Catch 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.
ViewSince 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.
ViewBeginning 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.
ViewIn 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.
ViewFor 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.
ViewA 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.
View10 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.
ViewYee 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.
ViewIn 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.
ViewSin 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.
ViewPlayfully 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.
ViewFor 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.
ViewGriselda 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.
ViewFor 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.
ViewFor 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.
ViewWhat 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.
ViewFor 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.
ViewCal 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.
ViewThis 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.
ViewThis selection of photographs and two video installations centers the continent of Africa as a site of extraction, exploitation, and displacement for economic gain.
ViewEndless 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.
ViewAmalia 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.
ViewThis 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.
ViewThis 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.
ViewEndless 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.
ViewIn 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.
ViewThe 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.
ViewUndoing 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.
ViewHannah 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.
ViewAn 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.
ViewBest 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.
ViewThis 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.
ViewBAMPFA 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.
ViewBAMPFA 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.
ViewThis 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.
Curated 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.
ViewThis 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.
This 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.
ViewGestural 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
ViewScreening 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.
ViewFeaturing more than 150 works, most made since the year 2000, this major survey presents a kaleidoscopic view of feminist practices in contemporary art.
ViewSix 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.
Developed 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.
ViewBAMPFA presents works by this year’s MFA graduates from the Department of Art Practice at Cal.
This 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.
View
After a pandemic-related postponement, we showcase works by 2020 graduates from the MFA program at Cal.
ViewIn 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.
ViewCal 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.
View
Northern 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.
An 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.
ViewOn 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.
ViewExploring 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.
ViewA 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.
ViewThe 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.
View
Ron Nagle’s small sculptures combine modernism, pop culture, and sensory pleasure in compact, perfect packages.
ViewLegendary 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.
ViewCal 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.
ViewEdie Fake’s mural envisions affordable housing for transgender elders, using architecture to celebrate the uniqueness of trans bodies and the possibilities of queer space.
ViewThis career-spanning centenary tribute of Sylvia Fein showcases a wide array of works drawing on both the personal and the fantastical.
ViewA 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.
ViewPhotographs by an affecting social documentarian and explorer of what he calls “a world contained in a frame.”
ViewTwo 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.
ViewThe 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.
ViewPart 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.
ViewFollowing 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.
ViewPhotographs 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.”
ViewThe 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.
ViewThis exhibition brings together two Bay Area artists whose work embraces the simple act of seeing as an inspiration to deep reflection and understanding.
ViewArt 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.
ViewBAMPFA showcases work by the latest graduates from the MFA program at Cal.
ViewCal 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.
ViewThis presentation of work by Fernando Botero and others asks how art can urge accountability for human rights in ways that the law cannot.
ViewExplore 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.
ViewCelebrating 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.
ViewThis new commission draws on multiple histories of Mexican muralism, graffiti, and political protest, while reinforcing the importance of social engagement in the present moment.
ViewSpanning 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.
ViewIn these multicolored transformations of computer-generated forms, the artist makes connections between art, science, design, and visual poetry.
ViewA magical installation inspired by Shinto beliefs and the shape-shifting beings of Japanese folklore.
ViewThe exuberance, romance, and beauty of dance are central themes in this wide-ranging selection of works.
ViewAn exceptional selection of scroll paintings, screens, woodblock prints, lacquerware, and ceramics demonstrating the breadth and beauty of Japanese art.
ViewA 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.
ViewDiscover 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.
ViewThis 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.
ViewFeaturing 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.
ViewA 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.
ViewBAMPFA’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.
ViewA 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.
ViewThe pioneer of the 1960s design phenomenon Supergraphics creates a new piece for BAMPFA’s Art Wall.
ViewThis first survey of Vicuña’s work stages a conversation about discarded and displaced people, places, and things in a time of global climate change.
ViewLeonard’s photographs are rare, intimate documents of life in Oakland in the 1960s and 1970s.
ViewThe first retrospective of an enormously influential artist whose photographs capture the creative subcultures of downtown New York in the 1970s and 1980s.
