On View from June 6 through November 29, 2026

Career-Spanning Exhibition of Hassinger’s Work Will Feature Live Performance, Site-Specific Installations, Participatory Elements

(Berkeley, CA) August 19, 2025—The most comprehensive retrospective to date of Maren Hassinger will open at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive next year, featuring half a century of work by one of the most influential living artists in the United States. Maren Hassinger: Living Moving Growing encompasses the full scope of Hassinger’s output across an eclectic range of forms, including large-scale sculpture, site-specific installations, video, and performance. The exhibition will display more than twenty of Hassinger’s most notable works from the 1970s to the present, as well as participatory and performance elements executed in partnership with the artist. Maren Hassinger: Living Moving Growing will be accompanied by an extensive exhibition catalogue, featuring new scholarly essays and previously unpublished documentation of Hassinger’s work.

Hassinger began her career in the 1970s and brought new perspectives to contemporary art, positioned in dialogue with a cohort of Black artists, feminist artists, and artists addressing ecological concerns. Known for constantly experimenting with impermanent and industrial materials as well as performance, she has worked at the intersection of dance, sculpture, video, and installation over the past five decades. While her work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions at leading museums across the country, the ephemerality of her practice requires that many of her sculptures and installations be recreated anew for each presentation. Maren Hassinger: Living Moving Growing is the most ambitious retrospective to date of the artist’s body of work, assembling major sculptures alongside temporary installations that will be recreated at BAMPFA. Notable examples include Love (2008), a site-specific sculpture composed of pink plastic bags inflated by human breath and filled with love notes; Beach (1980), a floor installation consisting of sand, plaster, and wooden dowels; and multiple sculptures that incorporate recently harvested tree branches, which BAMPFA will realize in partnership with the University of California Botanical Garden.

Over the course of Maren Hassinger: Living Moving Growing, BAMPFA will host a series of participatory workshops engaging visitors to co-create to a new work that will be incorporated into the retrospective. This has become a major aspect of Hassinger’s practice, extending her work in performance to engage directly with audiences. Hassinger will invite visitors to join her in twisting and knotting newspapers to create a new, large-scale installation. Assembled within the gallery, the installation will continue to grow throughout the run of the exhibition. The exhibition will also feature archival documentation, including video and photographs of many of Hassinger’s performances and ephemeral public art projects. BAMPFA is also working with Hassinger to restage one of her most iconic performances, Pink Trash (1982) on UC Berkeley’s Crescent Lawn, across the street from the museum. 

Born in Los Angeles in 1947, Hassinger studied dance and sculpture at Bennington College and received an MFA in Fiber Structure from UCLA. In the 1970s, she began collaborating with other artists as part of the collective Studio Z, including Senga Nengudi, Ulysses Jenkins, and David Hammons, among others. In 1980, Hassinger had her first solo exhibition at Just Above Midtown Gallery in New York; the following year, she became the first Black artist to have a solo exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Hassinger relocated to the East Coast in 1984 to participate in the artist-in-residence program at the Studio Museum in Harlem. After several years on Long Island, she moved to Baltimore, where she became Director of the Rinehart School of Sculpture at the Maryland Institute College of Art, a position she held for twenty years. She currently lives and works in Harlem, New York.

Maren Hassinger: Living Moving Growing marks the culmination of a renewed interest in Hassinger’s work in recent years, during which she has been featured in acclaimed group exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and The Whitney Museum of American Art, among other leading art institutions. Her retrospective at BAMPFA will be co-curated by BAMPFA Chief Curator Margot Norton and Senior Curator Anthony Graham.

In conjunction with the retrospective, BAMPFA is partnering with DelMonico Books / D.A.P. to publish a fully illustrated catalogue on Hassinger, the most extensive scholarly publication on this artist ever assembled. The catalogue will feature an introductory essay by Graham and a roundtable conversation moderated by Norton with Hassinger’s collaborators, including gallery owner, filmmaker, and activist Linda Goode Bryant, and artists Senga Nengudi and Ava Hassinger—Maren’s daughter and an accomplished artist in her own right. In addition, the catalogue will include an original interview with Hassinger conducted by the distinguished art historian Lowery Stokes Sims. Additional essays will be contributed by Robyn Farrell, Senior Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs of The Kitchen; Kristen Juarez, Senior Research Specialist at the Getty Research Institute; and Hilton Als, UC Berkeley professor and longtime critic and essayist at The New Yorker.

“Maren Hassinger’s practice has been of great influence for generations of artists–from her early collaborative performances and experimental installations with Studio Z and JAM to her direct impact over decades as a teacher, and through her monumental sculptural installations in major museum collections across the United States,” said Norton. “We are thrilled to finally bring her artworks and their stories from across her career together through our exhibition, and to showcase Hassinger’s profound contributions to contemporary art.”

“For decades, Maren Hassinger has created sculptures and installations that transcend disciplinary boundaries, transforming industrial and mass-produced materials into evocative abstractions,” said Graham. “This exhibition showcases how these innovative works have drawn attention to subtle movements and forms of our everyday lives, connecting us to one another and to the world around us.”

“Maren Hassinger’s work invites us to reflect on the beauty and complexity of human connection—through movement, material, and shared experience. Presenting this landmark retrospective at BAMPFA underscores our commitment to amplifying artists whose practices challenge conventions and inspire collective engagement across generations,” said BAMPFA’s Executive Director, Julie Rodrigues Widholm.

About Maren Hassinger

Maren Hassinger (b. 1947) has spent the past five decades building an interdisciplinary practice that articulates the relationship between nature and humanity. Carefully choosing materials for their innate characteristics, Hassinger has explored the subjects of movement, family, love, nature, environment, consumerism, identity, and race. The artist uses her materials to mimic nature, whether bundling them to resemble a monolithic sheaf of wheat or planting them in cement to create an industrial garden. Over the past decade, Hassinger has been commissioned to make work for Sculpture Milwaukee (curated by Ugo Rondinone); The Art Institute of Chicago; Dia Bridgehampton; Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; the Rockefeller Foundation, Tarrytown; and the Aspen Art Museum. Hassinger was recently honored with an exhibition focused on her collaborative performance work with Senga Nengudi at the Cooley Gallery, Reed College, Portland, OR traveling to the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH (2024), as well as a two-person survey alongside Nengudi at the Institut Valencià d'Art Modern, Valencia (2025). Hassinger is the recipient of the Women’s Caucus for the Arts Lifetime Achievement Award. Her work can be found in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; the Guggenheim Museum; the Hirshhorn Museum; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Art; the Walker Art Center; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.

About BAMPFA

Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) ignites cultural change for a more inclusive and artistic world. BAMPFA has been uniquely dedicated to art and film since 1970, with international programming that is locally connected and globally relevant. It holds more than 25,000 artworks and 18,000 films and videos in its collection, with particular strengths in modern and contemporary art and historical Chinese painting, as well as the world’s largest collection of African American quilts. As part of the University of California, Berkeley, BAMPFA is committed to artistic diversity through its robust slate of art exhibitions, film screenings, artist talks, live performances, and educational programs that shed new light on the art of the past and connect our audiences with leading filmmakers and artists of our time. BAMPFA sits on the edge of campus and downtown Berkeley, where it welcomes visitors from across and beyond the Bay Area in a repurposed building designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

Sponsorship

Maren Hassinger: Living Moving Growing is curated by Margot Norton, Chief Curator, and Anthony Graham, Senior Curator. This exhibition is made possible through support from the Shah Garg Women Artists Research Fund. Major support is provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.