On View
Past Exhibitions
Current Exhibitions-
Making Their Mark: The Next Generation
Student Art Display
March 26–April 20, 2025Organized as a collaboration between the Arts and Humanities Academy at Berkeley High School and BAMPFA’s Education Department, this monthlong show presents work in a range of media by students in Berkeley High School’s senior AP Art class made in response to the exhibition Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection.
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Teaching Wall / Lives on Paper, Drawing as Trace
Campus Collaborations
January 30–March 23, 2025This exhibition presents works on paper drawn from BAMPFA’s collection, organized in partnership with Todd Olson, Professor of Early Modern Art in the Department of History of Art at UC Berkeley. It offers historical and cultural perspectives on a keystone of fine arts training: drawing the human figure through direct observation of a live model. This display provides students with direct access to artworks and themes connected to their classes in the History of Art and Art Practice Departments.
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MATRIX 286 / Amol K Patil: A Forest of Remembrance
January 18–April 27, 2025Amol K Patil works across painting, sculpture, performance, and video and excavates the lived experiences of Mumbai’s working class. For his first solo exhibition in the United States, the artist presents a newly commissioned body of work that reconfigures the architecture of the city’s chawls into a space of collective memory and dynamic protest.
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Abounaddara: The Ruins We Carry
Campus Collaborations
October 9, 2024–February 23, 2025Part of BAMPFA’s Campus Collaborations series, Abounaddara: The Ruins We Carry is the collective’s first solo US museum exhibition. Known for its intimate portrayals of Syrian life amid upheaval, Abounaddara debuts a new three-channel film installation, The Imagemaker, exploring the world-making powers of one of the last craftsmen of stamped cloth in Damascus.
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BODY FREEDOM FOR EVERY(BODY)
Thursday, October 3, 2024Catch BODY FREEDOM FOR EVERY(BODY) on its cross-country exhibition tour at BAMPFA! The tour’s 27-foot box truck shares the work of over 100 artists on intersecting themes of Reproductive Justice, Queer Liberation, and Trans Joy through contemporary art. This project champions bodily autonomy and aims to reinforce community(ies), create safe spaces, and cultivate joy.
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On the Outdoor Screen / Michele Pred: United for Freedom
October 1–November 6, 2024Since 2016, Pred has organized numerous feminist and GOTV (Get Out The Vote) art parades, blending art and activism to inspire change. This exhibition highlights Pred’s ongoing commitment to reproductive justice, freedom, and women’s rights, featuring an image from her iconic 2018 Vote Feminist parade in New York City.
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On the Outdoor Screen / Lena Wolff and Hope Meng: Art for Democracy
October 1–November 6, 2024Beginning one month prior to Election Day 2024, BAMPFA presents Bay Area artist Lena Wolff’s clarion call to civic engagement on our Outdoor Screen. Wolff made these voting posters in collaboration with the multidisciplinary designer Hope Meng. Initially launched in 2017, Wolff’s iconic poster series encourages viewers to make their voices heard at the ballot box in support of urgent and timely issues: reproductive freedom, gun reform, trans rights, environmental justice, and democracy at large.
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On the Outdoor Screen / Kathryn Andrews: Victoria Woodhull, Belva Ann Lockwood, Abigail Scott Duniway [ . . . ]
October 1–December 6, 2024In anticipation of the upcoming 2024 election, BAMPFA presents Los Angeles–based artist Kathryn Andrews’s work Victoria Woodhull, Belva Ann Lockwood, Abigail Scott Duniway [ . . . ], which addresses the gender disparity among US presidents. Chronicling nearly 150 years of women vying for the presidential seat.
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Teaching Wall / Water, Art, and California
Campus Collaborations
August 28–December 22, 2024This exhibition presents a group of works drawn from BAMPFA’s collection, organized in conjunction with an undergraduate Art Practice course. Taught by Professor Greg Niemeyer, this course surveys the many waters that flow deep within our bodies and all across the globe.
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MATRIX 285 / Young Joon Kwak: Resistance Pleasure
August 7, 2024–December 15, 2024Young Joon Kwak (b. 1984, Queens, New York) works across sculpture, performance, and video to create works that resist the boundaries of representation. In MATRIX 285 / Young Joon Kwak: Resistance Pleasure, the artist casts the human form in sculptures where the body is fragmented and installed throughout the gallery, suggesting a series of movements or gestures within the space.
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Art Wall / Rose D’Amato: Mission Chevrolet
August 7, 2024–December 15, 2024Rose D’Amato (b. 1991, Whittier, California) is a second-generation sign painter and pinstriper. Her abstract compositions celebrate this personal lineage as a representation of the ingenuity of Latinx and working-class communities and the traditions of self-presentation embodied in lowrider culture. For her first museum exhibition, she created an Art Wall commission based on the recently exposed Mission Chevrolet Service billboard—a historic hand-painted sign in San Francisco—to memorialize and celebrate this formerly hidden emblem of community and artistic labor.
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MITH & CO.: Fifty-Fourth Annual UC Berkeley Master of Fine Arts Exhibition
May 1–July 21, 2024For more than half a century, BAMPFA and the UC Berkeley Department of Art Practice have collaborated to present an exhibition of works by MFA graduates. This year’s exhibition features the exceptional work of Salimatu Amabebe, Anamaya Farthing-Kohl, Valencia James, and Nivedita Madigubba.
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A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration
April 13, 2024–September 22, 2024A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration illuminates the enduring impressions of the Great Migration through the eyes and work of twelve contemporary artists.
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On the Outdoor Screen: Navigating the Pilot School
10 AM, 2 PM, and 6 PM daily. 6 PM only on 4/24
March 21–April 24In conjunction with the film series Tell No Lies: Decolonizing Cinema, we present Filipa César and Sónia Vaz Borges’s Navigating the Pilot School on BAMPFA’s outdoor screen. The film uses a performance with children’s building blocks to describe a militant school, together with archival footage, the recollections of a student, and an excerpt from a political publication.
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Art Wall / Yee I-Lann: TIKAR/MEJA/PLASTIK
January 24–July 14, 2024Yee I-Lann’s (b. 1971, Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, Malaysian Borneo) multidisciplinary practice interrogates the complex geopolitical histories of Southeast Asia. For her first major solo presentation at a US museum, the artist has created sixty new works as part of her ongoing TIKAR/MEJA series for BAMPFA’s Art Wall.
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On the Outdoor Screen: Lessons in Semaphore
January 15–February 15, 2024In conjunction with the film series Cauleen Smith—In Space, In Time, view Lessons in Semaphore on BAMPFA’s outdoor screen. Filmed with Cauleen Smith’s beloved but broken wind-up 16mm camera in a verdant vacant lot on Chicago’s South Side, choreographer Taisha Paggett performs signals with artist-made flags.
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MATRIX 284 / Sin Wai Kin: The Story Changing
December 13, 2023–March 10, 2024Sin Wai Kin uses speculative fiction and storytelling to create multilayered performances and moving image works. The Story Changing, the artist’s first solo exhibition in the United States, explores how forms of embodiment and multiplicity have the potential to transform social narratives.
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MATRIX 283 / Gabriel Chaile: No hay nada que destruya el corazón como la pobreza
December 13, 2023–April 14, 2024Playfully intertwining Indigenous mythologies and contemporary social references, Gabriel Chaile creates soaring clay sculptures that expand on the forms, rituals, and traditions of precolonial cultures in northwestern Argentina. MATRIX 283 / Gabriel Chaile features all newly commissioned work, and is the artist’s first solo museum presentation in the United States.
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Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection
October 27, 2024–April 20, 2025Making Their Mark brings together more than seventy artworks by women artists from the Shah Garg Collection, illuminating transgenerational affinities, influences, and methodologies among pathbreaking artists from the postwar era to the present.
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Duane Linklater: mymothersside
October 7, 2023–February 25, 2024For over a decade, Duane Linklater has been making art that interrogates the construct of museums, their conventions, and their historical exclusion of Indigenous people and content. Working across a range of media—including painting, sculpture, and video—he addresses the contradictions of contemporary Indigenous life within settler systems of knowledge, representation, and value. Duane Linklater: mymothersside is the artist’s first major survey exhibition.
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MATRIX 282 / Griselda Rosas: Yo te cuido
August 30–November 19, 2023Griselda Rosas / MATRIX 282: Yo te cuido presents the artist’s textile drawings and sculptural installations, addressing the complexities of the US-Mexico border region by drawing from colonial histories, familial traditions, and personal experience. Themes of inheritance and intergenerational knowledge recur in Rosas’s work alongside references to single motherhood.
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MATRIX 281 / Kenneth Tam: The Founding of the World
August 16–November 26, 2023For MATRIX 281, Kenneth Tam’s latest video and sculptural installation makes its museum debut at BAMPFA. Incorporating the artist’s long-standing research into culturally prescriptive forms of masculinity, The Founding of the World interrogates themes of group identity, ritualized violence, belonging, and intimacy.
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Art Wall: Xylor Jane
August 16, 2023–January 7, 2024For BAMPFA’s Art Wall, Xylor Jane presents a pyramidal calendar organized by the fifth palindromic triangular number, 666—a number with myriad positive and negative connotations. A black grid outlines the color-coded days of the week, while hand-drawn notations mark full moons, equinoxes, and solstices to queer and cross-reference the relationship of natural cycles with European constructions of time.
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What Has Been and What Could Be: The BAMPFA Collection
June 7, 2023–July 7, 2024What Has Been and What Could Be: The BAMPFA Collection inaugurates a year-long presentation of the BAMPFA collection, bringing a contemporary perspective to the museum’s global art holdings.
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Fifty-Third Annual UC Berkeley Master of Fine Arts Exhibition
May 10–July 23, 2023For over half a century, BAMPFA and the UC Berkeley Department of Art Practice have collaborated to present an exhibition of works by Master of Fine Arts graduates. This year’s exhibition includes the exceptional work of Irma Yuliana Barbosa, Gericault De La Rose, Eniola Fakile, Juniper Harrower, Fei Pan, Tiare Ribeaux, and Samuel Wildman.
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Alexandre Dumas’s Afro: Blackness Caricatured, Erased, and Back Again
Cal Conversations
April 12–July 30, 2023Alexandre Dumas’s Afro reassembles the “scattered pieces” of Dumas and his circle, including American actress, poet, and painter Adah Isaacs Menken.
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On the Hour: Three short films by William Kentridge
March 9–April 30, 2023This trio of short animated films by William Kentridge demonstrate his interest in patterns associated with stream of consciousness thought, transformation, language, abstraction, and time. He uses the formal principles and building blocks of cinema, i.e. the illusion of movement that is created when the eye sees 24 frames per second, and manipulates the single film frame to make these magical works.
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Out of Africa: Selections from the Kramlich Collection
March 8–April 30, 2023This selection of photographs and two video installations centers the continent of Africa as a site of extraction, exploitation, and displacement for economic gain.
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Apichatpong Weerasethakul "Morakot (Emerald)"
Endless Knot: Struggle and Healing in the Buddhist World
March 8–April 30, 2023Independent filmmaker, screenwriter, and producer Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s video installation Morakot (Emerald), a work in the BAMPFA collection, is on view as part of the exhibition Endless Knot: Struggle and Healing in the Buddhist World.
