On View
Exhibitions
Past Exhibitions-
To Exalt the Ephemeral: The (Im)permanent Collection
August 14, 2024–July 6, 2025To Exalt the Ephemeral: The (Im)permanent Collection draws from BAMPFA’s art and film collections to explore how museums collect, care for, and amplify the work of artists who celebrate ideas of impermanence and cycles of decay and regeneration.
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Art Wall / Tanya Aguiñiga: Border Fall Height
January 18–July 13, 2025Tanya Aguiñiga creates sculptures and installations using natural materials and objects gathered from her environment. Her Art Wall installation at BAMPFA is her first solo presentation in the Bay Area. Aguiñiga presents a series of rust prints depicting a thirty-foot ladder made using an actual object that she found near the US–Mexico border.
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Collection Focus / Sky Hopinka: Sunflower Siege Engine
March 12–August 17, 2025Sky Hopinka’s video Sunflower Siege Engine is a poetic meditation on history, resistance, and place.
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Fifty-Fifth Annual UC Berkeley MFA Exhibition: The Currents Beneath
May 14–July 27, 2025Celebrate bold new works by six emerging artists in the Fifty-Fifth Annual UC Berkeley Master of Fine Arts Exhibition, where innovative practices meet powerful explorations of community, memory, and transformation.
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Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California
June 8, 2025—November 30, 2025Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California traces the flow and flourishing of quilts in the context of the Second Great Migration through approximately one hundred quilts representing the work of eighty individuals, many of them women. It is the first group show drawn from a transformative bequest of African American quilts that the museum received in 2019.
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Lee ShinJa: Drawing with Thread
August 6, 2025–February 1, 2026Lee ShinJa: Drawing with Thread is the first North American survey of the work of the historically under-recognized Korean artist Lee ShinJa (b. 1930, Uljin, South Korea; lives and works in Seoul). Spanning more than five decades, from the 1950s to the early 2000s, the exhibition showcases the artist’s bold innovations in fiber through forty monumental textile works, woven maquettes, and preparatory sketches.
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Art Wall / Stephanie Syjuco: Present Tense (Roll Call)
August 13, 2025–June 28, 2026Debuting her largest wall installation to date, artist Stephanie Syjuco (b. 1974, Manila, Philippines; lives and works in Oakland) presents Present Tense (Roll Call). Referencing the classroom routine of announcing one’s presence, the exhibition explores radical pedagogy in the politics of education. Syjuco’s practice spans from handcrafted textiles to archival excavations, interrogating how photography and archives shape racialized narratives of being and belonging.
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MATRIX 287 / Berenice Olmedo
August 13–November 23, 2025MATRIX 287 / Berenice Olmedo is the first museum exhibition in the United States for artist Berenice Olmedo (b. 1987, Oaxaca, Mexico; lives and works in Mexico City). Olmedo’s intimate yet commanding anthropomorphic assemblages with fused prostheses and orthotics urge a reconsideration of standardized expectations of bodies.
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Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Multiple Offerings
January 17–April 26, 2026Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Multiple Offerings is the first retrospective in over two decades dedicated to the groundbreaking work of the artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Beginning her artistic career in the Bay Area during the early 1970s, Cha produced an expansive range of works across text-based media, video, and performance. Best known for her posthumously published book, Dictee (1982), which weaves the personal and familial into historical narratives of displacement through word and image, Cha’s interdisciplinary practice gave shape to the experimental art scenes in San Francisco, New York City, and beyond.
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