ViewRecent additions to the BAMPFA collection feature unusual approaches to color and form—plus a unicorn.
ViewNew work by two artists who got their start in San Francisco in the 1990s and have maintained a strong artistic dialogue ever since.
ViewWorks dating from the second century through the twentieth reveal how Buddhist power was visually expressed and transmitted throughout Asia.
ViewThis annual showcase celebrates the diverse and exceptional work of new graduates from the MFA program at Cal.
ViewAl Wong’s photocollage portraits of the sister he never met form a meditation on displacement and the collision between personal and geopolitical histories.
ViewCreated 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.
ViewThis selection of historical works explores how physical violence and suffering have been represented in art, from the promise of transcendence to political critique.
ViewRecent paintings, sculptures, and drawings that offer both a reflection on our cultural moment and a commitment to the material properties of the art object
ViewView artworks and ephemera from the Cha archive at BAMPFA in dialogue with her best-known work, the artist's book Dictee.
View
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.
ViewMoletsane’s vibrant, large-scale portraits for the Art Wall draw on both traditional African visual culture and Afrofuturism.
ViewI 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.
ViewDe Jesus's memorial portraits honor artists, writers, and diverse cultural figures, testifying to the fact that each life is valuable and worthy of recognition.
ViewChen 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.
ViewThis collaborative video project captures twenty-four hours in the lives of diverse individuals across the globe.
ViewExquisite examples of Buddhist art from the Himalayan region.
ViewDiscover the singular vision of a Berkeley-born artist whose paintings explore both exterior and interior landscapes.
ViewThis investigation of the editorial process behind Parks's photo-essay "Harlem Gang Leader" reveals unspoken conflicts between photographer, editor, subject, and truth.
ViewThis retrospective surveys the career of "one of our great urban visionaries" (New York Times), from Northern California to New York and back.
ViewThis exhibition crosses cultures and centuries to bring together works that activate the expressive and aesthetic potential of letters and words.
ViewTHE 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.
ViewWorks by Fernando Botero, Adrian Piper, and others demonstrate how power is articulated and reinforced through the dehumanized body.
ViewThe exhibition features clowns and rainbows, but it's not just clowning around—Swiss artist Rondinone's work is both exuberant and melancholy.
ViewWorks from the BAMPFA collection reveal the richness and variety of India's painterly traditions.
ViewDiscover the enigmatic work of this pioneering yet underrecognized painter, who bridged figurative, Surrealist, and abstract currents in modern art.
ViewTibetan Buddhist paintings and sculptures vividly evoke the realms of the celestial and the supernatural.
ViewWorks by this year's MFA recipients from UC Berkeley's Department of Art Practice.
ViewPhotographic works made at the remote and idiosyncratic Deep Springs College.
ViewExquisitely composed collages incorporating fragments of found, or "experienced," paper.
ViewA one-man performance by Cliff Hengst, directed by Asher Hartman.
ViewWorks from the collection examining the history of US human rights.
ViewLarge-scale photographs of women from the African diaspora, presented in a way that challenges traditional assumptions about artistic technique and individual identity.
ViewThe artist continues his exploration of language as medium in this newly commissioned work.
ViewExplore how artists, architects, and designers intersected with the counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s.
ViewCal 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.
ViewNew works by the London-based painter reflect on sexuality and gender stereotypes in Kenya.
ViewTransmission of the Dharma
December 14, 2016–May 7, 2017 ViewWarhol prints from 1964 to 1977 that critique contemporary culture.
ViewThis 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.
ViewFall 2016
Compelling works from Fernando Botero's Abu Ghraib series.
ViewAn endlessly looping computer program by artists Greg Niemeyer, Olya Dubatova, and Brewster Kahle, created for BAMPFA's giant outdoor screen.
ViewFirst-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.
ViewThe work of Pat O'Neill, a pioneer of avant-garde film and optical printing techniques, including films, sculpture, photography, and works on paper.
