Exhibitions

Past Exhibitions
  • Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection

    October 27, 2024–April 20, 2025

    Making 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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  • Art Wall / Rose D’Amato: Mission Chevrolet

    August 7, 2024–December 15, 2024

    Rose 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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  • MATRIX 285 / Young Joon Kwak: Resistance Pleasure

    August 7, 2024–December 15, 2024

    Young 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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  • To Exalt the Ephemeral: The (Im)permanent Collection

    August 14, 2024–July 6, 2025

    To Exalt the Ephemeral: The (Im)permanent Collection draws from BAMPFA’s art and film collections to explore how museums collect, care for, and amplify the work of artists who celebrate ideas of impermanence and cycles of decay and regeneration.

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  • Teaching Wall / Water, Art, and California

    Campus Collaborations

    August 28–December 22, 2024

    This 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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  • On the Outdoor Screen / Kathryn Andrews: Victoria Woodhull, Belva Ann Lockwood, Abigail Scott Duniway [ . . . ]

    October 1–November 6, 2024

    In 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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  • On the Outdoor Screen / Lena Wolff and Hope Meng: Art for Democracy

    October 1–November 6, 2024

    Beginning 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 / Michele Pred: United for Freedom

    October 1–November 6, 2024

    Since 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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  • Abounaddara: The Ruins We Carry

    Campus Collaborations

    October 9, 2024–February 23, 2025

    Part 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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  • Art Wall / Tanya Aguiñiga

    January 18–July 13, 2025

    Tanya Aguiñiga creates sculptures and installations using natural materials and objects gathered from her environment. Her Art Wall installation at BAMPFA is her first solo presentation in the Bay Area. Aguiñiga presents a series of rust prints depicting a thirty-foot ladder made using an actual object that she found near the US–Mexico border.

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  • MATRIX 286 / Amol K Patil: A Forest of Remembrance

    January 18–April 20, 2025

    Amol 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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  • Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California

    June 7, 2025—November 30, 2025

    Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California traces the flow and flourishing of quilts in the context of the Second Great Migration. These quilts explore the medium’s unique capacity for connecting kin across time and space, holding memory and ancestral knowledge, and opening up space for beauty and ingenuity.

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