On View
Exhibitions
Past Exhibitions-
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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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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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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To Exalt the Ephemeral: The (Im)permanent Collection
August 14, 2024–July 6, 2025To 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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On the Outdoor Screen / Kathryn Andrews: Victoria Woodhull, Belva Ann Lockwood, Abigail Scott Duniway [ . . . ]
October 1–November 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. View
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On the Outdoor Screen / Lena Wolff and Hope Meng: VOTE
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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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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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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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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Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California
June 7, 2025—November 30, 2025Routed 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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