ViewPush and Pull: Hans Hofmann showcases signature works that manifest Hofmann’s dynamic painterly approach.
ViewA monumental weaving by East Bay artist Terri Friedman, the second work in BAMPFA’s Art Wall series of commissioned temporary works.
ViewPhotographic carte de visite self-portraits by abolitionist, feminist, and orator Sojourner Truth.
ViewPaintings and sculptures from India, Tibet, and Nepal provide a window into a divine Buddhist reality.
ViewPerspectives 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.
ViewRecent acquisitions including work by Sophie Calle, Charles Gaines, Todd Hido, Gordon Matta-Clark, Richard Misrach, Shirin Neshat, Hedda Sterne, Katharina Wulff, and more.
ViewThe 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.
ViewDiscover the work of this year’s MFA graduates of the UC Berkeley Department of Art Practice.
ViewStockholm-based artist Cecilia Edefalk’s engagement with nature comes to the fore in this MATRIX exhibition featuring watercolors, photographs, sculptures, and paintings.
ViewTwo mixed-media performances by Otobong Nkanga that use storytelling to explore the material and natural history of Nigeria and beyond.
ViewThe 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.
ViewInspired 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.
ViewWe 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.
ViewElectroacoustic musician Tarek Atoui uses custom-built electronic instruments and computers to create music as a powerful tool of expression and identity.
ViewMATRIX 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.
ViewJoseph 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.
ViewDiscover 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.
ViewBerkeley-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.
ViewMATRIX 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.
ViewIn 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.
ViewIn 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.
ViewInspired 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.
ViewSelf-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.
ViewIs a museum fun? Truthful? Political? Artist Sam Durant invites you share your thoughts on isamuseum.org and on Twitter using #isamuseum.
ViewWe 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.
ViewFor 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.
ViewElephants 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.
ViewBarbara 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.
ViewCombining 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.
ViewMATRIX 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.
ViewThis 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.
ViewPowerful drawings and paintings from Fernando Botero's Abu Ghraib series commemorate Art for Human Rights.
ViewMultiple 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.
ViewLos 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.
ViewBeauty 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.
ViewThis 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.
ViewMATRIX 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.
ViewWe 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.
ViewJoyful 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.
ViewWe 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.
ViewNow 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.
ViewTaking 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.
ViewWe 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!
ViewMATRIX 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.
ViewAs 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).
ViewMATRIX 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.
ViewFor 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.
ViewMATRIX 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."
ViewA 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.
ViewTrimpin'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.
ViewAs 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.
ViewThis 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.
ViewMATRIX 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.
ViewD-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.
ViewAt 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.
ViewThe 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.
ViewBe 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.
ViewHave 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.
ViewThe 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).
ViewMeet 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.
ViewCome 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.
ViewCome 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.
ViewThe 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.
ViewIn 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).
ViewIn 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.
ViewWith 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.
ViewThe 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.
ViewInternationally 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.
ViewIn 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.
ViewHeterotopias, 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.
ViewOnline 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.
ViewCome 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.
ViewCreate 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.
ViewJill 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.
ViewShelley 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.
ViewThis 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.
ViewSan 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.
ViewThis 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.
ViewLike 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.
ViewThis 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.
ViewArtist 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.
ViewVuk 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.
ViewWith 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.
ViewMarjolijn 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.
ViewWith 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.
ViewA 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.
ViewDrawn 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.
ViewGatherings 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.
ViewExplore 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.
ViewWith a pair of provocative YouTube videos, Olson unravels the promise and pitfalls of online participatory culture.
ViewThis 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.
ViewBrent 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.
ViewThis 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.
ViewThis installation of extraordinary objects from Tibet explores the role of the teacher and master in the transmission of the Buddhist canon.
ViewIn 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.
ViewWelcome to the world of Serg Riva, self-declared “aquatic couturier, enfant terrible, and man about town”-and sly fictive creation of artist James Buckhouse.
ViewDrawn 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.
ViewBorn 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).
ViewHow 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.