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Amalia Mesa-Bains: Archaeology of Memory
February 4–August 13, 2023Amalia Mesa-Bains: Archaeology of Memory is the first retrospective exhibition of the work of longtime Bay Area artist Mesa-Bains. Presenting work from the entirety of her career for the first time, this exhibition, which features nearly 60 works in a range of media, including fourteen major installations, celebrates Mesa-Bains’s important contributions to the field of contemporary art locally and globally.
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Frank Moore / MATRIX 280: Theater of Human Melting
January 25–April 23, 2023This exhibition represents a small portion of the vast body of creative work by the late Berkeley-based artist and teacher Frank Moore (1946–2013). Over the course of more than five decades, Moore, who was born with a physical disability, used painting, performance, public access television, and an extensive writing practice to explore the unlimited capacity for humans to connect.
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Rina Kimche
January 11–March 26, 2023This is the first solo exhibition in the United States of the work of Israeli-based artist Rina Kimche (born 1934). Kimche’s diminutive sculptures are modern in their reductive, abstract simplicity and in their expression of the material essence of their clay medium.
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Endless Knot: Struggle and Healing in the Buddhist World
December 14, 2022–May 7, 2023Endless Knot: Struggle and Healing in the Buddhist World explores how artists and practitioners across two millennia have understood and utilized one of the core tenets of Buddhism—dependent arising, which posits that cycles of existence (saṃsāra) arise from past actions and that everything in the world can impact everything else.
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Art Wall: Luis Camnitzer
November 30, 2022–July 16, 2023In his West Coast solo project debut, Uruguayan artist Luis Camnitzer (b. 1937) debuts the new work below/here/above/ahead/was as part of BAMPFA’s Art Wall commissioned series.
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Lena Wolff and Hope Meng: VOTE
October 8–November 8, 2022The return of Wolff’s iconic poster series encourages viewers to make their voices heard at the ballot box in support of urgent and timely issues: for reproductive freedom, gun reform, trans rights, environmental justice, and democracy at large.
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Undoing Time: Art and Histories of Incarceration
September 3–December 11, 2022Undoing Time: Art and Histories of Incarceration considers the foundational roots of confinement from philosophical, sociological, theological, and art historical perspectives to better understand the fact that today’s mass incarceration crisis has been centuries in the making. This exhibition traces images from history that contribute to the entrenched cultural beliefs associated with today’s carceral system.
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Hannah Levy / MATRIX 279
August 10, 2022–January 8, 2023Hannah Levy’s tactile, creaturelike sculptures infuse the stripped-down lines of Modernist design with a visceral tension that is simultaneously sterile and erotic, amusing and disturbing.
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Fluxus Reverb: Events, Scores, Boxes & More
July 20, 2022–February 12, 2023An international movement of the 1960s and 1970s of artists working across disciplines and in a decidedly anti-commercial manner, this exhibition offers an opportunity to see Fluxus materials and many artworks in the form of a box, including numerous Fluxkits by a wide variety of artists.
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by Alison Knowles: A Retrospective (1960–2022)
July 20, 2022–February 12, 2023Best known as a core member of Fluxus, the first comprehensive exhibition of Knowles's work, spanning the entire breadth of her still-active career, from her intermedia works of the 1960s to participatory and relational art from the 2000s.
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Whitney Bradshaw: OUTCRY
July 13–December 3, 2022This large-scale presentation of Bradshaw's photographic project features one hundred women engaging in unbridled self-expression as an act of defiance against patriarchal oppression. Running three times daily on the outdoor screen.
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The 52nd Annual UC Berkeley Master of Fine Arts Graduate Exhibition
May 13–July 24, 2022BAMPFA and the UC Berkeley Department of Art Practice host an exhibition of works by the Master of Fine Arts class of 2022: Erica Deeman, Edgar Fabián Frías, Kavena Hambira, Hala Kaddoura, Ahn Lee, and Rivka Valérie Louissaint.
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Art Wall: Caroline Kent
April 27–October 30, 2022BAMPFA commissioned Chicago-based artist Caroline Kent to present The Sounds Among Us, a large-scale, self-reflective yet otherworldly meditation on the museum as a site of intimate performance and public engagement.
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On the Hour: A Cool Million
April 18–22, 2022This Earth Week, BAMPFA is proud to be participating in this public initiative for climate awareness led by artists and institutions to expand environmental arts programming and support the conservation of land central to the California hydrological cycle.
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The Artist’s Eye: Tammy Rae Carland, David Huffman, Lava Thomas, John Zurier
March 19–July 17, 2022Curated by four established Bay Area artists, this exhibition centers their respective artistic visions and engages the space where the artist—as curator, collector, and maker—meets the museum.
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Recent Acquisitions from the BAMPFA Collection
March 2–April 24, 2022This exhibition of recent acquisitions by the museum demonstrates BAMPFA’s ongoing work to expand the global art historical canon through the art of lesser known makers and marginalized groups.
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Spiritual Mountains: The Art of Wesley Tongson
January 12–June 12, 2022This exhibition debuts a recent gift of eleven Tongson paintings and pairs them with historic paintings from BAMPFA’s extensive Chinese painting collection, demonstrating the relationship between his genius and that of past masters.
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Lines of Thought
Gestural Abstraction in the BAMPFA Collection
January 5–July 3, 2022This collection-based exhibition of gestural paintings from the 1950s to the present features works by key international figures who have continued to explore artistic possibilities within or in dialogue with gestural abstraction
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On the Hour: Night Watch
September 16–October 31, 2021Screening hourly on BAMPFA's Outdoor Screen, Shimon Attie's 2018 video work features twelve portraits of refugees who fled violence and discrimination in their homeland and were granted political asylum in the United States.
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New Time: Art and Feminisms in the 21st Century
August 28, 2021–January 30, 2022Featuring more than 150 works, most made since the year 2000, this major survey presents a kaleidoscopic view of feminist practices in contemporary art.
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The Enduring Mark
Six Centuries of Drawing from the Gray Collection
August 6–November 28, 2021Celebrating drawing as an expression of the beauty, vigor, and ephemerality of life, this exhibition charts a history of European and American drawing from the fifteenth to the twentieth century with works by Rubens, Degas, Klee, Picasso, and more.
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Art Wall: Luchita Hurtado
August 6–March 20, 2022Developed from a drawing that delineates the differing strata of earth's material structure, BAMPFA's Art Wall commission is Hurtado's most monumental painting to date and among the last works she made.
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The 51st Annual University of California, Berkeley Master of Fine Arts Graduate Exhibition
June 11–July 11, 2021BAMPFA presents works by this year’s MFA graduates from the Department of Art Practice at Cal.
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Kay Sekimachi: Geometries
May 28–October 24, 2021This survey spans the innovative career of Kay Sekimachi, whose experimental objects fold together art and craft, found and made, and Japanese and American artistic traditions.
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The 50th Annual University of California, Berkeley Master of Fine Arts Graduate Exhibition
May 14–June 20, 2021After a pandemic-related postponement, we showcase works by 2020 graduates from the MFA program at Cal.
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Ulrike Ottinger / MATRIX 276
April 30–July 18, 2021In tandem with a streaming series of Ulrike Ottinger’s films, this exhibition highlights her work as a photographer, revealing her keen eye for landscape and intimate portraiture.
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Present Tense: Five Centuries of Colonialism in Latin American and Caribbean Art
Cal Conversations
April 30–June 20, 2021An exhibition of historical and contemporary art that reveals how colonialism has shaped life in the Latin Americas offers captivating works that critique society and introduce beauty as a form of healing.
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Beyond Boundaries: Buddhist Art of Gandhara
April 30, 2021–March 13, 2022Northern India’s Gandharan region was a crossroads of power, culture, and art from the second to ninth centuries. Rare sculptural images of the Buddha and his life story reflect cultural exchanges between the Hellenistic world and the native artistic traditions of India.
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Orbits of Known and Unknown Objects: SFAI Histories / MATRIX 277
September 30, 2020–OngoingAn exhibition in the form of a website, MATRIX 277 explores and honors the rich legacy of the San Francisco Art Institute on the occasion of its 150th anniversary, tracing connections among artworks, people, and places over the trajectory of the institution’s history.
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Catherine Opie: Political Landscapes
On the Outdoor Screen
September 2–November 29, 2020Presented hourly on BAMPFA’s outdoor screen, this selection of photographs from Opie’s ongoing series documenting political protests in Los Angeles provides a glimpse into civic participation and affirms the right to freedom of expression.
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When All That Is Solid Melts into Air
Exploring the Intersection of the Folk and the Modern in Postcolonial India
March 4–November 1, 2020Featuring Indian folk art as well as less traditional forms, this exhibition tells the story of the momentous social and artistic transformations that unfolded in the relationship between the “modern” and the “folk” in India after 1947.
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Art for Human Rights: Peace Now!
February 26–August 30, 2020A selection of protest posters made in Berkeley in the sixties and seventies offers a chance to reflect on an era when Americans were at war with one another while waging war abroad.
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Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective
February 19, 2020–July 18, 2021The largest exhibition of Rosie Lee Tompkins’s work to date, this retrospective reveals her as a brilliantly inventive quiltmaker and an artist of stunning variety, depth, and impact.
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Ron Nagle: Handsome Drifter
January 15, 2020–March 14, 2021Ron Nagle’s small sculptures combine modernism, pop culture, and sensory pleasure in compact, perfect packages.
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Brave Warriors and Fantastic Tales: The World According to Yoshitoshi
January 15–July 19, 2020Legendary warriors and fantastical creatures come to life in the daring prints of Taiso Yoshitoshi, one of the last great ukiyo-e artists of Meiji Japan.
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Lands of Promise and Peril: Geographies of California
Cal Conversations
December 11, 2019–August 23, 2020This student-curated exhibition maps California’s many contradictions as a place of beauty and brutality, prosperity and inequality, sanctuary and exclusion.
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Art Wall: Edie Fake
November 20, 2019–June 27, 2021Edie Fake’s mural envisions affordable housing for transgender elders, using architecture to celebrate the uniqueness of trans bodies and the possibilities of queer space.
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Sylvia Fein / MATRIX 275
November 13, 2019–March 1, 2020This career-spanning centenary tribute of Sylvia Fein showcases a wide array of works drawing on both the personal and the fantastical.
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BAMPFA AR—Augmented Time
A Project by Luisa Caldas
October 23–December 15, 2019Using augmented reality as a medium, BAMPFA AR—Augmented Time tells the story behind the new BAMPFA building by architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro.
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Dennis Feldman: Photographs
October 16–December 15, 2019Photographs by an affecting social documentarian and explorer of what he calls “a world contained in a frame.”
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Terry Fox: Resonance
October 2–December 15, 2019Two of Terry Fox’s video and audio works are being presented at BAMPFA in conjunction with Terry Fox: Resonance, a multivenue celebration organized by Dena Beard and Constance Lewallen.
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Hinges: Sakaki Hyakusen and the Birth of Nanga Painting
October 2, 2019–February 2, 2020The first US exhibition focused on Sakaki Hyakusen, the founding father of the Nanga school of painting in Japan, this presentation reveals his pivotal role in the history of eighteenth-century Japanese art and highlights the conservation of his masterpiece Mountain Landscape.
