Current & Upcoming Exhibitions

Past Exhibitions

  • Rhapsody: Works from the Cooper Rosenwasser Collection

    March 4–June 28, 2026

    Rhapsody: Works from the Cooper Rosenwasser Collection presents a selection of painting, printmaking, sculpture, and photography from the collection of Penny Cooper and Rena Rosenwasser. Cooper, a celebrated criminal defense attorney and advocate for social justice, and Rosenwasser, a poet and cofounder of the Bay Area–based feminist publishing house Kelsey Street Press, have been longtime supporters of BAMPFA and have championed women artists for five decades.

  • Art Wall / Stephanie Syjuco: Present Tense (Roll Call)

    August 13, 2025–June 28, 2026

    Debuting her largest wall installation to date, artist Stephanie Syjuco (b. 1974, Manila, Philippines; lives and works in Oakland) presents Present Tense (Roll Call). Referencing the classroom routine of announcing one’s presence, the exhibition explores radical pedagogy in the politics of education. Syjuco’s practice spans from handcrafted textiles to archival excavations, interrogating how photography and archives shape racialized narratives of being and belonging.

  • Object Oriented: Abstraction and Design in the BAMPFA Collection

    September 10, 2025–June 28, 2026

    Object Oriented: Abstraction and Design in the BAMPFA Collection explores how artists have represented, reshaped, and reimagined familiar objects, drawing attention to the role of design in our everyday lives

  • Atrium Projects / Sarah Cain: To—you know—you

    October 30, 2025–June 6, 2027

    Painter Sarah Cain (b. 1979, Albany, New York; lives and works in Los Angeles) presents the site-specific installation To—you know—you. Returning to UC Berkeley, where she received her MFA in 2006, the artist continues her intuitive approach to painting, improvising the installation on-site at the museum.

  • Teaching Gallery / Environmental Justice, Art, and Race

    January 21–May 10, 2026

    This exhibition is presented in connection with Ethnic Studies 180, an undergraduate course at UC Berkeley that focuses on the social impacts of hazardous waste exposure, natural disasters, resource extraction, farming practices, deforestation, and pollution. It asks what role art can play in imagining alternate social and ecological relationships.

  • Collection Focus / Meriem Bennani: Life on the CAPS

    May 6–August 23, 2026

    Collection Focus / Meriem Bennani: Life on the CAPS presents the California debut of Bennani’s acclaimed video trilogy Life on the CAPS (2018–22). In the style of augmented reality, layered with animation and live action, Bennani’s three films explore a dystopian future in which a community of migrants navigates internment on a fictional island called the CAPS.

  • Fifty-Sixth Annual UC Berkeley MFA Exhibition

    May 13–July 26, 2026

    For over fifty years, BAMPFA and the UC Berkeley Department of Art Practice have partnered to present an exhibition of work by graduating MFA students. This year’s exhibition will present works by six artists from the class of 2026: Zuhoor Al Sayegh, Eleni Maria Berg, Itzli OCIEL, Kristiana Chan, Swaleha Masude, and Héctor Muñoz-Guzmán.

  • Maren Hassinger: Living Moving Growing

    June 6–November 29, 2026

    Maren Hassinger: Living Moving Growing will be the most significant retrospective of the work of Maren Hassinger, presenting her work across sculpture, performance, video, and installation from the early 1970s to the present. Hassinger’s work addresses social and cultural issues through an awareness of interconnectedness, ephemerality, and relationships between humans and the natural world. These themes emphasize the importance of caring for the things we share in contrast to the things that divide us. The exhibition will survey Hassinger’s expansive career, making connections across her practice and asserting her dynamic place in the history of contemporary art.

  • Art Wall / Marcel Pardo Ariza: Las Frutas del Labor

    August 5, 2026–July 11, 2027

    Opening in Summer 2026 as the next installment of BAMPFA’s annual Art Wall series, Marcel Pardo Ariza (b. 1991, Bogotá, Colombia; lives and works in Oakland, CA) will present a site-specific installation that pays homage to art handlers, celebrating their vital contributions to cultural institutions. The Art Wall commission highlights Ariza’s work as co-founder of Arthandlxrs*, an organization and publication that supports marginalized communities within the art handling profession.