Irene Sawyer (b. 1929, d. 1988) was an artist, art historian, and educator, who played a key role in developing the field of African American art history. Like other Black women art historians and archivists of the 1970s and 1980s, Sawyer recognized the critical role that comprehensive archival databases of work by Black artists would have for future students and researchers of the field. She worked over the course of her career to create these archival databases, and to develop the exhibitions, texts, and educational resources that they made possible.

A Bay Area native, Sawyer earned her B.A. and M.A. in Art History from Mills College, focusing in these early studies on ancient Greek art. In the late 1960s—in part influenced by the ideas of the Black Power and Black Arts Movements—she shifted her focus to art created by Black American artists. Sawyer taught high school in the Oakland Unified school district from 1958 until 1966, while maintaining her own artistic practice, focused on oil and collage. In 1969, she became an assistant professor at San Francisco State University.

Irene Sawyer recognized the critical role that comprehensive archival databases of work by Black artists would have for future students and researchers of the field.

In 1970, she was tapped to co-direct, alongside Dr. Margaret Wilkerson, the University of California, Berkeley’s new Black Cultural Center, imagined as a campus and community hub for research, dialogue, and education in Black art and performance. Although the Center was short-lived, Sawyer remained affiliated with the University in a research capacity. From 1971-1976, she was the director and primary investigator for the Black Cultural Research Project. Supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration, the Black Cultural Research Project was dedicated to documenting and researching the work of Black artists and craftspeople in the United States, beginning in the 1700s and culminating in Sawyer’s own moment. From 1971-1974, Sawyer traveled across the country, visiting archives, meeting with curators and art educators, and interviewing artists. Although she worked under a rotating group of on-campus sponsors—almost entirely White, male scholars, like Folklore pioneer Alan Dundes, Anthropology professor William Bascom, and History professor Lawrence Levine—Sawyer herself was the project’s director and tireless advocate. By 1976, she had compiled a collection of slides that was at the time the most comprehensive visual archive of the work of Black American artists in existence at that time. The collection included some 4,300 unique slides, along with transcribed interviews with artists, artist biographies, and an annotated bibliography. It is still held in the archives of the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley.

While working on the Black Cultural Research Project, Sawyer began doctoral studies in Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles. She worked with professor E. Maurice Bloch, writing a dissertation titled “The Afro-American Artist-Illustrator: A Cultural and Historical Survey, 1770-1950.”

Drawing on the breadth of knowledge granted by her work on the Black Cultural Research Project, Sawyer developed multiple art history courses, including a survey of African American art. She lectured at University of California, Berkeley, delivering probably its first course on African American art history, as well as at UC Davis, and later at Harvard. She was a W.E.B. Du Bois fellow at Harvard University from 1977-1979. She died in San Francisco in 1988.

This post was written by Claire Ittner, PhD Candidate in the History of Art Department at UC Berkeley, as part of research funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for Graduate Study in Curatorial Preparedness.

Adapted from texts written by Research Anthropologist Ira Jacknis.

Berta Bascom (née Berta Montero-Sanchez y Lopez) was born in Havana, Cuba on June 19th, 1919.  After receiving degrees and honors from Havana University and Syracuse University,  she studied folklore and anthropology at Northwestern University under Africanist anthropologist William Bascom, and under the direction of department chair Melville Herskovits, a leader in the field of African and African American studies in American academia at the time. William (Bill) Bascom had received his PhD at Northwestern in 1939, where he subsequently taught anthropology and trained many of the graduate students in the department. In 1948, the same year Berta Montero-Sanchez y Lopez earned her Masters from Northwestern, William Bascom received a grant to study the descendants of western African Yoruba people in Cuba. After she joined him on the trip as a folklorist and anthropologist with personal knowledge of Cuba, Berta and William were married. 

Over the next decade the Bascoms continued to study Cuban and West African folklore, religion and art, focusing on Afro-Cuban cults and the Yoruba people of Nigeria. In 1957, they came to Berkeley, California where William Bascom served as Director of the Lowie Museum of Anthropology (now the Hearst Museum) and Professor of Anthropology. On their many travels, the Bascoms collected African art and objects of daily life, some of which they donated to the Museum together, and some of which Berta would later donate in memory of her husband who passed in 1981. These collections can be viewed on the Hearst Museum’s Collections Portal. She also made numerous audio recordings of song, story, and language which have been digitized and are available for listening online through the California Language Archive. William and Berta Bascom were among the museum’s most devoted patrons, second only to Phoebe Hearst. Almost every year from 1959 until 1999, the couple made a donation to the museum, eventually totaling 2029 objects, mostly from Africa, but also from the Caribbean, South America, North America, Europe, and the Pacific; in addition to related photographs, films, and sound recordings.