ViewAn 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.
ViewThis new Internet artwork and iPhone app takes a tongue-in-cheek approach to the notion of “personal time.”
ViewAn exhibition in the museum's Theater Gallery celebrates the art of the French film poster.
ViewA new exhibition unveils major gifts to the BAM collection, including subtly beautiful Chinese ceramics and fascinating, intricately sculpted seals.
ViewOmer 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.
ViewInternationally 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.
ViewRecording 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.
ViewThe first presentation of the new BAMPFA NetArt portal features whimsical and meditative works that offer a nuanced critique of social spectacle.
ViewConceptual art takes on elemental themes in this exhibition of works by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, drawn from the artist's archive at BAMPFA.
ViewArtists 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.
ViewDeborah 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.
ViewThis 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.
ViewCan 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.
ViewA selection of rare and beautiful objects from Tibet, Nepal, and northern India represents the rich history of Buddhist art in the Himalayas.
ViewGalaxy 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.
ViewBy 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.
View“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.
ViewThis 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.
ViewThis 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.
ViewFor 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.
ViewBruce 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.
ViewTrained 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.”
ViewMedia artist Scott Snibbe animates BAMPFA's Durant Avenue entrance, making it the backdrop for a silent, dreamlike narrative of mortality, empathy, and whimsy.
ViewJim 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
ViewThis 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.
ViewA 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.
ViewIn 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.
ViewConceptual works by John C. Fernie and Lawrence Weiner from the BAMPFA collection foreground the frame.
ViewOver 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.
ViewThe 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.
ViewMickey 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.
ViewTomás 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.
ViewFrancisco 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.
ViewCelebrating 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.
ViewIn 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
ViewA small selection of landscapes provides important cornerstones for understanding painting in the turbulent environment of mid-17th-century China.
ViewBringing 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
ViewBritish 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.
ViewAcclaimed 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.
ViewCelebrated 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.
ViewA 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.
ViewThe 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.
ViewThis 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.
ViewAllison 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.
ViewIn 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.
ViewBAMPFA 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.
ViewAn 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.
ViewProfessor 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.
View“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.
ViewIn 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.
ViewPrints 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.
ViewThis ongoing, evolving exhibition features a range of BAMPFA's signature works, from the 16th century to the 21st, as well as important new acquisitions.
ViewTime 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.
ViewWork In Progress: Objects for People-Snapshots
July 10–September 4, 2005 ViewFrom the Jean and Francis Marshall Collection
September 20, 2004–March 13, 2005 ViewRocks in Chinese Painting and Woodblock Printing
July 2–October 24, 2004 ViewPhotographs trom the Jan Leonard and Jerrold Peil Collection
February 5–August 8, 2004 ViewPhotographs by Ruth-Marion Baruch and Pirkle Jones
March 26–September 21, 2003 ViewJapanese Buddhist Ink Paintings of the 17th and 18th Centuries
December 11, 2002–June 22, 2003 ViewMinimatrix: Black Hole Sun #3 (X-Ray Vision)
October 20–November 17, 2002 ViewA Photographer at Work
December 12, 2001–March 10, 2002 ViewAn Exhibition Highlighting Our Growing Collection
October 17, 2001–February 24, 2002 ViewQing Dynasty Figure Painting in the Qing Dynasty
September 12, 2001–February 28, 2002 ViewA Maximum Minimum Time Space Between Us and the Parsimonious Universe
February 18–April 15, 2001 ViewThe National Center for Experiments in Television, 1967-1975
September 14–November 15, 2000 ViewMen and Women Principals in Contemporary Architectural Practice
December 15, 1999–March 19, 2000 ViewThe Phoebe Hearst International Architectural Competition and the Berkeley Campus, 1896-1930
December 8, 1999–April 23, 2000 ViewMystics and Healers Holy People and Their Messages
October 14, 1999–January 9, 2000 ViewBritish Art and the Origins of Modern Childhood, 1730-1830
August 23–November 19, 1995 ViewIn 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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