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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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 11, 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.

  • Campus Collaborations / Private Frontiers: Media Legacies of the Cold War

    September 9–December 13, 2026

    Private Frontiers presents new and recent work in photography, video, and installation by four contemporary artists who engage the Cold War as a prism for understanding today's media-saturated world. Through methodologically-driven practices drawing on historical archives, news broadcasts, pop songs, and game theory, Naeem Mohaiemen, Prajakta Potnis, TJ Shin, and Tiffany Sia examine media as a crucial arena in which politics was articulated and contested in the second half of the twentieth century.