Throughout her time at Berkeley and abroad, Berta Bascom was respected for her reputation as a folklorist, appreciated for her lively personality, and noted for her cooking. Her publications include Influencias Africanas en la Cultura Cubana and Seven Afrocuban Myths. In addition, Berta Bascom taught Spanish in Cuba and the United States, including at Anna Head School (now Head-Royce School) in Berkeley.  She was a member of the American Folklore Society, California Academy of Sciences, Sigma Delta Epsilon, Berkeley Yacht Club, and the U.C. Berkeley Faculty Club, and was an honorary emeritus member of the U.C. Anthropology Department.

Originally published as “Focus on the Ethnographic Collections: The Mexican Collections of Zelia Nuttall” by Ira Jacknis

Archaeologist and ethnohistorian Zelia Nuttall (1857–1933) is today best-known for her work in finding and reproducing colonial-era Mexican books and maps.  During her lifetime, she seems to have known everybody concerned with anthropology and Mexico’s past.

It was Zelia Nuttall, more than anyone else, who was responsible for encouraging her friend Phoebe Hearst to found a museum of anthropology at Berkeley.

Zelia Nuttall grew up in San Francisco, the daughter of a pioneering banker.  After a private education in Europe, in 1880 she married French explorer, archaeologist, and linguist Alphonse Louis Pinart.  The marriage was not a happy one, and the couple soon separated and divorced. Increasingly, she found her passion in Mexico, the birthplace of her mother.  After a lengthy trip there in 1885, she soon began her career with publications on Mexican antiquities.

It was Nuttall, more than anyone else, who was responsible for encouraging her friend Phoebe Hearst to found a museum of anthropology at Berkeley.  The pair, who had first met around 1882, reunited at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893.  In the years leading up to the founding of the museum in 1901, Nuttall guided Hearst in anthropology, putting her in touch with her own collaborator, Harvard’s Frederic Putnam, who became the museum’s first director.

In 1902, shortly after moving permanently to Mexico, Zelia Nuttall was commissioned to collect for the new museum, sponsored by patrons Ethel Crocker and Elisabeth Mills Reid.  Between 1902 and 1905, she gathered a wide range of ethnographic objects, many expressing her interest in pre-contact customs.  The expedition was especially notable for the important textiles she gathered.  A woman’s huipil tunic, for instance, is the oldest documented weaving from the village of Magdalenas, and one of the earliest surviving textiles from the Maya of Chiapas.

One of her most spectacular finds was a 16^th century lienzo (a colonial period pictorial narrative) from Puebla.  Not able to purchase it, she commissioned a full-size copy in 1902.  The following year, the University of California published The Book of the Life of the Ancient Mexicans, a sumptuous facsimile of an ancient Mexican illustrated book that she had found in a Florentine library.

After the close of the expedition, Nuttall’s ties to the museum faded, although she maintained her close personal relationship with its founder.  These were renewed in 1915, at San Francisco’s Panama Pacific International Exposition, where she displayed and lectured about her collection of 389 Central Mexican spindle whorls.  After the fair Phoebe Hearst purchased the collection, simultaneously supplementing the museum’s holdings and helping out her friend, whose finances were always precarious.

One of the last but most important of the Nuttall acquisitions, which counts in its own way as part of the “Mexican collections,” was a rare, early “signed” basket made by Ventureño Chumash weaver Maria Marta Zaputimeu, which Nuttall found in 1918 in an antique shop in Mexico City. Nuttall intended to donate it as a birthday present for her friend, but Mrs. Hearst died before it could be given.  Nuttall later donated it in her memory, testifying to the long and important friendship between Zelia Nuttall and Phoebe Hearst.

October 3, 2020 marks the 150th anniversary of the UC Regents’ unanimous approval of a resolution: “That young ladies be admitted into the University on equal terms in all respects with young men.” – Regent Samuel F. Butterworth

In 2020, Berkeley celebrated 150 Years of Women at Berkeley. The first women were admitted to the university in 1872, and since that time, hundreds of thousands of women have graduated from UC Berkeley, and thousands of staff, faculty, and friends of the campus have made immeasurable contributions to the UC Berkeley campus and beyond.

