A sequel to last fall's exhibition highlighting acquisitions of the past five years, Fast Forward II continues our up-to-the-moment look at the ways in which Berkeley Art Museum collections have grown. A steady focus has been on emerging artists and works that turn the corner on tradition, mark transition, and explore new intellectual or material territory. This is most visible in the group of sculptures, photography, videoworks, and multi-media installations by ten emerging artists acquired with funds provided by a generous purchase grant from the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation. (This is the second such grant awarded by the Bay Area foundation to BAMPFA.) In November BAMPFA Senior Curator for Exhibitions Constance Lewallen and I were invited along with curators from five other Bay Area and Honolulu museums to review the work of seventy-eight artists. After studio visits we selected for acquisition to the collection twenty-five works by artists from the Bay Area (Elizabeth Demaray, Jeanne Friscia, Susan Magnus, Rachel Neubauer, Shaun O'Dell, Will Rogan, Chris Sollars, and Gail Wight) and from Hawaii (Darius Homay and Esther Shimazu). Several of these artists conceptually reengineer animate and inanimate forms, as in Rachel Neubauer's anthropomorphic sculptural shapes or Elizabeth Demaray's hybridized Baseball Rocks. Jeanne Friscia's elegantly patterned designs have evolved digitally from consumer images of fish and poultry. Darius Homay's textile-based works compress cultural symbols of East and West, old and new, sacred and profane, while Will Rogan and Chris Sollars offer humorous, Dadaesque video explorations of perception and contemporary experience.
