What Has Been and What Could Be: The BAMPFA Collection inaugurates a year-long presentation of the BAMPFA collection, bringing a contemporary perspective to the museum’s global art holdings.
Read full descriptionBAMPFA Education staff offers a highly descriptive tour of several artworks in the exhibition for blind and low-vision visitors.
UC Berkeley graduate Ester Hernández talks about her screen prints Sun Mad II and Sun Raid II, which address issues of migration and the overuse of pesticides and their impact on farmworkers, consumers, and the environment. Catherine Wagner discusses her work The Arctic Circle IV, part of a photographic trilogy in three distinct areas: scientific machines (Frankenstein), the Arctic Circle, and the history of science.
Tabitha Soren talks about Truth-out.org/Ferguson, part of a project entitled Surface Tension. With an 8x10 camera, Soren shoots photographs of fingerprints on technological devices, placing in sharp focus what we normally try to look past on our screens. Lava Thomas discusses Ms. Jimmie L. Lowe, a life-size drawing based on a police photograph that is one of a dozen in the artist’s series of portraits honoring Black women who played a leadership role in the 1955–56 Montgomery Bus Boycott and were indicted under Alabama’s anti-boycott laws.
Berkeley-based Japanese artist Masako Miki discusses Ichiren-bozu (Animated prayer beads blue), a new work in BAMPFA’s collection that reflects her interest in reclaiming the power of myth making. Artist and UC Berkeley professor Stephanie Syjuco talks about her Raiders (Selections from the Asian Art Museum), a collection of flat, laser-cut, life-size images of antique Asian vessels downloaded from the Asian Art Museum’s online databases and adhered to wooden backings, investigating how we participate in the construction of culture.
BAMPFA Senior Curator Anthony Graham discusses selected works from each thematic section of What Has Been and What Could Be, highlighting artists with ongoing relationships to BAMPFA, the UC Berkeley campus, and the Bay Area.
Tours of What Has Been and What Could Be: The BAMPFA Collection take place on selected Sundays at 2 PM and Free First Thursdays at 1:15 PM
BAMPFA Executive Director Julie Rodrigues Widholm, who organized What Has Been and What Could Be, offers a curatorial walkthrough of her new collection-based exhibition, addressing selected works from each thematic section, as well as sharing perspectives on curating from the museum’s collection.