Current & Upcoming Exhibitions

Past Exhibitions

  • 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 / 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.

  • 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.

  • 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 薧礼醑, Swaleha Masude, and Héctor Muñoz-Guzmán.

  • Teaching Gallery / The Politics of the Poster

    May 13–August 23, 2026

    This exhibition considers the poster as a site of artistic expression and seeks to explore how it can be used to motivate people to collective action. Curated by the BAMPFA Student Committee in conjunction with museum staff, The Politics of the Poster is part of a regular series of rotating exhibitions that connect faculty teaching and student learning with artworks from the museum’s collection.

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

    August 5, 2026–July 25, 2027

    For the next installment of BAMPFA's annual Art Wall series, Marcel Pardo Ariza (b. 1991, Bogotá, Colombia; lives and works in Oakland) presents a site-specific installation that pays homage to art handlers. Las frutas del labor brings visibility to the often-overlooked yet essential part that art handlers play in museums and collection care, celebrating their vital contributions to cultural institutions.

  • Some Particular Heaven: Ideas of Utopia in the BAMPFA Collection

    August 5, 2026–July 11, 2027

    Some Particular Heaven: Ideas of Utopia in the BAMPFA Collection is a yearlong exhibition that invites visitors to contemplate spiritual, social, environmental, and political possibilities through artworks from a vast range of historical periods and places. This wide-ranging, multidisciplinary presentation of artworks from BAMPFA's collection considers utopia as an ongoing project rooted in the pursuit of social justice, and a future in which all have the resources to thrive.

  • Campus Collaborations / Lotty Rosenfeld: Disobedient Spaces

    August 12–November 15, 2026

    Lotty Rosenfeld: Disobedient Spaces is the first US retrospective of Chilean artist Lotty Rosenfeld (1943–2020), one of the most important feminist artists of the twentieth century. Through printmaking, collage, video, and site-specific installation, she encoded political gestures to contest the militarization of public space and celebrated the imagination as the antidote to systems of control.