On View

exhibitions
film series
event series

  • Scott Snibbe: Falling Girl

    June 1–August 31, 2008

    Media artist Scott Snibbe animates BAMPFA's Durant Avenue entrance, making it the backdrop for a silent, dreamlike narrative of mortality, empathy, and whimsy.

    View
  • Trevor Paglen: The Other Night Sky / MATRIX 225

    June 1–September 14, 2008

    Trained as both an artist and a geographer, Trevor Paglen uses an array of tactics to map the “black world” of U.S. military and intelligence activities. His MATRIX project scans the heavens for signs of covert activity, visualizing “the other night sky.”

    View
  • Bruce Conner: Mabuhay Gardens

    June 4–August 3, 2008

    Bruce Conner's photographs from a legendary San Francisco nightclub document the demimonde of three-chord chaos that was the seventies punk scene, when acts like the Avengers, Negative Trend, and the Mutants were in their anarchic heyday. In his images, Conner captured both the... View

  • The Graphic Arts Loan Collection at UC Berkeley: 50 Years

    June 14–August 3, 2008

    For half a century, the Morrison Library's unique graphic arts loan program has been bringing original art to students. We celebrate the program's anniversary with prints by masters from Rembrandt to Matisse, once in the loan collection and now held by BAMPFA.

    View
  • Mahjong: Contemporary Chinese Art from the Sigg Collection

    September 10, 2008–January 4, 2009

    This landmark exhibition, complemented by a broad array of public programs, offers a unique window onto four decades of extraordinary transformation in Chinese art, culture, and society.

    View
  • Bending the Word / MATRIX 226

    September 28, 2008–February 8, 2009

    This exhibition brings together four artists-Martha Colburn, Patricia Esquivias, Olivia Plender, and Tris Vonna-Michell-whose work mingles fact and fiction, history and anecdote, reshaping our views of the world through storytelling.

    View
  • Gas Zappers

    October 22, 2008–February 8, 2009

    “A fierce, funny and inventive political satirist” (N.Y. Times), Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung offers an interactive online game that tackles global warming with political savvy and wry humor.

    View
  • Mario García Torres: Je ne sais si c'en est la cause, What Doesn...

    February 22–May 17, 2009

    By investigating and reconstructing ephemeral histories of conceptual art, Mario García Torres considers the functions of time and distance in our constructions of the past. The works in this exhibition excavate two such histories: Martin Kippenberger's attempt to establish a... View

  • Galaxy: A Hundred or So Stars Visible to the Naked Eye

    February 25–August 30, 2009

    Galaxy creates a new constellation of works from the Berkeley Art Museum's eclectic collection, including pieces by major stars from Dürer and Rembrandt to Pollock and Warhol as well as many less familiar lights.

    View
  • Taking Refuge: Buddhist Art from the Land of White Clouds

    February 25–May 3, 2009

    A selection of rare and beautiful objects from Tibet, Nepal, and northern India represents the rich history of Buddhist art in the Himalayas.

    View
  • Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet

    April 1–September 27, 2009

    Can art inspire conservation? Can conservation inspire art? Human/Nature explores these questions and investigates the relationships between fragile natural environments and the human communities that depend upon them. The exhibition presents new works by Mark Dion, Ann Hamilton,... View

  • What We Can Live With: The 39th Annual University of California,...

    May 15–June 21, 2009

    This year's M.F.A. exhibition introduces six promising local artists: Sara Bright, Lydia Greer, Laura Britt Greig, Farley Gwazda, Aaron Maietta, and Ginger Wolfe-Suárez.

    View
  • Deborah Grant: Bacon, Egg, Toast in Lard / MATRIX 228

    May 31–October 11, 2009

    Deborah Grant's paintings are densely layered with marks and meanings drawn from popular media, history, and personal experience. The centerpiece of her MATRIX exhibition views contemporary concerns-race, sexuality, violence-through the surprising prism of an imagined meeting... View

  • Material Witness

    July 22–December 20, 2009

    Artists from Francisco Goya to Carrie Mae Weems bear witness to social issues and consider cultural memory in a new selection of works from the Berkeley Art Museum collection.

    View
  • Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Earth

    August 26, 2009–February 7, 2010

    Conceptual art takes on elemental themes in this exhibition of works by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, drawn from the artist's archive at BAMPFA.