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Kader Attia / MATRIX 274
September 18–November 17, 2019Part of French-Algerian artist Kader Attia’s ongoing investigation of the concept of repair and healing from the trauma of war, this exhibition presents his seminal installation J’accuse.
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The San Quentin Project: Nigel Poor and the Men of San Quentin State Prison
August 21–November 17, 2019Following the evolution of artist Nigel Poor’s collaboration with men incarcerated at San Quentin State Prison, this exhibition features visual documents, photographs from the prison’s archive, and episodes of the award-winning podcast Ear Hustle.
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Dennis Feldman: Photographs
July 31–October 13, 2019Photographs from two series, Hollywood Boulevard, 1969–1972 and American Images, demonstrate the artist’s achievements as an affecting social documentarian and explorer of what he calls “a world contained in a frame.”
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Meditation in Motion: Zen Calligraphy from the Stuart Katz Collection
July 17–October 20, 2019The first exhibition at BAMPFA to present the unique art form of Japanese Zen-inspired calligraphy, Meditation in Motion features important works by Chinese Ōbaku monks who immigrated to Japan, as well as writings by Japanese monks who expanded on their examples.
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No Horizon: Helen Mirra and Sean Thackrey
July 3–August 25, 2019This exhibition brings together two Bay Area artists whose work embraces the simple act of seeing as an inspiration to deep reflection and understanding.
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Divine Women, Divine Wisdom
June 26, 2019–December 8, 2020Art from South Asia and the Himalayan region that celebrates the beauty, fecundity, wisdom, power, and compassion of women within the context of Hindu and Buddhist traditions.
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The 49th Annual University of California, Berkeley Master of Fine Arts Graduate Exhibition
May 17–June 16, 2019BAMPFA showcases work by the latest graduates from the MFA program at Cal.
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About Things Loved: Blackness and Belonging
Cal Conversations
May 17–July 21, 2019Featuring creations by Black artists in the collections of BAMPFA and the Hearst Museum of Anthropology, this exhibition organized by UC Berkeley graduate students imagines the liberatory possibilities of celebrating blackness and belonging.
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Permanent Accusation: Art for Human Rights
April 10–July 14, 2019This presentation of work by Fernando Botero and others asks how art can urge accountability for human rights in ways that the law cannot.
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Looking: The Art of Frederick Hammersley
April 10–June 23, 2019Explore the extraordinary creativity of artist Frederick Hammersley in its full breadth, from painting and photography to computer art, in this exhibition marking a significant recent donation of the artist's work.
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Unlimited: Recent Gifts from the William Goodman and Victoria Belco Photography Collection
March 27–September 1, 2019Celebrating a major gift of photographs from a pair of local collectors, this exhibition features works by masters of the photographic form, with an emphasis on contemporary work from the Bay Area and around the world.
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Art Wall: Carlos Amorales
March 27–October 13, 2019This new commission draws on multiple histories of Mexican muralism, graffiti, and political protest, while reinforcing the importance of social engagement in the present moment.
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Hans Hofmann: The Nature of Abstraction
February 27–July 21, 2019Spanning the entirety of the artist’s career, this exhibition presents a fresh and eye-opening examination of Hans Hofmann’s prolific and innovative artistic practice.
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Aaron Marcus: Early Works
February 6–June 30, 2019In these multicolored transformations of computer-generated forms, the artist makes connections between art, science, design, and visual poetry.
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Masako Miki / MATRIX 273
January 9–April 28, 2019A magical installation inspired by Shinto beliefs and the shape-shifting beings of Japanese folklore.
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Get Dancin’: Selections from the Collection
January 9–March 31, 2019The exuberance, romance, and beauty of dance are central themes in this wide-ranging selection of works.
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Ink, Paper, Silk: One Hundred Years of Collecting Japanese Art
December 12, 2018–April 14, 2019An exceptional selection of scroll paintings, screens, woodblock prints, lacquerware, and ceramics demonstrating the breadth and beauty of Japanese art.
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Arthur Jafa / MATRIX 272
December 12, 2018–March 24, 2019A gallery exhibition and complementary screenings of videos by Arthur Jafa, whose work expands the concept of black cinema while exploring African American experience and race relations in everyday life.
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Dimensionism: Modern Art in the Age of Einstein
November 7, 2018–March 3, 2019Discover the connections between the scientific and artistic revolutions of the early twentieth century with this groundbreaking exhibition, which reveals how artists responded to scientific advances with bold new forms of creative expression.
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Harvey Quaytman: Against the Static
October 17, 2018–January 27, 2019This new retrospective charts the painter’s career from the 1960s through the 1990s, showcasing abstract experiments in form, texture, and color that are both formally rigorous and rich with sensuality and humor.
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Boundless: Contemporary Tibetan Artists at Home and Abroad
October 3, 2018–May 26, 2019Featuring works by renowned contemporary Tibetan artists alongside rare historical pieces, this exhibition highlights how artists explore the infinite possibilities of visual forms to reflect their transcultural, multilingual, and translocal lives.
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Redacted: Art for Human Rights
September 19–December 10, 2018A selection of works from the BAMPFA collection that use redacted content to question the relationships between power, information, and censorship and consider the precarious nature of truth.
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Old Masters in a New Light: Rediscovering the European Collection
September 19–December 16, 2018BAMPFA’s outstanding collection of historical European art—including several important new acquisitions—is showcased in this exhibition, the culmination of a major research and conservation effort.
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Christina Quarles / MATRIX 271
September 19–November 18, 2018A gathering of paintings by Quarles, whose work tussles with culturally prescribed identities and probes the margins where meaning remains unfixed, illegible, and subject to question.
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Art Wall: Barbara Stauffacher Solomon
August 15, 2018–March 3, 2019The pioneer of the 1960s design phenomenon Supergraphics creates a new piece for BAMPFA’s Art Wall.
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Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen
July 11–October 14, 2018This first survey of Vicuña’s work stages a conversation about discarded and displaced people, places, and things in a time of global climate change.
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Joanne Leonard: Intimate Documentary
July 4-September 2, 2018Leonard’s photographs are rare, intimate documents of life in Oakland in the 1960s and 1970s.
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Peter Hujar: Speed of Life
June 30–November 18, 2018The first retrospective of an enormously influential artist whose photographs capture the creative subcultures of downtown New York in the 1970s and 1980s.
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Color, Form, Unicorn: Recent Acquisitions
June 6-August 19, 2018Recent additions to the BAMPFA collection feature unusual approaches to color and form—plus a unicorn.
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Alicia McCarthy and Ruby Neri / MATRIX 270
May 23–August 26, 2018New work by two artists who got their start in San Francisco in the 1990s and have maintained a strong artistic dialogue ever since.
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Master Traces, Transcultural Visions
May 16–September 16, 2018Works dating from the second century through the twentieth reveal how Buddhist power was visually expressed and transmitted throughout Asia.
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The 48th Annual UC Berkeley Master of Fine Arts Graduate Exhibition
May 11–June 17, 2018This annual showcase celebrates the diverse and exceptional work of new graduates from the MFA program at Cal.
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Al Wong: Lost Sister
March 28–June 17, 2018Al Wong’s photocollage portraits of the sister he never met form a meditation on displacement and the collision between personal and geopolitical histories.
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Cal Conversations: Dreaming the Lost Ming 夢回金陵
February 21–May 13, 2018Created in collaboration with a UC Berkeley course, this exhibition explores the cataclysmic end of the Ming dynasty through paintings and literature of China’s long seventeenth century.
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Agony in Effigy: Art, Truth, Pain, and the Body
February 21–June 17, 2018This selection of historical works explores how physical violence and suffering have been represented in art, from the promise of transcendence to political critique.
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Jay Heikes / MATRIX 269
February 14–April 29, 2018Recent paintings, sculptures, and drawings that offer both a reflection on our cultural moment and a commitment to the material properties of the art object
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Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Avant Dictee
January 31–April 22, 2018View artworks and ephemera from the Cha archive at BAMPFA in dialogue with her best-known work, the artist's book Dictee.
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Breaking ICE
A Community Response to a Citizenship Test
January 31–May 20, 2018An interactive installation based loosely on the 100 questions used to test aspiring US citizens.
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Art Wall: Karabo Poppy Moletsane
November 22, 2017–July 15, 2018Moletsane’s vibrant, large-scale portraits for the Art Wall draw on both traditional African visual culture and Afrofuturism.
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On the Hour / Hayoun Kwon
I Suddenly Hear the Flap of Wings
November 1–December 29, 2017Commissioned for BAMPFA’s outdoor screen, Kwon’s imaginative digital animation evokes a woman who transformed her apartment into an aviary.
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Veronica De Jesus / MATRIX 268
October 25, 2017–February 25, 2018De Jesus's memorial portraits honor artists, writers, and diverse cultural figures, testifying to the fact that each life is valuable and worthy of recognition.
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Repentant Monk: Illusion and Disillusion in the Art of Chen Hongshou
October 25, 2017–January 28, 2018Chen Hongshou is a major figure in Chinese art of the late Ming and early Qing dynasties. This exhibition explores his visually compelling work and his response to the turmoil of his times.
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Global Lives Project
October 25–December 29, 2017This collaborative video project captures twenty-four hours in the lives of diverse individuals across the globe.
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Buddhist Realms
October 25, 2107–April 22, 2018Exquisite examples of Buddhist art from the Himalayan region.
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Miyoko Ito / MATRIX 267
September 27, 2017–January 28, 2018Discover the singular vision of a Berkeley-born artist whose paintings explore both exterior and interior landscapes.
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Gordon Parks: The Making of an Argument
September 27–December 17, 2017This investigation of the editorial process behind Parks's photo-essay "Harlem Gang Leader" reveals unspoken conflicts between photographer, editor, subject, and truth.
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Martin Wong: Human Instamatic
September 20–December 10, 2017This retrospective surveys the career of "one of our great urban visionaries" (New York Times), from Northern California to New York and back.
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To the Letter: Regarding the Written Word
September 13, 2017–January 28, 2018This exhibition crosses cultures and centuries to bring together works that activate the expressive and aesthetic potential of letters and words.
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On the Hour / JJ PEET
THE VACANT AMERICAN
September 13–October 29, 2017PEET brings his distinctive observational style to a pair of videos commissioned for BAMPFA's monumental outdoor screen and Theater Two.
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Information in the Flesh: Art for Human Rights
September 13–October 1, 2017Works by Fernando Botero, Adrian Piper, and others demonstrate how power is articulated and reinforced through the dehumanized body.
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Ugo Rondinone: the world just makes me laugh
June 28–August 26, 2017The exhibition features clowns and rainbows, but it's not just clowning around—Swiss artist Rondinone's work is both exuberant and melancholy.
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Divine Visions, Earthly Pleasures: Five Hundred Years of Indian Painting
June 22–September 10, 2017Works from the BAMPFA collection reveal the richness and variety of India's painterly traditions.
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Charles Howard: A Margin of Chaos
June 21–October 1, 2017Discover the enigmatic work of this pioneering yet underrecognized painter, who bridged figurative, Surrealist, and abstract currents in modern art.
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Buddhist Realms
May 24–October 8, 2017Tibetan Buddhist paintings and sculptures vividly evoke the realms of the celestial and the supernatural.
