Joanna Gottfried Williams

September 24, 1939 - June 16, 2022

Joanna Gottfried Williams, Professor Emerita of South and Southeast Asian Art at the University of California Berkeley, died quietly at her Berkeley home on June 16, 2022. She was among the world’s foremost scholars of South Asian Art, renowned for her work on 4th-5thcentury Indian sculpture, later painting, textiles, and folk art.

Joanna Williams was born to Marion and Rudolf Gottfried in Bloomington, Indiana, on September 24, 1939. Her mother was engaged in community affairs, becoming the first woman to be elected to the Monroe County Council, and her father was a distinguished professor of English at the Indiana University, Bloomington. As an only child raised by two accomplished parents, expectations for Joanna’s future were high. She earned a B.A. from Swarthmore College (1960), an M.A. from Radcliffe College (1962), and a Ph.D. from Harvard University (1969), all with a focus on the History of Art. Shortly after completing her doctoral dissertation on the wall paintings of Central Asian Khotan (a site that at the time was completely inaccessible to Western scholars), in 1967 she joined the faculty of the Department

of History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley, where she refocused her research and taught the history of South and Southeast Asian art for over 40 years. She held a joint appointment in the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies, where she also served as Chair. She retired in 2010.

Joanna told her students that her interest in India was first sparked by a small town in Indiana called Hindustan, located just north of Bloomington and founded by a 19th-century businessman engaged in the India trade. This early attraction to India and the Indic world was developed over many years of fieldwork spent in India (especially in her beloved Orisha), Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal, and Southeast Asia, and by a period (1984-86) during which she served as Program Officer for Education and Culture for the Ford Foundation in New Delhi. Her research was recognized in numerous awards, including grants from Phi Beta Kappa, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the American Institute of Indian Studies, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her legacy is embodied in her many students now teaching in colleges and universities around the world.

While conducting research in India, traveling to remote sites in a Land Rover and armed with multiple cameras and hundreds of rolls of film, Joanna Gottfried met C. Thomas Williams, a paleontologist. They married in 1967, and, in 1970, their son Dylan Williams was born. The marriage ended in divorce in 1981. Joanna and Dylan together returned to India many times. Dylan collected and devoured Indian comic books (and later became a distinguished comic book artist and publisher himself) and played near ancient temples and cave sites, while Joanna pursued her meticulous recording of them.

Joanna Williams was a beloved mentor, gracious and unruffled, efficiently handling her teaching, service obligations, research, and family responsibilities. Her students were her extended family, gathering at her art-filled Berkeley home to share conversation, cappuccino, and wine, and to watch Indonesian shadow-plays in her backyard. During the tumultuous years of the Vietnam War, when some of her classes were conducted as tear gas filled the Berkeley campus, Joanna found ways to balance political activism with her teaching by examining the horrific effects of war on cultural heritage. This period began a deep involvement in Southeast Asian art. Joanna’s courses were a major draw for young scholars and other seekers. Everyone left her instruction enlightened, having learned, among much else, always to see the world through the eyes of others, and never, ever to forget a citation or split an infinitive.

Joanna Williams was a groundbreaking scholar who authored numerous books and articles on Indian art. Her first book, The Art of Gupta India, Empire and Province, centered on the art and architecture of the Indian Gupta period (4th-6th c. CE). She also published books on Palm-Leaf Miniatures (The Art of Raghunath Prusti of Orissa), and The Two-headed Deer: Illustrations of the Ramayana in Orissa. She advised on many exhibitions at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology and the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), and she was instrumental in bringing the Jean Marshall Collection of Indian miniature paintings to BAMPFA. She was a much-admired advisor to the San Francisco Society for Asian Art, and to SACHI (Society for Art & Cultural Heritage of India), and an active member of many professional and governmental organizations focused on South Asia.

Joanna Williams’s interest in folk art, artworks created for use in rituals, textiles, and modern forgeries helped to expand the scope of Indian art history as it is now taught. Her students recall her bringing textile artists and their looms, painters, potters, and musicians into class, and leading groups to visit Bay Area temples and artists’ studios. Her love for folk art shone in the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco’s exhibition, Princes, Palaces, and Passion: The Art of India’s Mewar Kingdom (Feb. 2-April 29, 2007), for which she was the exhibition curator, and the main contributor to the accompanying catalog, Kingdom of the Sun: Indian Court and Village Art from the Princely State of Mewar.

Joanna Williams was preceded in death by her parents and by her son, Dylan Williams, who died in 2011. She is survived by her daughter-in-law, Emily Nilsson, of Portland, Oregon, and by a multitude of friends, students, and colleagues worldwide. Her devoted caregivers, Billynda Holland, Deb Patton, Myisha Myers, Latazija Washington, and many others, attended her with compassion, generosity, and fortitude. Her gratitude to them was boundless. Joanna will be mourned by everyone who had the privilege to know her and especially by her friends, Carol Badran and Patricia Berger. We urge those who wish to honor her memory to contribute to the Joanna G. Williams Endowment at UC Berkeley, a graduate fellowship fund that her students established upon her retirement in the Department of History of Art. Donations can be made via the link on her department webpage: https://arthistory.berkeley. edu/people/joanna-williams/