FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: December 2005
Please note that dates and exhibition titles listed in this schedule may change.
To confirm any information, please call the publicity office at (510) 642-8691.
Exhibition schedule:
The Making of a Modernist: Hans Hofmann
through JUNE 30, 2007
Meiji à la Mode: A Modernizing Japan, 1868–1912
through February 19, 2006
MATRIX 219: Wilhelm Sasnal
through FEBRUARY 26, 2006
Jeanne Dunning: Study after Untitled
JANUARY 25 - APRIL 2, 2006
Dreaming California: Ruth-Marion Baruch, Bill Owens and Larry Sultan
JANUARY 18 - MAY 21, 2006
Bancroft Library at 100: A Celebration 1906 - 2006
FEBRUARY 11 - DECEMBER 3, 2006
A Measure of Time
FEBRUARY 22, 2006 - JUNE 24, 2007
Selections
FEBRUARY 2006 - JANUARY 2007
The 36th Annual Masters of Fine Art Exhibition
MAY 3 - MAY 21, 2006
Edge of Desire: Recent Art in India
JUNE 13 - SEPTEMBER 17, 2006
Semina Culture: Wallace Berman and His Circle
OCTOBER 17 – DECEMBER 10, 2006
A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman's Formative Years
JANUARY 17 - APRIL 15, 2007
Exhibition descriptions:
The Making of a Modernist: Hans Hofmann
through JUNE 30, 2007
Hofmann first arrived in the United States in 1930 when he was invited to teach in the Department of Art at UC Berkeley. In 1933 he established a new art school in New York City, and over the next twenty-five years, at his schools in New York and Provincetown, Massachusetts, Hofmann influenced an astounding array of young artists. Included among his students were the painters Burgoyne Diller, Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner, and Larry Rivers. The critic Clement Greenberg referred to Hofmann's Greenwich Village school as a vortex of influence in the burgeoning art scene of the 1930s and 1940s, "a major fountainhead of style and ideas for the 'new' American painting." By 1958, when Hofmann closed his schools to devote himself full-time to his own work, he had achieved international recognition as a painter and wide respect as a teacher and theorist. The Whitney Museum of American Art mounted a nationally touring retrospective in 1957, and six years later The Museum of Modern Art in New York organized another major exhibition that toured internationally. The Making of a Modernist: Hans Hofmann follows the steady development of Hofmann's distinctive and highly influential artistic vocabulary, and features a nearly thirty-year span of paintings reflecting the enormous scope of works in the UC Berkeley Art Museum collection.
The Making of a Modernist: Hans Hofmann is organized by BAM/PFA and curated by Lucinda Barnes, Associate Director for Art, Film, and Programs. The exhibition will not tour.
Meiji à la Mode: A Modernizing Japan, 1868–1912
through February 19
This exhibition highlights artistic responses to the social upheaval of a modernizing Japan in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Paintings, prints, photographs, and decorative pieces reveal Japanese artists adopting Western styles and pushing traditional ones to their expressionistic limits.
MATRIX 219: Wilhelm Sasnal
through FEBRUARY 26, 2006
Polish artist Wilhelm Sasnal works in traditional painting and drawing mediums as well as in more contemporary media of video, audio, and film. His internationally acclaimed images play with modes of representation and form, drawing on a broad range of sources that derive from both "high" culture and the type of visual imagery with which we are inundated daily. With this as his starting point, Sasnal's work expands fragments of private events or feelings into more universal meanings. This exhibition, composed of new work in painting, video, and sound, will be his first solo museum exhibition in the United States.
MATRIX 219: Wilhelm Sasnal is organized by BAM/PFA and curated by Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson. The exhibition will not tour.
Jeanne Dunning: Study after Untitled
JANUARY 25 - APRIL 2, 2006
Jeanne Dunning is a Chicago-based artist whose work encompasses a variety of media, including photography, sculpture, and video. Her unwavering focus over the past several decades has been the terrain of the human body, and in particular the ways in which we perceive and conceive norms of gender, sexuality, and reality itself. The exhibition will comprise photographic, video, and sculptural works arranged according to traditional art historical categories-portraiture, still life, and landscape, comparing and contrasting an early and late body of work.
Jeanne Dunning: Study after Untitled is organized by BAM/PFA and curated by Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson.
Dreaming California: Ruth-Marion Baruch, Bill Owens and Larry Sultan
JANUARY 18 - MAY 21, 2006
Through the photographs of three Bay Area photographers Ruth-Marion Baruch, Bill Owens, and Larry Sultan, this exhibition investigates the shifting social paradigms taking place in America during the second half of the twentieth-century. Two photographic essays by Ruth-Marion Baruch, Illusions for Sale (1961) and Haight Ashbury (1967), reflect a significant moment of change in the cultural landscape of San Francisco in the 1960s. Bill Owens's three series, Suburbia, Working, and Leisure, elucidate the cultural movements of the 1970s, revealing the optimism, humor, and, at times, turmoil of the period. The photographs of his aging parents in Larry Sultan's series Pictures from Home (1992) and of the burgeoning pornography industry in the San Fernando Valley in The Valley (1998-1999) offer strikingly dissimilar views of contemporary Californian culture.