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The 47th Annual University of California, Berkeley Master of Fine Arts Graduate Exhibition
May 17–June 11, 2017Works by this year's MFA recipients from UC Berkeley's Department of Art Practice.
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Sam Contis / MATRIX 266
May 3–August 26, 2017Photographic works made at the remote and idiosyncratic Deep Springs College.
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Irwin Kremen / MATRIX 265
April 26–August 26, 2017Exquisitely composed collages incorporating fragments of found, or "experienced," paper.
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Asher Hartman and Cliff Hengst / MATRIX 264
April 12–16, 2017A one-man performance by Cliff Hengst, directed by Asher Hartman.
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AMERICA AMERICA: Art for Human Rights
March 22–April 16, 2017Works from the collection examining the history of US human rights.
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Erica Deeman: Silhouettes
March 8–June 11, 2017Large-scale photographs of women from the African diaspora, presented in a way that challenges traditional assumptions about artistic technique and individual identity.
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Art Wall: Lawrence Weiner
March 1–October 30, 2017The artist continues his exploration of language as medium in this newly commissioned work.
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Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia
February 8–May 21, 2017Explore how artists, architects, and designers intersected with the counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s.
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Slow Reading / Slow Seeing
Cal Conversations
January 18–April 30, 2017An exhibition of poems and artworks developed in collaboration with UC Berkeley Professor Lyn Hejinian’s class English 190: Slow Reading / Slow Seeing.
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Michael Armitage / MATRIX 263
December 14, 2016–April 2, 2017New works by the London-based painter reflect on sexuality and gender stereotypes in Kenya.
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Buddhist Art from the Roof of the World
Transmission of the Dharma
December 14, 2016–May 7, 2017 View -
Andy Warhol: Still Lifes and Portraits
November 23, 2016–March 12, 2017Warhol prints from 1964 to 1977 that critique contemporary culture.
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Covered in Time and History: The Films of Ana Mendieta
November 9, 2016–February 12, 2017This exhibition presents the films of Ana Mendieta (1948–1985) in the context of her own work and of the transformation of visual art in the 1970s.
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Fernando Botero: Art for Human Rights
Fall 2016
Compelling works from Fernando Botero's Abu Ghraib series.
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GIF Collider 1.0
October 26–28, 2016An endlessly looping computer program by artists Greg Niemeyer, Olya Dubatova, and Brewster Kahle, created for BAMPFA's giant outdoor screen.
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Mind Over Matter: Conceptual Art from the Collection
October 19–December 23, 2016First-generation Conceptualism, focusing on performance and language. Works by Ant Farm, Eleanor Antin, John Baldessari, James Lee Byars, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Bruce Nauman, Ed Ruscha, Yoko Ono, and more.
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Pat O'Neill / MATRIX 262
September 28–November 27, 2016The work of Pat O'Neill, a pioneer of avant-garde film and optical printing techniques, including films, sculpture, photography, and works on paper.
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Push and Pull: Hans Hofmann
August 31–December 11, 2016Push and Pull: Hans Hofmann showcases signature works that manifest Hofmann’s dynamic painterly approach.
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Art Wall: Terri Friedman
August 25, 2016–February 12, 2017A monumental weaving by East Bay artist Terri Friedman, the second work in BAMPFA’s Art Wall series of commissioned temporary works.
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Sojourner Truth, Photography, and the Fight Against Slavery
July 27–October 23, 2016Photographic carte de visite self-portraits by abolitionist, feminist, and orator Sojourner Truth.
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Buddhist Art from the Roof of the World
July 27–November 27, 2016Paintings and sculptures from India, Tibet, and Nepal provide a window into a divine Buddhist reality.
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Berkeley Eye
Perspectives on the Collection
July 13–December 11, 2016Berkeley Eye celebrates BAMPFA’s collection with nearly 150 works organized into thematic groupings, such as Human Nature; Space, Time, Energy; Barriers & Walls; Connection & Change.
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This Just In: Recent Acquisitions
July 6–September 11, 2016Recent acquisitions including work by Sophie Calle, Charles Gaines, Todd Hido, Gordon Matta-Clark, Richard Misrach, Shirin Neshat, Hedda Sterne, Katharina Wulff, and more.
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Summer Trees Casting Shade: Chinese Painting at Berkeley
The First Fifty Years
July 6–September 25, 2016Summer Trees Casting Shade celebrates the breadth and depth of BAMPFA’s acclaimed Chinese painting collection with over fifty diverse works.
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The 46th Annual University of California, Berkeley Master of Fine Arts Graduate Exhibition
June 29–August 7Discover the work of this year’s MFA graduates of the UC Berkeley Department of Art Practice.
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Cecilia Edefalk / MATRIX 261
June 29-October 16, 2016Stockholm-based artist Cecilia Edefalk’s engagement with nature comes to the fore in this MATRIX exhibition featuring watercolors, photographs, sculptures, and paintings.
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Otobong Nkanga / MATRIX 260
May 11 & 14, 2016Two mixed-media performances by Otobong Nkanga that use storytelling to explore the material and natural history of Nigeria and beyond.
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Architecture of Life
January 31–May 29, 2016The inaugural exhibition BAMPFA's landmark new building, Architecture of Life explores the ways that architecture—as concept, metaphor, and practice—illuminates various aspects of life experience.
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Will Brown / MATRIX 259
June 12–September 13, 2015Inspired by enigmatic stories about Dan Flavin’s 1978 site-specific installation at BAMPFA, Will Brown’s MATRIX exhibition includes installations outside BAMPFA’s Bancroft Way building, an artist book displayed in UC Berkeley’s Morrison Library, and a one-night theatrical production written by poet and playwright Kevin Killian.
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The 45th Annual University of California, Berkeley Master of Fine Arts Graduate Exhibition
May 15–June 14, 2015We are honored to present the work of six promising artists-Leslie Dreyer, Tanja Geis, Lee Lavy, Michelle Ott, Sofie Ramos, and Matt Smith Chavez-in the forty-fifth edition of the annual MFA exhibition. This year's presentation will be held at the Berkeley Art Center, 1257 Walnut Street, Berkeley.
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Tarek Atoui / MATRIX 258
March 2–November 7, 2015Electroacoustic musician Tarek Atoui uses custom-built electronic instruments and computers to create music as a powerful tool of expression and identity.
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Eric Baudelaire / MATRIX 257
February 4–February 21, 2015MATRIX 257 features the work of French-American artist Eric Baudelaire, who explores intricate facets of representation through a keen unraveling of entangled narratives. The exhibition comprises film screenings at the PFA Theater and an installation, film screenings, and public conversations at Kadist Art Foundation in San Francisco.
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Eric Baudelaire / MATRIX 257
2/4/15 to 2/21/15 MATRIX 257 features the work of French-American artist Eric Baudelaire, who explores intricate facets of representation through a keen unraveling of entangled narratives. The exhibition comprises film screenings at the PFA Theater and an installation, film screenings, and public conversations at Kadist Art Foundation in San Francisco. View -
Joseph Holtzman / MATRIX 256
October 17–December 21, 2014Joseph Holtzman's paintings on marble achieve remarkable chromatic and tonal effects by exploiting the transparency of oil paint and the unusual capacity of the stone surface to absorb and reflect light. The themes and motifs of these highly personal paintings are drawn from Holtzman's interest in historical painting and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century decorative arts, and often depict family and friends, cultural personalities, historical figures, and literary characters.
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American Wonder: Folk Art from the Collection
October 1–December 22, 2014Discover the early years of our nation through portraits, landscapes, commemorative mourning pictures, weather vanes, and decorative sculptures that reflect the daily lives and aspirations of Americans between the years 1776 and 1865. American Wonder begins in Colonial New England, evoking the world of early settlers, and ends in the San Francisco Bay Area, where the pitched optimism of the Gold Rush met with dreams of a post-Civil War American Eden.
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John Zurier / MATRIX 255
September 12–December 21, 2014Berkeley-based artist John Zurier's luminous, abstract canvases capture qualities of light and the changing effects of the atmosphere. MATRIX 255 debuts a new body of paintings and watercolors that evoke the ice, fog, wind, water, and light of the Icelandic landscape, while also tapping into more timeless, contemplative states.
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Geta Brătescu / MATRIX 254
July 25–September 28, 2014MATRIX 254 presents a focused selection of key works by Geta Brătescu (b. 1926), a central figure in postwar Romanian art. Brătescu's multidisciplinary practice-which includes collage, drawing, video, textiles, performance, installation, photography, graphic design, and printmaking-is characterized by a playful, experimental approach and frequent use of role-playing and self-portraiture.
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Looking Intently: The James Cahill Legacy
July 23–December 21, 2014In fond memory of James Cahill (1926–2014), we present this selection from the collection in tribute to his tremendous generosity and commitment to Berkeley and to BAMPFA.
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Hofmann by Hofmann
July 2–December 22, 2014In 1963 Hans Hofmann donated nearly fifty paintings in support of the burgeoning University Art Museum (now BAMPFA). As we prepare to move to our new building in downtown Berkeley, it seems fitting to revisit the enduring vitality and generosity of Hofmann's extraordinary gift with a selection of the works selected personally by the artist for BAMPFA.
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Color Shift
June 18–August 24, 2014Inspired by Josef Albers, who taught that developing a "sensitive eye for color" was a key component of the modernist project, Color Shift explores color relationships within abstract compositions. The exhibition puts into dialogue a broad range of media and includes work by Jennifer Bartlett, Dan Flavin, Xylor Jane, Ruth Laskey, Ron Nagle, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and more.
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Forrest Bess: Seeing Things Invisible
June 11–September 14, 2014Self-described “visionary” artist Forrest Bess (1911–1977) created a signature aesthetic, painting simple landscapes characterized by planar bands and coded symbols derived from dreams. Forrest Bess: Seeing Things Invisible pairs Bess's paintings, dating from 1946 to 1970, with an installation of archival materials curated by sculptor Robert Gober that illuminates Bess's art and life.
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What #isamuseum?
May 23–December 31, 2014Is a museum fun? Truthful? Political? Artist Sam Durant invites you share your thoughts on isamuseum.org and on Twitter using #isamuseum.
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Envisioning Human Rights: The Next Generation
April 23–September 21, 2014We have teamed up with the Human Rights Center at the UC Berkeley School of Law to celebrate their twentieth anniversary with a juried exhibition of artworks by University of California students that address a broad spectrum of social justice issues.
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Will Rogan / MATRIX 253
April 11–June 29, 2014For MATRIX 253, Will Rogan has created a new body of work that explores various time scales-past, present, and future-as evinced in a reversed order or a backward motion. Primarily taking the form of photography, collage, sculpture, or video, Rogan's work possesses a subtlety and quietude that inspire thoughtful consideration of the material effects of time and space.
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The Elephant's Eye: Artful Animals in South & Southeast Asia
March 5–July 6, 2014Elephants take center stage in this delightful exhibition that focuses on the representation of animals in the art of India, Thailand, and Cambodia. Discover how animals evoke the power of kingdoms, embody the wisdom of saints, and inspire devotional desire.
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Barbara Chase-Riboud: The Malcolm X Steles
February 12–April 27, 2014Barbara Chase-Riboud: The Malcolm X Steles features monumental sculptures and lyrical drawings by the internationally acclaimed artist and author. The exhibition focuses on six major sculptures named in memory of the assassinated civil rights leader, which are marked by the dynamic interplay of material and thematic opposites.