    View
  • Angelo Plessas

    September 1–November 30, 2009

    The first presentation of the new BAMPFA NetArt portal features whimsical and meditative works that offer a nuanced critique of social spectacle.

    View
  • Ari Marcopoulos: Within Arm's Reach

    September 23, 2009–February 7, 2010

    Recording New York's downtown art world or the emerging hip-hop scene, shooting snowboarders hurtling down a vertical mountain face or chronicling the vicissitudes of his own family life, photographer Ari Marcopoulos unerringly captures the zeitgeist. This midcareer retrospective... View

  • Fernando Botero: The Abu Ghraib Series

    September 23, 2009–February 7, 2010

    Internationally acclaimed artist Fernando Botero offers a powerful critique of the prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib in a series of paintings and drawings recently donated to the Berkeley Art Museum.

    View
  • Omer Fast: Nostalgia / MATRIX 230

    October 25–December 17, 2009

    Omer Fast's video works conflate factual and fictional narratives at the intersection of memory, history, and media. In his project for MATRIX, an interview with a Nigerian refugee is reimagined as science fiction.

    View
  • New Pathways to Ancient Traditions: Recent Acquisitions to the Asian...

    October 30, 2009–February 14, 2010

    A new exhibition unveils major gifts to the BAM collection, including subtly beautiful Chinese ceramics and fascinating, intricately sculpted seals.

    View
  • French Film Posters from the BAMPFA Collection

    November 25, 2009–September 12, 2010

    An exhibition in the museum's Theater Gallery celebrates the art of the French film poster.

    View
  • Joe McKay: Big Time

    December 1, 2009–February 28, 2010

    This new Internet artwork and iPhone app takes a tongue-in-cheek approach to the notion of “personal time.”

    View
  • Ahmet Öğüt: Exploded City / MATRIX 231

    January 24–April 11, 2010

    An imaginary metropolis constructed from models of buildings and vehicles that have figured in acts of violence and terrorism worldwide, Ahmet Öğüt's Exploded City engages the poetics and politics of space, architecture, and international relations.

    View
  • Thom Faulders: BAMscape

    January 29, 2010–April 15, 2012

    How often do you get a chance to sit, lounge, or study on a work of art? BAMscape invites you to interact with art-and with the museum-in unexpected ways.

    View
  • James Castle: A Retrospective

    February 3–April 25, 2010

    Born deaf and raised in rural Idaho, James Castle was an artist of remarkable range, subtlety, and graphic skill. This retrospective of Castle's drawings, books, and paper constructions is an “exhilarating . . . opportunity to fully consider one of America's most idiosyncratic... View

  • Nature into Action: Hans Hofmann

    February 3, 2010–July 3, 2011

    Drawn from BAMPFA's extensive Hans Hofmann collection, this installation reveals the relationship between nature as source and action as method in the great abstract painter's work.

    View
  • James Buckhouse: Serg Riva

    March 1–May 31, 2010

    Welcome to the world of Serg Riva, self-declared “aquatic couturier, enfant terrible, and man about town”-and sly fictive creation of artist James Buckhouse.

    View
  • Realm of Enlightenment: Masters and Teachers from the Land of Snows

    March 3–August 1, 2010

    This installation of extraordinary objects from Tibet explores the role of the teacher and master in the transmission of the Buddhist canon.

    View
  • Assignment Shanghai: Photographs on the Eve of Revolution

    March 3–May 23, 2010

    In 1946, Life magazine assigned the young photographer Jack Birns to Shanghai with instructions to document the ongoing Chinese civil war. This selection of the resulting photographs, drawn from the BAM collection, vividly captures a cosmopolitan city in the midst of social and... View

  • What's It All Mean: William T. Wiley in Retrospect

    March 17–July 18, 2010

    This retrospective surveys the witty, idiosyncratic, and introspective work of William T. Wiley, a beloved Bay Area artist and “a national treasure” (Wall Street Journal). Layered with ambiguous ideas and allusions, autobiographical narrative and sociopolitical commentary, Wiley's... View

  • Brent Green: Perpetual and furious refrain / MATRIX 232

    May 2–September 12, 2010

    Brent Green is a maker of moving things-animated films, kinetic objects, and other eccentric inventions. His MATRIX exhibition coincides with the release of his first feature film, Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then, a fable of love, loss, and compulsive construction.

    View

Pages