Dreaming California: Ruth-Marion Barusch, Bill Owens and Larry Sultan is organized by BAM/PFA and curated by Gary Bogus, Stephanie Cannizzo and Dara Solomon. The exhibition will not travel.
Bancroft Library at 100: A Celebration 1906 - 2006
FEBRUARY 11 - DECEMBER 2006
Following the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire in 1906, the personal library belonging to Hubert Howe Bancroft-the only one in that city to survive the conflagration-was acquired by the University of California and transported to the Berkeley campus. One hundred years later, UC Berkeley's Bancroft Library houses an exceptional collection of Western Americana, including exceptionally rare and unique documents, books, maps, photographs and visual images, sound recordings, and other materials that document the human experience from ancient Egypt to the ever-changing frontiers of the American West. This exhibition will feature many of the most visually compelling objects and historically significant treasures, and traces the growth of the Bancroft Library over the past century, providing an unparalleled window to the cultural history of our world.
Bancroft Library at 100: A Celebration 1906 - 2006 is organized by BAM/PFA and guest curated by Jack von Euw, Curator of The Bancroft Library Pictorial Collection. The exhibition will not tour.
Measure of Time
FEBRUARY 22, 2006 - JUNE 24, 2007
This major exhibition will trace the ways in which American artists have incorporated time as a conceptual and physical element in their work. Showcasing the museum's important collection of twentieth-century American art, the exhibition will feature significant pieces by many of the leading artists of the past one hundred years. Measure of Time will be organized around four main cornerstones: the modernist era of the first decades of the century, the Abstract Expressionist era at mid-century, the emergence of Conceptual and Process art in the 1960s and 1970s, and new approaches and techniques of the recent past.
The exhibition will include modernist period loans including major paintings by Joseph Stella and Max Weber. Other works range from Marcel Duchamp to early videos by Joan Jonas and new acquisitions by Terry Fox, Sol Lewitt, and Shirley Shor.
Measure of Time is organized by BAM/PFA and curated by Lucinda Barnes, Associate Director for Art, Film, and Programs. The exhibition will not tour.
Selections from the Collection
FEBRUARY 2006 - JANUARY 2007
Selections from the Collection explores the richness and scope of the museum's collection-from Peter Paul Rubens's majestic oil sketch The Road to Calvary (1632) to Mark Rothko's contemplative and ethereal Number 207 (Red over Dark Blue on Dark Gray) (1961); from Diego Carlone's exuberantly carved Saint Joseph and the Christ Child (1710-1720) to David Smith's monumental sculpture of welded steel and found objects Voltri XIII (1962); and from Paul Gauguin's reverie of quotidian Breton life Still Life with Pitcher (1889), to Joan Brown's paradise of personal signs and symbols The Bride (1970). Various groupings and clusters of works explore distinctive historical, thematic, and aesthetic relationships across BAM collections. Some works will change over the course of the exhibition in response to new additions to BAM collections as well as major temporary exhibitions, such as Edge of Desire and Semina Culture.
Selections from the Collection is organized by BAM/PFA and curated by Lucinda Barnes, Associate Director for Art, Film, and Programs. The exhibition will not tour.
The 36th UC Berkeley MFA Exhibition
MAY 3 - May 21, 2006
Every spring for over three decades BAM/PFA has collaborated with the Art Practice Department at UC Berkeley, dedicating one of the museum's galleries to a selection of new work by MFA graduates. This exhibition not only represents the culmination of their graduate degree, but provides students the valuable experience of participating in a museum exhibition, in addition to exposing some of the most promising new artists in the Bay Area to the community.
The 36th Annual Master of Fine Arts Exhibition is organized by BAM/PFA. The exhibition will not tour.
Edge of Desire: Recent Art in India
JUNE 13 - SEPTEMBER 17, 2006
Edge of Desire: Recent Art in India focuses on contemporary Indian art of the past decade, a period marked by the enormous social, cultural, and economic change in that country. This was countered by the rapid economic growth that followed liberalization and increasing amounts of foreign investment. These are among the issues that form the context for this exhibition, co-organized by the Asia Society, New York, and the Art Gallery of Western Australia. Featuring artists from areas right across India-from the metropolises of Delhi and Mumbai to the rural regions of Kondagaon-Edge of Desire illustrates diversity in its themes and in the variety of media and artistic practices it represents. Through work that is as polymorphous as it is sensual, challenging as well as uplifting, the exhibition raises questions that are not only significant in India, but which are true to contemporary art and artists all around the world.
Edge of Desire: Recent Art in India is curated by Chaitanya Sambrani and co-organized by the Asia Society, New York, and the Art Gallery of Western Australia. Edge of Desire opened at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, and is traveling to multiple venues internationally including the Tamayo Museum, Mexico City, and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MARCO) in Monterrey, Mexico. A film series will accompany this exhibition.