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The Possible
January 29–May 25, 2014Combining studio, school, library, gallery, and stage, The Possible is an open platform for exploring diverse creative techniques. This experimental exhibition transforms our galleries into workshops-a ceramics studio, dye lab, print shop, and recording studio-to foster collaboration among artists and between artists and visitors. Come and be a part of the process.
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Paz Errázuriz / MATRIX 251
January 17–March 30, 2014MATRIX 251 presents two series by Chilean photographer Paz Errázuriz, La manzana de Adán (Adam's Apple) and Boxeadores (Boxers), both of which were made during the brutal military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. The photographs display Errázuriz's authentic and deeply human approach to portraying people living on the margins of society.
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Anna Maria Maiolino / MATRIX 252
January 17–March 30, 2014This exhibition of work by São Paulo–based artist Anna Maria Maiolino features a group of four videos from the 1970s and early 1980s that use the body to express the experience of living under an oppressive regime.
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Art for Human Rights
November 13–November 25, 2013Powerful drawings and paintings from Fernando Botero's Abu Ghraib series commemorate Art for Human Rights.
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Multiple Encounters
November 6–February 16, 2014Multiple Encounters puts the video work of Yang Fudong in direct dialogue with historical Chinese paintings from our collection, and suggests that some of the ambiguous qualities of Yang's work may be inherited from the Chinese classical tradition.
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Linda Stark / MATRIX 250
October 18–December 22, 2013Los Angeles–based artist Linda Stark has been making figurative and abstract paintings with heavily built-up surfaces of paint since the late 1980s. MATRIX 250 highlights her more recent series of “adorned” and “branded” paintings, which conflate the surface textures of the painting with various aspects of the female body.
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Beauty Revealed: Images of Women in Qing Dynasty Chinese Painting
September 25–December 22, 2013Beauty Revealed proposes new ways of viewing and understanding the genre of later Chinese painting known as meiren hua, or beautiful women painting. The exhibition features over twenty rare, exquisite paintings of women in intimate settings, such as the garden, home, bath, and brothel.
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Yang Fudong: Estranged Paradise, Works 1993–2013
August 21–December 8, 2013This first midcareer survey of the work of Yang Fudong presents photographs, films, and video installations by a leading figure in China's contemporary art world and independent cinema movement. Yang reflects the ideals and anxieties of the generation that came of age after the Cultural Revolution and is struggling to find its place in the rapidly changing society of the new China.
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Zarouhie Abdalian / MATRIX 249
August 2–September 29, 2013MATRIX 249 showcases the work of Oakland-based artist Zarouhie Abdalian, whose work often responds to the specific attributes of a given location, architectural setting, or social landscape. For this exhibition, the artist has created new sculptures for Gallery A that explore the interrelated, yet distinct, states of noise, silence, and the absence of sound.
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Thingamajigs: Migrations, Maps & Labyrinths
July 21–August 16, 2013We are pleased to welcome Thingamajigs Performance Group as our first-ever L@TE artists-in-residence. With the help of audiences and local collaborators Thingamajigs investigates the meanings of travel, migrations, maps, and labyrinths in a series of linked performances, talks, a workshop, and open rehearsals.
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Deities, Demons, and Teachers of Tibet, Nepal, and India
June 26–September 14, 2014Joyful and sensual sculptural figures of Indian deities and dancers join radiant images of enlightened beings from Tibet and Nepal in Deities, Demons, and Teachers, which presents a rotating display of works by anonymous Indian, Nepalese, and Tibetan artisans.
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Gazing into Nature: Early Chinese Painting
June 5–October 20, 2013We are delighted to present, for the first time in ten years, a selection of BAMPFA's earliest Chinese paintings. These rare works by twelfth- to fifteenth-century landscape and bird-and-flower painters demonstrate the sophistication and accomplishment of the early Chinese painting tradition.
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The 43rd Annual University of California, Berkeley Master of Fine Arts Graduate Exhibition
May 17–June 16, 2013 BAMPFA presents the work of the 2013 M.F.A. graduates of UC Berkeley's Department of Art Practice. View -
Hans Hofmann: Rectangles
May 17–September 1, 2013Now closing August 25. Drawn exclusively from BAMPFA's unsurpassed collection of paintings by the tremendously influential Abstract Expressionist artist, Hans Hofmann: Rectangles celebrates the completion of a comprehensive conservation project.
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Ballet of Heads: The Figure in the Collection
May 17–August 25, 2013Taking as its point of departure the work of Nicole Eisenman, on view in MATRIX 248, Ballet of Heads brings together works from the collection that demonstrate the inexhaustible variety and texture of the human form in art.
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Rebar: Kaleidoscape
May 12, 2013–December 21, 2014We invite you to experience Kaleidoscape, an interactive seating sculpture designed by the San Francisco–based firm Rebar. Come rearrange the modular pieces to create a customized environment for study, relaxation, or socializing, or use the sections to create a crystalline landscape. Take a picture of your Kaleidoscape composition and share it on our photostream!
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Nicole Eisenman / MATRIX 248
May 3–July 14, 2013MATRIX 248 showcases the work of New York–based artist Nicole Eisenman, who has been steadfastly expanding dialogues surrounding painting and drawing since the 1990s. Intermixing styles associated with American Regionalism and the Italian Renaissance with German Expressionism, Eisenman brings history to bear in her canvases and drawings, yet twists the imagery to infuse these familiar forms with her own incisive social commentary and aesthetic voice.
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Art For Human Rights
April 1–April 14, 2013As part of our ongoing Art for Human Rights program, we display paintings and works on paper from acclaimed Colombian artist Fernando Botero's provocative Abu Ghraib series (2004–06).
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Apichatpong Weerasethakul / MATRIX 247
February 15–April 21, 2013MATRIX 247 presents Apichatpong Weerasethakul's 2007 video installation Morakot (Emerald), where ghostly voices share their stories as the camera lingers on dust, light, and memory in the empty rooms and hallways of a defunct Bangkok hotel that once housed Cambodian refugees.
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Anna Halprin / MATRIX 246
February 15–April 21, 2013For MATRIX 246, visionary choreographer Anna Halprin stages the final performances of her groundbreaking 1965 dance, Parades and Changes, and we display scores, photographs, and other documentation of the history of the dance.
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Silence
January 30–April 28, 2013 Inspired by John Cage's groundbreaking composition 4'33", and the centenary of the composer's birth, Silence considers the absence of sound as both subject and medium in modern and contemporary art and film. The exhibition includes work by Joseph Beuys, Stan Brakhage, Giorgio de Chirico, Maya Deren, Nathaniel Dorsky, Marcel Duchamp, René Magritte, Christian Marclay, Nam June Paik, Robert Rauschenberg, Doris Salcedo, Tino Sehgal, Stephen Vitiello, and Andy Warhol, among others. View -
Rudolf de Crignis / MATRIX 245
January 30–May 5, 2013MATRIX 245, Rudolf de Crignis's first solo museum exhibition in the United States, brings together fourteen paintings and a series of graphite works on paper from 1991 to 2006. De Crignis (1948–2006) is best known for radiant abstract works, layered hues of blue that he called "catalysts to create the space and the light."
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Facing Two Directions: A Japanese Painter Looks to China
January 30–May 19, 2013A magnificent pair of screens painted by Sakaki Hyakusen forms the centerpiece of this exhibition. The masterful Hyakusen (1697–1752) was an artist facing two directions: one towards the traditions of China and the other toward the future of Japanese Nanga painting.
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Trimpin: Nancarrow Percussion Orchestra / MATRIX 244
November 2–December 23, 2012Trimpin's Nancarrow Percussion Orchestra celebrates the one-hundredth birthday of the avant-garde composer Conlon Nancarrow (1912–97) with an interactive sculptural sound installation comprising three reconstructed salvaged pianos as well as percussive instruments originally designed and built by Nancarrow. Commissioned by Other Minds in collaboration with BAMPFA in conjunction with Nancarrow at 100: A Centennial Celebration.
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Art for Human Rights
October 31–November 11, 2012As part of the new BAMPFA program Art for Human Rights, we feature several works from Fernando Botero's provocative Abu Ghraib series, as well as a sculpture by the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei and newly acquired photographs by Ruth-Marion Baruch and Pirkle Jones that focus on aspects of the Black Panther movement.
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Barry McGee
August 24–December 9, 2012This first midcareer survey of the globally influential San Francisco–based artist showcases the broad range of Barry McGee's compassionate and vivacious work. Taking over the entire lower level of the museum, the exhibition includes rarely seen early etchings, letterpress printing trays and liquor bottles painted with his trademark cast of down-and-out urban characters, constellations of vibrant op-art painted panels, animatronic taggers, and an elaborate re-creation of a cacophonous street-corner bodega, along with many new projects.
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Lutz Bacher / MATRIX 242
July 18–October 7, 2012MATRIX 242 presents Bien Hoa (2006–07), an important but rarely seen series that sheds light on the elusive practice of Berkeley-based artist Lutz Bacher. The series juxtaposes enlargements of photographs taken by a soldier in Vietnam, unearthed by the artist at a local salvage store, with the versos of the originals, which reveal the soldier/photographer's handwritten annotations. As in much of her work, in this series Bacher uses found objects to prompt questions without offering clear answers.
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D-L Alvarez / MATRIX 243
July 18–October 7, 2012D-L Alvarez's first solo museum exhibition explores the aesthetic guises that sometimes mask unspeakable horrors. MATRIX 243 pairs The Closet, a drawing series from 2006–07 based on the 1978 horror film Halloween, with Something to Cry About (I and II) (2007), patchwork bodysuits draped on armatures that evoke the skins of corpses.
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At the Edge: Recent Acquisitions
July 18–December 23, 2012At the Edge features works that have entered the BAMPFA collection over the past two years that convey a sense of reaching-and sometimes crossing-limits of perception and experience. Among the works on view are dreamlike, mystical, and otherworldly visions, as well as images of life at its dramatic extremes.
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Himalayan Pilgrimage: Liberation Through Sight
June 15–November 25, 2012The journey of Himalayan Pilgrimage continues with Liberation Through Sight, which focuses on artwork created as vehicles to enlightenment. Works on view include an exceptionally rare set of seven paintings depicting the lineage of the Great Fifth Dalai Lama (c. 1815), as well as images of compassionate and wrathful deities of the Tibetan pantheon.
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The 42nd Annual University of California, Berkeley Master of Fine Arts Graduate Exhibition
May 18–June 10, 2012Be among the first to encounter the work of seven exceptional artists as they embark on their careers in the Forty-Second Annual University of California, Berkeley Master of Fine Arts Graduate Exhibition.
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State of Mind: New California Art circa 1970
February 29–June 17, 2012Have you ever heard the sound of ice melting? State of Mind: New California Art circa 1970, part of Pacific Standard Time, offers an in-depth exploration of Conceptual art made by both Northern and Southern California artists during a pivotal period in contemporary art.
