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UC Berkeley’s South Asia Art Initiative Awarded $395,000 Getty Grant for Three-Year Art History Project

Berkeley, CA — The South Asia Art Initiative (SAAI), housed within the Institute for South Asia Studies (ISAS) at the University of California, Berkeley, is pleased to announce that it has received a $395,000 grant from the Getty Foundation’s Connecting Art Histories )  to support a three-year project titled Language of Nature, Language of Culture: Towards a Decolonial Art History

Led by Professors Sugata Ray and Atreyee Gupta, the project critically examines the relationship between nature and culture as one of the central problems confronting the humanities today. In response to contemporary conditions of environmental precarity, resurgent nationalisms, and intensified global interdependence, the project asks how art history might generate new conceptual and methodological tools for understanding the intertwined crises of environmental precarity, cultural politics, and ethnonationalism.

India serves as the project’s primary site of inquiry. Rather than treating the nation-state as a self-evident unit of analysis, however, Language of Nature, Language of Culture: Towards a Decolonial Art History foregrounds longue durée histories of circulation, ecological entanglement, and multi-sited exchange that have connected the subcontinent to wider worlds across the Indian Ocean, Eurasia, Africa, and the Transpacific. In doing so, the project advances a connected history that challenges claims of civilizational enclosure by demonstrating how artistic, intellectual, and ecological formations have long been co-produced through circulation, encounter, and material exchange beyond territorial boundaries.

"We are deeply grateful to the Getty Foundation for its generous support of this project,” said Professors Ray and Gupta. “At a moment when both environmental crisis and nationalist politics are reshaping public life across the world, Language of Nature, Language of Culture asks how art history can offer new vocabularies for thinking across borders, disciplines, and planetary futures.”

During its first two years, the project will convene a global cohort of early-career scholars and practitioners for intensive seminars in Delhi and Kolkata—two historically layered megacities where ecological processes, material histories, and cultural production remain deeply entangled. Through experiential learning, field-based workshops with leading scholars and artists, archival encounters, and collaborative research, participants will develop a rigorous yet portable lexicon for artistic and visual history. This lexicon will bring material, environmental, and cultural analyses into conversation with the intellectual, aesthetic, and ethical demands of the present.

In its third year, the project will culminate in a convening at UC Berkeley. This final gathering will synthesize the cohort’s inquiries through a series of public engagements and will launch the project’s lexicon as an illustrated deck of conceptual cards designed to serve as a critical pedagogical tool for collective inquiry.

Across all three years, SAAI will host a roster of distinguished art historians, critical and cultural theorists, and scholars of visual culture for public talks in Berkeley, Delhi, and Kolkata. These talks will anchor the program’s interdisciplinary engagement with climate, decolonization, and planetary thought while contributing to a publicly accessible, evolving archive of lectures and conversations hosted on the project website.

The Getty Foundation’s Connecting Art Histories supports projects that strengthen art historical scholarship through international exchange, collaboration, and the development of new research networks. With this support, Language of Nature, Language of Culture will foster a new generation of scholars and practitioners working at the intersection of art history, environmental humanities, and decolonial thought, while developing new frameworks for a connected art history responsive to the ecological and political urgencies of the present.

For more information about the project and upcoming public programs, please visit the project website.