The University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive is pleased to announce two new curatorial appointments. Constance Lewallen, formerly the museum's Senior Curator, has been appointed Senior Curator for Exhibitions. Lucinda Barnes will join the museum as Senior Curator for Collections from her position at Museum Management Consultants, Inc., where she was Vice President. Both appointments are effective April 1, 2001.

For the past three years Constance Lewallen has been Senior Curator at the BAM/PFA. She curated the current retrospective exhibition of the late New York artist, Joe Brainard, which will tour three other U.S. museums after its season in Berkeley. Her upcoming survey of the work of Korean American conceptual artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha will premier at the BAM this fall and subsequently tour internationally. From 1980 to 1987 Lewallen was the curator of the BAM's acclaimed MATRIX Program for Contemporary Art. During that period she curated nearly ninety solo exhibitions by international artists including Julian Schnabel, Chuck Close, Barbara Kruger, Hamish Fulton, Pat Steir, Elizabeth Murray, and Martin Puryear.
From 1987 to 1992 Lewallen was Associate Director of Crown Point Press, where she was responsible for managing etching and woodblock projects in San Francisco and Japan with international artists. She also created and coordinated the publications of the press including VIEW, a series of extensive interviews with artists such as Anish Kapoor, Bertrand Lavier, Alex Katz, Sherrie Levine, and Judy Pfaff.

As an independent curator she has organized Mistaken Identities (1992), co-curated with Abigail Solomon-Godeau; the conceptual selection of Facing Eden: 100 Years of Bay Area Landscape (1994-95), M. H. de Young Memorial Museum; The Structure of Chance: John Cage (1995), Mills College Art Gallery; and a 1996 retrospective of Jay DeFeo for Moore College of Art in Philadelphia, which traveled to the BAM.

Lewallen was born and raised in New York City. She completed her undergraduate work at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, and did graduate work in art history at Columbia University and San Diego State University, where she received her MA in 1970. She has taught and lectured at various colleges and universities in California, including the University of California, Santa Barbara, San Francisco Art Institute, the California College of Arts and Crafts, and Sonoma State University.
In 2000 Lewallen was named a Gerbode Fellow by the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation. This grant recognizes five individuals annually who have evidenced extraordinary commitment and accomplishment in the not-for-profit field.

Prior to joining Museum Management Consultants, Lucinda Barnes was Executive
Director of Boise Art Museum, Idaho, a post she took after leaving the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, where she was Curator of Collections from 1994 to 1998. Exhibitions she curated at the MCA include Adam Brooks: Denaturalized (1998); In the Shadow of Storms: Art of the Postwar Era in the MCA Collections (1996); and Bruce Nauman: Elliot's Stones (1995). She also oversaw more than three hundred acquisitions, including major works by Jasper Johns, Jeanne Dunning, Kerry James Marshall, Stan Douglas, and Mariko Mori. An Ohio native, Barnes' extensive experience includes working as Director of the Karl Bornstein Gallery in Santa Monica (1980 – 1984); Curator of Exhibitions at the University Art Museum, California State University, Long Beach (1985 to 1989); and Associate Curator and Acting Head, Curatorial Department, Newport Harbor Art Museum, Newport Beach (1989 to 1990). At these various institutions she has curated exhibitions featuring artists including Charles Ray, Lorna Simpson, David Levinthal, April Gornik, Ron Pippin, Barbara Bosworth, Steve Wood, and Patrick Mohr.

Barnes has taught at a number of colleges and universities including Williams College, Williamstown, MA; California State University, Long Beach. CA; Saddleback College, Mission Viejo, CA; University of California, Irvine – Extension; and University of California, Los Angeles – Extension. She received her MA magna cum laude from the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art, and is a Ph.D. candidate at University of Southern California. In addition, Barnes has studied with the Getty Leadership Institute for Museum Management.

The BAM/PFA is the principal visual arts center of the University of California at Berkeley. One of the largest university art museums in the United States with around 31,000-square-feet of exhibition space, the museum opened the doors of its distinctive building on the south side of campus in 1970. In addition to a challenging schedule of art exhibitions including the MATRIX Program for Contemporary Art, the museum houses the Pacific Film Archive, which premiered in January 1971, and which remains one of the nation's most acclaimed and comprehensive film collections and exhibition programs.