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Tables of Content: Ray Johnson and Robert Warner Bob Box Archive / MATRIX 241
January 27–May 20, 2012The collagist Robert Warner has arranged the contents of thirteen boxes given to him by reclusive artist Ray Johnson (the "Bob Boxes") on tables and on the gallery walls. The collages, letters, drawings, beach trash and other found objects reveal Johnson's stream-of-consciousness flow through the matter and memory of everyday life. “Once you get into Johnson art, it's very hard to leave . . . take that immersive trip with a highly knowledgeable and profoundly committed guide” (Holland Cotter, New York Times).
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Andy Warhol: Polaroids / MATRIX 240
January 27–May 20, 2012Meet celebrities and other fabulous people in this diverse selection of portraits taken by Warhol in the 1970s and 1980s with his favorite camera, the Polaroid Big Shot. A generous gift from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, these images reveal a little-known but seminal aspect of Warhol's practice.
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Abstract Expressionisms: Paintings and Drawings from the Collection
January 18–June 10, 2012Come spend some time with the work of seminal Abstract Expressionists this spring at BAMPFA. Forceful paintings by Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Hans Hofmann, William Baziotes, Asger Jorn, Philip Guston, and others hang in light-filled Gallery A, while Gallery C displays rarely seen works on paper by artists including Sam Francis, Mark Tobey, Antonio Saura, and Norman Bluhm.
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The Reading Room
January 15, 2012–December 21, 2014Come hang out in The Reading Room, a temporary project dedicated to poetry and experimental fiction. On selected Fridays, The Reading Room becomes the site of readings by poets and writers.
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Sun Works
November 9–May 6, 2012The sun's power to illuminate, yet also to scar, makes itself known in the works of Sarah Charlesworth and Chris McCaw on view in Sun Works. Part of a larger series that explores how current events are represented photographically in the media, Charlesworth's Arc of Total Eclipse (1979) tracks a solar eclipse across the front pages of multiple newspapers. Like Charlesworth, McCaw is also interested in questioning the role of the photograph as a simple representation of reality. For Sunburned GSP #488 (2011), he used a handmade view-camera to capture the path of the sun on a paper negative, creating an ambiguous, ethereal image.
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Richard Misrach: Photographs from the Collection
October 12–February 5, 2012In conjunction with 1991: Oakland–Berkeley Fire Aftermath, Photographs by Richard Misrach, we are pleased to present works by Richard Misrach from the BAMPFA collection. In addition to the entire Graecism portfolio (1979–82), Richard Misrach: Photographs from the Collection also includes samplings from the artist's acclaimed series Golden Gate (2000), Desert Cantos (1987–97), and Bravo 20 Bombing Range (1986).
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1991: The Oakland-Berkeley Fire Aftermath Photographs by Richard Misrach
October 12–February 5, 2012In October 1991, immediately following a catastrophic firestorm that struck the Oakland and Berkeley hills, renowned Bay Area photographer Richard Misrach ventured into the fire zone armed with his eight-by-ten-inch view camera, recording both stark vistas and intimate details of destroyed homes. To commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the fire, BAMPFA and the Oakland Museum of California each present forty photographs from the series, including fourteen large-format images whose immense scale invites the viewer to enter into Misrach's quiet elegies.
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Silke Otto-Knapp: A light in the moon / MATRIX 239
September 30, 2011–January 15, 2012With layered washes of similarly hued watercolors, the canvases of London-based German artist Silke Otto-Knapp seem at first monochromatic, but slight changes in light or a viewer's position reveal figures or landscapes. Conflating the mediums of painting and performance, Otto-Knapp draws from the vocabulary of abstraction to renew our engagement in the act of seeing.
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Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage
August 3–November 27, 2011The first major museum presentation of Schwitters's work to appear in the United States in more than twenty-five years, Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage examines one of the most daring and innovative figures of the international avant-garde. Including assemblages, collages, sculpture, and a reconstruction of his room-size sculptural installation Merzbau, the exhibition places particular emphasis on the significance of color and light in the artist's work and explores the relationship between his collage and painting.
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Fernando Botero: The Abu Ghraib Series
August 3–September 23, 2011Internationally acclaimed artist Fernando Botero created an intense torrent of drawings and paintings responding to abuses at Abu Ghraib prison. In 2009, the artist donated fifty-six works from this series to BAMPFA, an extraordinary gift made in recognition of Berkeley's historic role in the arena of free speech.
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Rome, Naples, Venice: Italian Masterworks from the BAMPFA Collection
July 6–December 18, 2011In celebration of the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Italian unification, we present Rome, Naples, Venice: Italian Masterworks from the BAMPFA Collection. This exhibition brings together striking works by Mannerist and Baroque artists, including Caravaggio, Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, Giambattista Tiepolo, and Il Cavaliere d'Arpino, that reflect a vibrant range of artistic innovation from three of Italy's great cities.
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Desirée Holman: Heterotopias / MATRIX 238
June 26–September 18, 2011Heterotopias, which combines live action with digital animation, is one of a trilogy of videos in which Desirée Holman imagines and interrogates the human tendency to engage in fictional narratives. Holman constructs a Möbius-like relation between real and virtual, self and avatar, action and play, fantasy and fiction.
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Thomson & Craighead: Flipped Clock
Online only
June 1–August 31, 2011Flipped Clock, by the British artist duo Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead, is an online digital clock display that is inverted vertically. Flipped Clock takes an image created to be a display (a clock face) and puts it on display. Inverting the numbers underscores this quotation and asks us to consider the artifice behind this taskmaster of modern life.
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Inarguably Uncertain: The 41st Annual University of California, Berkeley Master of Fine Arts Graduate Exhibition
May 20–June 26, 2011Come see the newest talents to arrive on the art-world stage in the Forty-First Annual M.F.A. exhibition. The M.F.A. exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive offers UC Berkeley M.F.A. graduates in art practice the opportunity to present their work in the museum galleries and, in the process, gain valuable experience working in a professional museum setting. This year's artists include Corinna Nicole Brewer, Chun-Shan (Sandie) Yi, Narangkar Glover, Plinio Alberto Hernandez, Merav Tzur, Chris E. Vargas, and David Gregory Wallace.
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Create
May 11–September 25, 2011Create is a major survey exhibition that brings together work made at three pioneering centers for artists with developmental disabilities: Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland, San Francisco's Creativity Explored, and NIAD Art Center in Richmond. Showcasing twenty artists, who work in a variety of media and styles, Create celebrates the thirty years of phenomenal achievement that has been nourished in these small but influential artistic communities.
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Jill Magid: Closet Drama / MATRIX 237
March 20–June 12, 2011Jill Magid's recent work explores the intersection of governmental power and current events. For MATRIX, Magid considers a shooting at the Texas State Capitol by Fausto Cardenas in relation to Goethe's Faust, finding in the obvious but ultimately fruitful association similar tragic themes. By turning the gallery into a stage for the reading of Faust, a “closet drama,” the piece engages the larger themes of truth and fiction, language and translation, history and legend, gesture and performance, revelation and redaction, individual and institution.
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Shelley Jackson: Skin
March 1–May 31, 2011Shelley Jackson's Skin-equal parts conceptual art, performance art, literature, and Internet art-literalizes many of the tropes of Web-based art, such as decentralized authorship and the networked (common) body. In 2003, Jackson posted a 2,095-word short story on the Internet and invited readers to tattoo one word from the story on their bodies. The participants, known as “words,” gradually publish the story in the world, blurring the boundaries between online and offline.
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Abstract Now and Then
February 16–April 17, 2011This exhibition in two parts draws on BAMPFA's rich permanent collection to present an overview of abstraction from the 1940s to 2010, including Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, and Conceptualism, as well as works that exemplify how a new generation of artists is extending, reinterpreting, and challenging the legacy of these pivotal movements.
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Futurefarmers: A Variation on the Powers of Ten / MATRIX 236
February 6–April 17, 2011San Francisco-based collective Futurefarmers is spending the academic year in residency at the University exploring the production and the limits of knowledge. As a framework for this research, Futurefarmers is drawing on the iconic 1977 film Powers of Ten by Charles and Ray Eames and its central image of a picnic on a blanket. Research events will be documented and made available through the project website and related publication, and will also serve as fodder for a series of public programs at BAMPFA.
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Indeterminate Stillness: Looking at Whistler
January 26–April 10, 2011This exhibition, celebrating Sharon and Barclay Simpson's gift to BAMPFA of sixty-two prints by James McNeill Whistler, looks at how Whistler subordinated Realism to the Modernist concerns of design, color, and tonal variation.
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Eva Hesse: Studiowork
January 26–April 10, 2011Like other artists of the 1960s, sculptor Eva Hesse (1936-1970) pushed the conceptual and technical limits of art. Organized by The Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh, this exhibition presents rarely seen small-scale works, many from BAMPFA's own collection, that illuminate Hesse's studio practice and capture moments of experimentation.
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Echoes of the Past: Qing Dynasty Chinese Painting
January 5–June 26, 2011This selection of new acquisitions highlights the ink painters of the Ming and Qing dynasties whose work was inspired by the artists of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
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Emily Roysdon: If I Don't Move Can You Hear Me? / MATRIX 235
December 12, 2010–March 6, 2011Artist and writer Emily Roysdon's work explores the intersection of social, political, and aesthetic space. Roysdon's MATRIX project, produced largely on-site in Berkeley, consists of photographic work that engages with the limits, framing, and representation of movement(s), both bodily movement and social/political movements. As part of her collaborative practice, Roysdon has invited other writers to consider the project's vocabulary of use, regulation, structure, and frame in a publication that accompanies the exhibition.
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Vuk Ćosić: ASCII History of Moving Images
December 1, 2010–February 28, 2011Vuk Ćosić created the ASCII History of Moving Images in 1998, just five years after the World Wide Web was introduced to the general public. Rendered online in the visual lingo of early computers, a black screen with green letters and numbers (ASCII characters), the piece presents clips that recall points when film, television, and video were finding their voices as the new media of their day. Online only: netart.bampfa.berkeley.edu.
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Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945–2000 The Timeline
October 6, 2010–April 3, 2011With the publication of Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945–2000, BAMPFA presents the first comprehensive overview of Bay Area avant-garde film and video. The book is accompanied by an exhibition featuring posters, flyers, and rare ephemera; a film and video series bringing artists to Berkeley to screen their work at the PFA Theater; and a series of special Radical L@TE programs.
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Marjolijn Dijkman: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum / MATRIX 234
September 26–November 28, 2010Marjolijn Dijkman's exhibition title refers to the first modern atlas, the “Theater of the World,” published in 1570. For Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, an ongoing photographic project initiated in 2005, Dijkman has archived and organized over 9,000 images in order to rethink existing representations of the world. The project includes an accompanying website and a freely distributed newspaper.
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Jeff Crouse: Unlogo
September 1–November 30, 2010With an iPhone app and a website, this online exhibition enables individuals to use a phone to identify logos occurring in cellular photographs and to replace them with images drawn from an online databank. Anyone can view and contribute to the databank, suggesting and uploading images that may be substituted for a particular logo, hence undoing the original logo-Unlogo.Online only: netart.bampfa.berkeley.edu.
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Flowers of the Four Seasons: Ten Centuries of Art from the Clark Center for Japanese Art and Culture
August 25–December 12, 2010A dazzling array of Japan's greatest artistic traditions from ancient to modern will be presented in BAMPFA's major fall exhibition, which will feature a selection of more than 100 works of art from one of the most significant collections of Japanese art in America.