Semina Culture: Wallace Berman and His Circle
OCTOBER 17 – DECEMBER 10, 2006
In many ways the entire Counterculture of the 1960s has its roots in the small circle of friends who congregated around Wallace Berman. The quintessential visual artist of the Beat era, it could be said of Berman (1926 – 1976) that, in the end, his greatest creation was the community of creative people that coalesced around him. That community forms the subject of Semina Culture, an international traveling exhibition organized by the Santa Monica Museum of Art. At its center is Semina, Berman's free-form poetry journal published from 1955–1964 that showcased the efforts of California artists and poets who came to define a still-potent strand of postwar beat counterculture. Berman's beautiful and evocative photographs, collages, sculptures, poems, and drawings have an undeniable power that deserves wide exposure. In addition to works by Berman, the exhibition features work by-to name just a few-John Altoon, Jay DeFeo, Bruce Conner, Joan Brown, Llyn Foulkes, John Reed, Michael McClure, and Jess, as well as poetry by Zack Walsh, Robert Duncan, David Meltzer, Idell Romero, and Kirby Doyle. The exhibition provides a fascinating and little-acknowledged backdrop to the youth and baby-boomer cultures of today.
Semina Culture: Wallace Berman & His Circle is organized by the Santa Monica Museum of Art with guest-curators Michael Duncan and Kristine McKenna. After its presentation in Berkeley the exhibition will travel to the Grey Art Gallery, New York.
A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman's Formative Years
JANUARY 17 - APRIL 15, 2007
Among the most influential artists working today, Bruce Nauman spent his formative years in Northern California-first as a graduate student at the University of California, Davis, from 1964 to 1966, and then living in and around San Francisco-before departing for Southern California in late 1969. It was during this period that he instigated many of his ground-breaking practices, such as creating sculpture in fiberglass, polyester resin, and other non-traditional materials; making casts of negative space and parts of his own body; and making relief sculptures from neon tubes. It was also at this time that he made virtually all of his landmark early films and videos-Nauman was among the first to present video works in an exhibition-as well as his first photographs, holographs, and sound works. A Rose Has No Teeth presents the full range of Nauman's work from this extremely productive and fertile early period. It represents a rare and remarkable opportunity to fully explore Nauman's development and his influence on artists in the Bay Area, and on the burgeoning conceptual art movement of the time.
A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman's Formative Years is organized by BAM/PFA and curated by Constance Lewallen, Senior Curator for Exhibitions. The exhibition will travel to Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Turin, Italy; and The Menil Collection, Houston, Texas. University of California Press will publish the exhibition catalog.
University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
The mission of BAM/PFA is to inspire the imagination and ignite critical dialogue through art and film. BAM/PFA is the visual arts center of the University of California, Berkeley. Through art and film programs, collections, and research resources, BAM/PFA engages audiences from the Berkeley campus, the community, and beyond. One of the largest university art museums in the United States, in both size and attendance, BAM/PFA presents innovative and challenging perspectives on art and artists from a wide range of cultures and backgrounds.
BAM/PFA is recognized internationally as a center for excellence in the presentation of visual art. Gallery exhibitions at BAM/PFA are adventurous, often exploring artists and artistic movements that represent a divergence from the mainstream. Innovative and intellectually rigorous, the museum exhibition program presents new perspectives on historical and contemporary art and artists from around the world, as well as important emerging artists, often in their first U.S. exhibitions.
The museum's MATRIX Program for Contemporary Art is dedicated to cutting-edge art and ideas. In more than 25 years and 200 exhibitions, MATRIX has featured artists who have since become leading figures in the contemporary art world.
Characterized by themes of artistic and intellectual exploration, the museum's collection of more than 15,000 objects includes exceptional examples of mid-twentieth-century painting, including important works by Hans Hofmann, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko. Other significant strengths include historical and contemporary Asian art; early American painting; Conceptual and contemporary international art; and California and Bay Area art.
The Pacific Film Archive is one of the nation's most respected and comprehensive film exhibition, collection, and study centers. With more than 500 public screenings each year, PFA presents the full spectrum of American and international cinema from its earliest days to the present.
Internationally recognized for its commitment to increasing the understanding and appreciation of the art of cinema, PFA's exhibition program surveys films in critical, cultural, and historical contexts, frequently including in-person conversations with filmmakers, authors, and scholars. A place to explore cinema from every film-producing country in the world, PFA screens rare and rediscovered prints, work by the world's great film directors, restored silent films with live musical accompaniment, and adventurous thematic series. Since its inception, PFA has also been one of the premier showcases for experimental film and video.
First established with an eye toward the Pacific Rim, the PFA film and video collection now includes the largest group of Japanese films outside of Japan, as well as impressive holdings of Soviet silents, West Coast avant-garde cinema, seminal video art, rare animation, Central Asian productions, Eastern European cinema, and international classics. PFA is actively engaged in film preservation, with a focus on endangered works of experimental film and video.