The Hearst Museum is honored to have been a site for research and teaching for innumerable women since its founding in 1901 by Phoebe A. Hearst, the first female regent of the University of California. In honor of this momentous year, we are delighted to share a selection of notable women who have worked with the Hearst Museum. The images below link to more information including: articles, online catalogs of collections donated to the Hearst Museum, and more. To read about other women affiliated with the Hearst Museum, visit Women in the Department of Near Eastern Studies.

Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for posts all year-long featuring #BerkeleyWomen150.

Lila Morris O’Neale  was an anthropologist and textile historian who pioneered the field of ethnoaesthetics through research that bridged the fields of design, history, and art. Trained as a teacher at the San Jose Normal School, O’Neale taught in Oakland before pursuing graduate degrees from Stanford, Columbia, and UC Berkeley. An interest in textiles, stemming from her teaching in the field then known as home economics, led her to pursue graduate research on lace in UC Berkeley’s Household Art Department. In 1926, O’Neale met Alfred Kroeber, then director of the Museum of Anthropology (now the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology)  who had just returned from fieldwork in Peru and sought a textile analyst. Taking this position marked a shift in O’Neale’s academic life toward an anthropological approach to the study of textiles. 

Lila Morris O’Neale  was an anthropologist and textile historian who pioneered the field of ethnoaesthetics through research that bridged the fields of design, history, and art.

O’Neale went on to complete groundbreaking research culminating in a book entitled Yurok Karok Basketweavers. Her ethnographic approach, which sought to understand the individual aesthetic motivations and design preferences of basket weavers, represented a departure from previous anthropological work which focused primarily on the functionality of material culture. By 1941, O’Neale was a full professor at Berkeley in the Design Department and became the first woman to teach in the Department of Anthropology. O’Neale made frequent use of the collections of the Museum of Anthropology and collections held by the Design Department in her teaching and research. She valued not only a visual and cultural, but also a technical understanding of textiles, and sought to reproduce methods she encountered in her work. Her approaches in teaching and research brought together art and anthropology and had a profound influence on students of the Design Department, later renamed the Decorative Arts Department, such as fiber artist Ed Rossbach. 

O’Neale was instrumental in shifting the field of anthropology toward a more interdisciplinary approach that prioritized individuals over generalized culture.

In addition to teaching, O’Neale served as Associate Curator of Textiles at the Museum of Anthropology and published works on Peruvian and Guatemalan textiles. Upon her death in 1968, O’Neale donated her personal collections to the Decorative Arts Department, which were later transferred to the Museum of Anthropology. You can explore these collections in our online Collections Portal. O’Neale was instrumental in shifting the field of anthropology toward a more interdisciplinary approach that prioritized individuals over generalized culture. Her legacy continues in the weavers who continue informed by her research, and the artists and historians guided by her teaching and methods.

The Hearst Museum’s former director, Dr. Mari Lyn Salvador, passed away peacefully October 23rd just after a majestic Albuquerque sunset. She died as she lived, with grace and surrounded by family.

Dr. Mari Lyn Salvador

Mari Lyn, a renowned scholar, spent much of her adult life conducting research in the San Blas Islands of Panama and the Azores Islands of Portugal. During a distinguished career as a cultural anthropologist, she was a professor, museum director and generous mentor and colleague. Mari Lyn was particularly devoted to the Phoebe Hearst Museum as it figured meaningfully in the initial and final phases of her career. Serving as director from 2010 to 2015, Mari Lyn initiated multiple projects that enhanced the Museum’s goal to be a place where cultures from around the world connect with each other. These projects included the initiation of a dramatic collections relocation program, the design of a new campus gallery, and the establishment of the Native American Advisory Council that guides the Museum on its relationship with Native American communities. Without a doubt, Mari Lyn’s bold and innovative planning has contributed to the Museum’s recent advancements under her successor, Benjamin Porter.

Mari Lyn is survived by her daughter Melina, son Sergio, their spouses, Tony and Julie and her four cherished grandchildren: Griffin, Foster, Oliver and Matilda. As the eldest of six children, she is also survived by her sisters Louise and Michelle, brothers David, Pat and Michael and their families. Those who knew her will likely remember her love of flowers, good food and celebrating just about anything.

Mari Lyn’s family asks that you honor her by eating some ice cream, spending some time working in a garden and looking for beauty even when it is hard to see.

For further information, please contact:

David Tozer, Hearst Museum Head of Development
dtozer@berkeley.edu | (510) 642-3683