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Hauntology
July 14–December 5, 2010Drawn primarily from the museum's recent acquisitions of contemporary art, this exhibition explores a wide range of art through the lens of the concept of “hauntology,” a term coined by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida in 1993 to refer to the study of social, psychological, and cultural conditions in the post-Communist period.
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David Wilson: Gatherings / MATRIX 233
July 7–August 22, 2010Gatherings is the first-ever crossover project between the museum's MATRIX and L@TE programs. Follow the Oakland-based artist David Wilson's progress on site-specific installations in Gallery B while becoming immersed in a series of four Friday-night performances programmed in conjunction with his work.
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Himalayan Pilgrimage: Journey to the Land of Snows
June 16, 2010–June 8, 2012Explore the journey of Buddhism across several centuries and from India into Tibet through exceptionally beautiful objects of sculpture and painting dating from the ninth to the eighteenth centuries.
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Marisa Olson: Double Bind
June 1–August 31, 2010With a pair of provocative YouTube videos, Olson unravels the promise and pitfalls of online participatory culture.
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No Right Angles: The 40th Annual University of California, Berkeley Master of Fine Arts Graduate Exhibition
May 21–June 20, 2010This year's M.F.A. exhibition introduces seven local artists-Miguel Arzabe, Bonnie Begusch, Amanda Eicher, Matt Mullins, Aliza Rand, aZin seraj, and Rebecca Suss-who challenge preconceptions about both the media and the motivations of art.
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Brent Green: Perpetual and furious refrain / MATRIX 232
May 2–September 12, 2010Brent Green is a maker of moving things-animated films, kinetic objects, and other eccentric inventions. His MATRIX exhibition coincides with the release of his first feature film, Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then, a fable of love, loss, and compulsive construction.
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What's It All Mean: William T. Wiley in Retrospect
March 17–July 18, 2010This retrospective surveys the witty, idiosyncratic, and introspective work of William T. Wiley, a beloved Bay Area artist and “a national treasure” (Wall Street Journal). Layered with ambiguous ideas and allusions, autobiographical narrative and sociopolitical commentary, Wiley's art is rich in self-deprecating humor and absurdist insight.
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Realm of Enlightenment: Masters and Teachers from the Land of Snows
March 3–August 1, 2010This installation of extraordinary objects from Tibet explores the role of the teacher and master in the transmission of the Buddhist canon.
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Assignment Shanghai: Photographs on the Eve of Revolution
March 3–May 23, 2010In 1946, Life magazine assigned the young photographer Jack Birns to Shanghai with instructions to document the ongoing Chinese civil war. This selection of the resulting photographs, drawn from the BAM collection, vividly captures a cosmopolitan city in the midst of social and political change.
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James Buckhouse: Serg Riva
March 1–May 31, 2010Welcome to the world of Serg Riva, self-declared “aquatic couturier, enfant terrible, and man about town”-and sly fictive creation of artist James Buckhouse.
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Nature into Action: Hans Hofmann
February 3, 2010–July 3, 2011Drawn from BAMPFA's extensive Hans Hofmann collection, this installation reveals the relationship between nature as source and action as method in the great abstract painter's work.
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James Castle: A Retrospective
February 3–April 25, 2010Born deaf and raised in rural Idaho, James Castle was an artist of remarkable range, subtlety, and graphic skill. This retrospective of Castle's drawings, books, and paper constructions is an “exhilarating . . . opportunity to fully consider one of America's most idiosyncratic self-taught artists” (Artforum).
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Thom Faulders: BAMscape
January 29, 2010–April 15, 2012How often do you get a chance to sit, lounge, or study on a work of art? BAMscape invites you to interact with art-and with the museum-in unexpected ways.
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Ahmet Öğüt: Exploded City / MATRIX 231
January 24–April 11, 2010An imaginary metropolis constructed from models of buildings and vehicles that have figured in acts of violence and terrorism worldwide, Ahmet Öğüt's Exploded City engages the poetics and politics of space, architecture, and international relations.
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Joe McKay: Big Time
December 1, 2009–February 28, 2010This new Internet artwork and iPhone app takes a tongue-in-cheek approach to the notion of “personal time.”
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French Film Posters from the BAMPFA Collection
November 25, 2009–September 12, 2010An exhibition in the museum's Theater Gallery celebrates the art of the French film poster.
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New Pathways to Ancient Traditions: Recent Acquisitions to the Asian Art Collection
October 30, 2009–February 14, 2010A new exhibition unveils major gifts to the BAM collection, including subtly beautiful Chinese ceramics and fascinating, intricately sculpted seals.
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Omer Fast: Nostalgia / MATRIX 230
October 25–December 17, 2009Omer Fast's video works conflate factual and fictional narratives at the intersection of memory, history, and media. In his project for MATRIX, an interview with a Nigerian refugee is reimagined as science fiction.
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Fernando Botero: The Abu Ghraib Series
September 23, 2009–February 7, 2010Internationally acclaimed artist Fernando Botero offers a powerful critique of the prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib in a series of paintings and drawings recently donated to the Berkeley Art Museum.
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Ari Marcopoulos: Within Arm's Reach
September 23, 2009–February 7, 2010Recording New York's downtown art world or the emerging hip-hop scene, shooting snowboarders hurtling down a vertical mountain face or chronicling the vicissitudes of his own family life, photographer Ari Marcopoulos unerringly captures the zeitgeist. This midcareer retrospective surveys the intimate and compelling work of a key documentarian of contemporary culture.
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Angelo Plessas
September 1–November 30, 2009The first presentation of the new BAMPFA NetArt portal features whimsical and meditative works that offer a nuanced critique of social spectacle.
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Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Earth
August 26, 2009–February 7, 2010Conceptual art takes on elemental themes in this exhibition of works by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, drawn from the artist's archive at BAMPFA.
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Material Witness
July 22–December 20, 2009Artists from Francisco Goya to Carrie Mae Weems bear witness to social issues and consider cultural memory in a new selection of works from the Berkeley Art Museum collection.
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Deborah Grant: Bacon, Egg, Toast in Lard / MATRIX 228
May 31–October 11, 2009Deborah Grant's paintings are densely layered with marks and meanings drawn from popular media, history, and personal experience. The centerpiece of her MATRIX exhibition views contemporary concerns-race, sexuality, violence-through the surprising prism of an imagined meeting between painter Francis Bacon and comedienne Jackie “Moms” Mabley.
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What We Can Live With: The 39th Annual University of California, Berkeley Master of Fine Arts Graduate Exhibition
May 15–June 21, 2009This year's M.F.A. exhibition introduces six promising local artists: Sara Bright, Lydia Greer, Laura Britt Greig, Farley Gwazda, Aaron Maietta, and Ginger Wolfe-Suárez.
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Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet
April 1–September 27, 2009Can art inspire conservation? Can conservation inspire art? Human/Nature explores these questions and investigates the relationships between fragile natural environments and the human communities that depend upon them. The exhibition presents new works by Mark Dion, Ann Hamilton, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Marcos Ramírez ERRE, Rigo 23, Dario Robleto, Diana Thater, and Xu Bing.
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Taking Refuge: Buddhist Art from the Land of White Clouds
February 25–May 3, 2009A selection of rare and beautiful objects from Tibet, Nepal, and northern India represents the rich history of Buddhist art in the Himalayas.
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Galaxy: A Hundred or So Stars Visible to the Naked Eye
February 25–August 30, 2009Galaxy creates a new constellation of works from the Berkeley Art Museum's eclectic collection, including pieces by major stars from Dürer and Rembrandt to Pollock and Warhol as well as many less familiar lights.
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Mario García Torres: Je ne sais si c'en est la cause, What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Stronger, and Some Reference Materials / MATRIX 227
February 22–May 17, 2009By investigating and reconstructing ephemeral histories of conceptual art, Mario García Torres considers the functions of time and distance in our constructions of the past. The works in this exhibition excavate two such histories: Martin Kippenberger's attempt to establish a modern art museum on a Greek island, and Daniel Buren's murals at a now-derelict resort hotel.
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Gas Zappers
October 22, 2008–February 8, 2009“A fierce, funny and inventive political satirist” (N.Y. Times), Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung offers an interactive online game that tackles global warming with political savvy and wry humor.
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Bending the Word / MATRIX 226
September 28, 2008–February 8, 2009This exhibition brings together four artists-Martha Colburn, Patricia Esquivias, Olivia Plender, and Tris Vonna-Michell-whose work mingles fact and fiction, history and anecdote, reshaping our views of the world through storytelling.
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Mahjong: Contemporary Chinese Art from the Sigg Collection
September 10, 2008–January 4, 2009This landmark exhibition, complemented by a broad array of public programs, offers a unique window onto four decades of extraordinary transformation in Chinese art, culture, and society.
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The Graphic Arts Loan Collection at UC Berkeley: 50 Years
June 14–August 3, 2008For half a century, the Morrison Library's unique graphic arts loan program has been bringing original art to students. We celebrate the program's anniversary with prints by masters from Rembrandt to Matisse, once in the loan collection and now held by BAMPFA.
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Bruce Conner: Mabuhay Gardens
June 4–August 3, 2008Bruce Conner's photographs from a legendary San Francisco nightclub document the demimonde of three-chord chaos that was the seventies punk scene, when acts like the Avengers, Negative Trend, and the Mutants were in their anarchic heyday. In his images, Conner captured both the outcry and the surrounding silence.
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Trevor Paglen: The Other Night Sky / MATRIX 225
June 1–September 14, 2008Trained as both an artist and a geographer, Trevor Paglen uses an array of tactics to map the “black world” of U.S. military and intelligence activities. His MATRIX project scans the heavens for signs of covert activity, visualizing “the other night sky.”
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Scott Snibbe: Falling Girl
June 1–August 31, 2008Media artist Scott Snibbe animates BAMPFA's Durant Avenue entrance, making it the backdrop for a silent, dreamlike narrative of mortality, empathy, and whimsy.
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Jim Campbell: Home Movies
May 31–August 3, 2008Jim Campbell's work manifests a poetics of the digital, upsetting common assumptions about the relationship between technology and humanity, “information” and thought. His LED installation Home Movies “brings us emotionally close, without sentimentality, to the unshareable quotient of memories.”-S.F. Chronicle
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These Canyons: The 38th Annual University of California, Berkeley Master of Fine Arts Graduate Exhibition
May 16–June 8, 2008This year's M.F.A. exhibition introduces seven promising emerging artists: Adrianne Crane, Renée Delores, Rosalynn Khor, Indira Martina Morre, Emily Prince, Wenhua Shi, and Sunaura Taylor.
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Hans Hofmann
May 3–August 3, 2008A cornerstone of the Berkeley Art Museum collection is an extraordinary group of paintings by Hans Hofmann (1880–1966), the world's most extensive museum collection of this German-born artist's work. The exhibition on view draws on this collection to span nearly thirty years of Hofmann's practice, from the figurative works of the 1930s to the explosive abstraction of the postwar period.
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Protest in Paris 1968: Photographs by Serge Hambourg
March 12–June 1, 2008In May 1968 in Paris, student and worker strikes against the conservative government of General Charles de Gaulle brought the country to a standstill. Images by French photographer Serge Hambourg provide a striking eyewitness account of this pivotal moment in political and cultural history.
