From Ancient Americas to Ancestral Abiayala

General: $25
Gardiner Friends: Free with RSVP
Students: Free
Gardiner Friends and Student must present ID upon arrival.

The Diane Wolfe Lecture

Speaker: Juliana Ramírez Herrera, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Indigenous Art and Archaeology of the Ancestral Americas and of Colonial Latin American Art, University of California, Berkeley

Join Dr. Juliana Ramírez Herrera, curator of the Gardiner Museum's Ancestral Abiayala Gallery—formerly Ancient Americas—for a conversation on repatriation, broadly understood, and how it shaped her vision for the renovated space.

Drawing on other threads of her research, Dr. Ramírez Herrera will situate Ancestral Abiayala within larger conversations about the mobility of belongings, violent and otherwise, and what it might mean to care for them responsibly in museum practice and scholarly writing.

The talk offers a behind-the-scenes look at what went into developing the Ancestral Abiayala Gallery, connecting its questions to broader intellectual debates in the field.

About the Speaker:

Dr. Juliana Ramírez Herrera is Assistant Professor of Indigenous Art and Archaeology of the Ancestral Americas and of Colonial Latin American Art at the University of California, Berkeley. She specializes in the so-called small-scale societies of pre-Conquest and early colonial Panama, Colombia, the Caribbean, and Amazonia. Before joining UC Berkeley, she was a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto and the Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art, where she collaborated with curators Dr. Sequoia Miller, Dr. Karine Tsoumis, and Franchesca Hebert-Spence on the renovation of the Museum's ground floor. She earned her PhD from Harvard University and her MA from the University of Toronto.