Tuesday, October 6 at 4 PM.

From Loom to Goddess: Weaving, Cognition, and Women’s Religious Experience in Ancient Greece

Each year, the women of Athens wove a new robe for their goddess. The peplos, presented to the ancient olive-wood statue of Athena Polias at the climax of the Panathenaia, began its life nine months earlier, when the warp was ritually set up on the loom at the festival of the Chalkeia. This paper follows that textile through its full life: from fleece and spindle, through the long months of weaving, into the procession through the city’s streets, and finally onto the body of the goddess herself.

Research in experimental psychology has demonstrated that wearing symbolically meaningful clothing measurably alters cognition – a phenomenon known as ‘enclothed cognition.’ But what of making such clothing? Drawing together cognitive science, sensory archaeology, and the material evidence of ancient textile production, I argue that the weaving of sacred cloth constituted what I call here ‘productive cognition’: a sustained cognitive, sensory, and devotional transformation worked in the maker by the very object she was making. Standing at the warp-weighted loom – hands coated in lanolin, beating the weft into scenes of cosmic battle – the weaver’s thought was shaped, thread by thread, by the garment destined for her goddess.

Tracing the peplos from loom to procession to dedication, and setting it alongside the clothing dedicated by women to Artemis at Brauron, I am to recover a dimension of ancient Greek religion that our male-authored sources almost entirely ignore: women’s religious experience as it was lived in the hands, the eyes, and the body. The sacred textile, it argues, was the connective tissue of Greek religion – an object that touched every body in the chain, from maker to carrier to goddess, and transformed each in turn.

This event will be held in Dodd 247 and an RSVP is required.

For full details and to RSVP: https://arthistory.ucla.edu/event/art-council-lecture-series-ellie-mackin-roberts/

08/14/2026

Professor Tiffany Barber's TEDxUCLA Talk is now up on YouTube!

Her talk entitled "The ethics of seeing in the age of AI" explores data consciousness and the ethics of seeing through the groundbreaking handmade data visualizations of Harlem Renaissance-era scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois.

Drawing connections between art, history, race, and AI, she reveals how Du Bois's work challenges the limits of data and offers a powerful framework for imagining more equitable technologies.

You can watch Prof. Barber's talk here:

Who gets seen and who gets left out in the age of artificial intell...

07/29/2026

Professor Thiago Puglieri and his colleague Dayanny Peres de Souza have a new article published in Getty Magazine.

They describe in detail, a new innovative collaboration called the Tikuna Blue project, which centered on a uniquely beautiful plant-based dye.

The project was designed as a collaboration from the start, beginning with the colorant’s name itself, which was suggested by the Association of Ticuna Artisan Women (AMATÜ), the Association of Indigenous Ticuna Women (AMIT), and the Association of Indigenous Women of Porto Cordeirinho.

The Tikuna Blue project has evolved into much more than a scientific investigation. It has become a model for how technical art historians can adopt an approach called Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR).

You can read all about it on the Humanities website:

Art history professor Thiago Puglieri and his colleague Dayanny Peres de Souza wrote about their innovative collaboration for Getty Magazine.

07/13/2026

Professor Lamia Balafrej will be presenting a talk at Rice University's symposium, Across Two Seas held Oct. 8-10, 2026.

Across Two Seas explores Black life, representation, and cultural imagination across the medieval and early modern Mediterranean, Islamic world, and Indian Ocean. Bringing together scholars, curators, artists, and public audiences, the symposium rethinks premodern histories of race, trade, and global connection beyond traditional Eurocentric frames.

For more information about this in-person conference, please see:

A Symposium at Rice University

07/02/2026

The UCLA Department of Art History is excited to announce that Professor Lothar von Falkenhausen was elevated by the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in France last week from a Corresponding Member (since 2022) to a Foreign Associate.

This is the highest rank a non-French citizen can attain in this branch of the French Academy, devoted - since 1663 and the reign of Louis XIV - to the study of epigraphy, literature, and the civilizations of antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Classical Period (as it is called in France), as well as non-European civilizations.

We congratulate Professor von Falkenhausen on this rare and well-deserved honor!

06/30/2026

The Renaissance Society of America has announced their Renaissance Studies Article Prize Winners for 2026.

Art history alumnus David Bardeen has received the “First Honorable Mention” prize for his article “Giovanni Bellini’s Bleeding Trees: Animacy and Arboreal Thinking in the Italian Renaissance Stump” (I Tatti Studies, Vol. 28, No. 1, 2025).

The research for this article was first presented at a 2024 conference, Making Green Worlds: Early Modern Art and Ecologies of Globalization, in a session co-organized by UCLA Art History Professor Bronwen Wilson.

You can check out the full list of RSA winners here: https://www.rsa.org/general/custom.asp?page=articleprizewinners

Congratulations David!