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Held Rectangles
March 12–August 3, 2008Conceptual works by John C. Fernie and Lawrence Weiner from the BAMPFA collection foreground the frame.
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MATRIX/REDUX
March 9–July 6, 2008Over the past thirty years, BAMPFA's acclaimed MATRIX Program has charted a unique course through the landscape of contemporary art. This anniversary exhibition samples from the program's history with special loans and works from the museum collection, including new acquisitions such as Kiki Smith's Crèche.
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James Lee Byars: The Perfect Audience
February 13–August 3, 2008The art of James Lee Byars could be as grand as a global gesture or as intimate and fleeting as a kiss. A new exhibition brings together the delicate and monumental sides of the artist's work with artist's books, mail art, performance documentation, and other ephemera from BAMFA's Conceptual Art Study Center.
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Enrique Chagoya: Borderlandia
February 13–May 18, 2008Mickey Mouse meets Aztec gods and Francisco Goya meets Jerry Falwell in the first major museum retrospective of the work of Mexico-born, San Francisco–based artist Enrique Chagoya. Chagoya draws on the European canon, Mexican folk arts, and U.S. pop icons to create paintings, drawings, and prints that are politically charged, formally sophisticated, and often scathingly funny.
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Tomás Saraceno: Microscale, Macroscale, and Beyond: Large-Scale Implications of Small-Scale Experiments / MATRIX 224
November 18, 2007–February 17, 2008Tomás Saraceno looks to the sky and sees possibilities for rethinking how we live in relation to one another. His artworks express at small scale his large-scale vision of a future in which cities take to the air, creating environments in a state of continuous physical and social transformation.
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Goya: The Disasters of War
November 1, 2007–March 2, 2008Francisco Goya's famed prints bear witness to the atrocities of the guerrilla war in early-19th-century Spain. Depicting the violence with a mixture of imagination and brutal realism, they are startlingly relevant today.
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RIP.MIX.BURN.BAM.PFA
October 24, 2007–March 2, 2008Celebrating the cultural and artistic practice of the remix, digital artworks by Ken Goldberg and Valéry Grancher from the BAMPFA collection become open-source ingredients for new creations by Michael Joaquin Grey, The Studio for Urban Projects, Jonathon Keats, and Nathaniel Wojtalik and Iris Piers.
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Joan Jonas: The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things
October 13, 2007–July 20, 2008In this recent installation, pioneering video artist Joan Jonas mines the cultural terrain of the American Southwest, as well as more personal territories. Jonas's work is “at once mysterious and transparent, strange yet familiar in an almost universal sense. She is like a magician who dazzles us while revealing the secret to every trick.”-N.Y. Times
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Their Own World: Chinese Paintings of the Ming and Qing Dynasties
October 10–December 23, 2007A small selection of landscapes provides important cornerstones for understanding painting in the turbulent environment of mid-17th-century China.
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One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now
September 19–December 23, 2007Bringing together a multiplicity of media and methods and representing widely divergent points of view, this major exhibition presents works by seventeen young artists who challenge and extend the category of “Asian American art.” “The works in (the exhibition) are pleasantly uncategorizable. . . . And by virtue of being so conceptually diverse, so defiantly without formula, they reveal a maturation, or at least an evolution, in the way that these creators view the very ideas of Asianness, Americanness, and art itself.”-S.F. Chronicle
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Rosalind Nashashibi: Bachelor Machines Part I / MATRIX 223
August 26–November 4, 2007British artist Rosalind Nashashibi makes quiet, deliberate films that luxuriate in incidental details of the everyday. Bachelor Machines Part I, her film installation in the MATRIX Gallery, chronicles the voyage of a cargo vessel from Italy to Sweden. In observing life on board, the film obliquely reveals neglected aspects of global commerce.
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David Goldblatt: Intersections
July 8–August 26, 2007Acclaimed South African photographer David Goldblatt has spent the past five decades documenting his native country and its people. For his Intersections project, Goldblatt traversed the country observing the crosscurrents of "ideas, values, ethics, postures, people, and things" since the end of apartheid. The resulting photographs sharply capture the political and physical geographies of South Africa in the twenty-first century.
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Abbas Kiarostami: Image Maker
July 8–September 23, 2007Celebrated as one of the world's great contemporary filmmakers, Abbas Kiarostami is also an accomplished still photographer. In conjunction with a retrospective of this Iranian master's films at the PFA Theater, a selection of his poetic photographs, including the new series Rain and Trees and Crows, is on view in the BAMPFA galleries.
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Parting the Curtain: Asian Art Revealed
June 27, 2007–July 20, 2008A showcase for the museum's extraordinary holdings of Asian art, including ancient pottery, classical Chinese paintings, religious art from Tibet, and provocative works by contemporary artists.
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Andrea Zittel: A-Z Travel Trailer Unit
June 6–October 14, 2007The exhibition of Andrea Zittel's A-Z Travel Trailer Unit has been delayed while it undergoes extensive conservation treatment. We apologize for any inconvenience.Andrea Zittel creates personalized designs for living, useful artworks that make no distinction between the conceptual and the utilitarian. Her faintly retro travel habitat brings a touch of the trailer park to the museum's sculpture garden.
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fer·ma·ta: The 37th Annual University of California, Berkeley Master of Fine Arts Graduate Exhibition
May 18–June 10, 2007This year's M.F.A. exhibition introduces seven promising new artists: Lindsay Benedict, Ali Dadgar, Kara Hearn, Bill Jenkins, Alicia McCarthy, Joe McKay, and Jenifer K. Wofford.
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Allison Smith: Notion Nanny / MATRIX 222
May 13–August 12, 2007Allison Smith has some interesting notions about the meanings of history and craft in contemporary life. In her latest project, inspired by nineteenth-century peddler dolls called “notion nannies,” she casts herself as an itinerant apprentice, working with other craftspeople to exchange ideas, skills, objects, and experiences along the way.
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Scott Burton: Table and Tableau
May 5–June 17, 2007In the late 1970s and '80s, Scott Burton made a series of works exploring subtle behavioral cues and social relations through tableaux vivants, enacted "living pictures." A suite of these works, including a recorded performance and related sculptures, extends Measure of Time's consideration of time-based art.
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psyche: R&R
April 18–October 14, 2007BAMPFA honors the centennial of the California College of the Arts with this exhibition of lyrical watercolors by Laurie Reid and funny, architecture-inflected drawings by Mark A. Rodriguez, both M.F.A. graduates of CCA.
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Kunstkammer
April 18–October 14, 2007An eccentric array of prints, drawings, and photographs from the BAMPFAcollections fills the Theater Gallery, with works by Dürer, Whistler, Gauguin, Basquiat, and many others hung together in the style of a sixteenth-century Kunstkammer-an "art chamber" offering objects of scholarship and wonder.
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Honoring a Tradition, Honoring a Teacher: A Tribute to James Cahill
February 14–May 27, 2007Professor Emeritus James Cahill made many contributions to the UC community during his 30-year tenure, none more lasting than the stellar collection of Chinese and Japanese paintings that are the core of the Asian art collection at BAMPFA. This exhibition presents highlights from that collection and pays tribute to a scholar whose passion for Chinese art is inspiring and infectious.
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A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s
January 17–April 15, 2007“Bruce Nauman is a national treasure, the most American of American artists, and one of the most celebrated, both at home and abroad.”-Vanity Fair. A Rose Has No Teeth is the first exhibition to explore in depth Nauman's relationship to the place where he created his earliest and often most strikingly innovative works.
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Grapefruit
October 18, 2006–April 1, 2007In the spirit of imagination, BAMPFA presents a selection of "instruction paintings" from Yoko Ono's groundbreaking publication Grapefruit, which John Lennon cited as a powerful influence in the writing of his song "Imagine." Gracefully expressive, enchanting, and original, Ono's instructions allow you to take the art home in the form of a do-it-yourself idea-along with a free IMAGINE PEACE button, a gift from Ono to museum visitors.
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As Is When and Universal Electronic Vacuum: Silkscreen Prints by Eduardo Paolozzi
October 4, 2006–April 1, 2007Prints by Paolozzi-one of the founders of the Independent Group, a precursor to the British Pop Art movement-incorporate a dazzling array of influences, from Ludwig Wittgenstein to Frederick's of Hollywood.
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Selections from the Collection
March 1, 2006–May 4, 2008This ongoing, evolving exhibition features a range of BAMPFA's signature works, from the 16th century to the 21st, as well as important new acquisitions.
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Measure of Time
February 22, 2006–June 24, 2007Time is of the essence in American art of the past century. Measure of Time showcases the museum's important 20th-century collection along with some significant loans to explore, over time, how artists have worked with temporality and duration. In two galleries of paintings, sculptures, and media (both analog and digital), time and motion are compressed, fragmented, mechanized, sped up, and slowed down to an almost imperceptible pace.
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Haim Steinbach / MATRIX 217
Work In Progress: Objects for People-Snapshots
July 10–September 4, 2005 View -
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Ragamala Paintings
From the Jean and Francis Marshall Collection
September 20, 2004–March 13, 2005 View -
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Within Small See Large
Rocks in Chinese Painting and Woodblock Printing
July 2–October 24, 2004 View -
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Time's Shadow
Photographs trom the Jan Leonard and Jerrold Peil Collection
February 5–August 8, 2004 View -
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The Black Panthers 1968
Photographs by Ruth-Marion Baruch and Pirkle Jones
March 26–September 21, 2003 View -
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A Brush With Truth
Japanese Buddhist Ink Paintings of the 17th and 18th Centuries
December 11, 2002–June 22, 2003 View -
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Dean Smith / MATRIX 201b
Minimatrix: Black Hole Sun #3 (X-Ray Vision)
October 20–November 17, 2002 View -
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Ansel Adams in the University of California Collections
A Photographer at Work
December 12, 2001–March 10, 2002 View -
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Fast Forward
An Exhibition Highlighting Our Growing Collection
October 17, 2001–February 24, 2002 View -
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The Lady at the Window
Qing Dynasty Figure Painting in the Qing Dynasty
September 12, 2001–February 28, 2002 View -
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Ernesto Neto / MATRIX 190
A Maximum Minimum Time Space Between Us and the Parsimonious Universe
February 18–April 15, 2001 View -
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Videospace
The National Center for Experiments in Television, 1967-1975
September 14–November 15, 2000 View -
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Equal Partners
Men and Women Principals in Contemporary Architectural Practice
December 15, 1999–March 19, 2000 View -
Roma/ Pacifica
The Phoebe Hearst International Architectural Competition and the Berkeley Campus, 1896-1930
December 8, 1999–April 23, 2000 View -
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Elisabeth Sunday
Mystics and Healers Holy People and Their Messages
October 14, 1999–January 9, 2000 View -
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The New Child
British Art and the Origins of Modern Childhood, 1730-1830
August 23–November 19, 1995 View -
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In a Different Light
January 11–April 9, 1995In a Different Light,co-curated by Nayland Blake and Lawrence Rinder, explores the resonance of gay and lesbian experience in twentieth-century American art. Remarkably, these artists, living in a generally hostile social climate-amidst the constant threat of "gay-bashings," proscriptive legislative initiatives, and surrounded by the tragedy of AIDS-not only persist in making art, but do so in a spirit of humor, generosity, and flamboyance.
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