For more than fifty years, BAMPFA and the UC Berkeley Department of Art Practice have collaborated to present an exhibition of works by Master of Fine Arts graduates. This year’s exhibition includes the work of four artists: Salimatu Amabebe, Anamaya Farthing-Kohl, Valencia James, and Nivedita Madigubba.
Titled MITH & CO., the exhibition takes its name from a reappropriated public sign located just a mile away from the MFA studios at Richmond Field Station. Either by intention or by incident, the S in the original sign, which read “SMITH & CO.,” is missing. The artists noticed that when read aloud, the phrase forms a homophone with the Spanish word mítico (mythic). This playful slippage is a reminder of how the unruliness of the world can create new language and meaning through poetic intervention. Exploring themes of queer kinship, mythmaking, postcolonial entanglements, late capitalist critique, and Black self-determination, this exhibition celebrates new bodies of work that represent the culmination of two years of intensive study through the MFA program at UC Berkeley.