The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA, formerly abbreviated as BAM/PFA) are a combined art museum, repertory movie theater, and archive associated with the University of California, Berkeley. Lawrence Rinder was Director from 2008, succeeded by Julie Rodrigues Widholm in August, 2020.[1][2] The museum is a member of the North American Reciprocal Museums program.
The University of California art collection began with Flight into Egypt, a 16th-century oil on wood panel by the School of Joachim Patinir gifted to the university by San Francisco banker and financier François Louis Alfred Pioche in 1870.[3][4] The museum was founded in 1963 after a donation was made to the university from artist and teacher Hans Hofmann of 45 paintings[5] plus $250,000. A competition to design a building was announced in 1964, and the museum, designed by Mario Ciampi, and associates Ronald Wagner and Richard Jurasch, opened in 1970.[6] Founding Director Peter Selz, formerly of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, served from 1965 to 1973 and played a key role in establishing the museum, championing unorthodox Bay Area artists.[7]
The collection holds more than 22,000 works of art, including Ming and Qing dynasty Chinese paintings, Mughal dynasty Indian miniature painting, Baroque painting, old master prints and drawings, early American painting, African-American quilts, 19th and 20th century photography, Conceptual art, and international contemporary art.
Joan Miró, Metamorphosis, mixed media, 1936, one of 15 works given to the museum in 2021 from the Richard and Mary L. Gray Collection.
In 2009, the museum acquired (as a gift from the artist) 56 paintings and drawings from the Abu Ghraib Series by Fernando Botero.[10][11] Selections from the series have been regularly included in the museum's annual Art for Human Rights exhibitions.[12]
In 2014, the museum acquired San Francisco collector and dealer Steven Leiber's collection of Conceptual art and art materials, as well as his library of reference and artists' books related to Conceptualism and the Fluxus movement. According to The New York Times, "with the acquisition…the museum and film archive will become one of the world’s most important centers for the study of Conceptual art."[13]
In 2019, as a bequest, the museum acquired the Eli Leon Collection of almost 3,000 works by African-American quilt makers, including more than 500 works by Rosie Lee Tompkins. The collection now accounts for about 15 percent of the museum's art collection.[14][15] Drawing from the Eli Leon Collection, BAMPFA presented Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective in 2020; The New York Times called it "a triumphal retrospective" that "confirms her standing as one of the great American artists–transcending craft, challenging painting and reshaping the canon."[16][17] Drawing on the larger collection, the exhibition Rooted West: Twentieth Century African American Quilts in California will open at BAMPFA in Spring 2025.[18]
The Pacific Film Archive (PFA) was founded by Sheldon Renan, who began screening films on the UC campus in 1966 and was appointed Director of the new PFA in 1967.[20][21] The PFA specializes in programming films "in a theoretical or critical context—exploring, for example, film noir in the context of the post-war ethos."[22] Lectures by film scholars and visits from filmmakers further contextualize the programming. The archive houses 16,000 films and videos, including the largest collection of Japanese films outside of Japan.[23] The PFA also includes a library and study center,[24] and maintains online catalogs of its films and books[25] and an online database of documentation associated with the films.[26]
BAMPFA's major retrospective in March 2019 of the work of Hans Hofmann, who was instrumental in the creation of the museum. Photo by Steven Saylor.
Buildings
The former Berkeley Art Museum building was designed by Mario Ciampi and associates Ronald E. Wagner and Richard Jurasch and opened in 1970.[6] The concrete Brutalist structure—one of the most inventive buildings in that style, with its fan-shaped procession down a spiral of semi-open galleries—was deemed seismically unsafe in 1997, and iron braces were added in 2001 to improve safety. In 1999, the Pacific Film Archive moved to a temporary building across the street.[27]
Interior of the former (seismically unsafe) Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive building designed by Mario Ciampi.
In 2008, BAMPFA unveiled plans for a new museum building, to be designed by the Japanese architect Toyo Ito and located in downtown Berkeley, across the street from UC Berkeley's main entrance.[28][29][30] In 2009 construction of Ito's planned design was cancelled. Citing the weak economy and trouble raising necessary funds, BAMPFA decided to re-construct and enlarge (rather than completely demolish) the former University of California Press printing plant at that site, a 1939 Art Deco building on the California Register of Historic Resources and qualified to be on the National Register of Historic Places because of its role in the publication of the Unitied Nations Charter.[27][31][32]
Berkeley Art Museum sign (detail), photo by Steven Saylor.
In 2011, BAMPFA presented the schematic design for the $100 million transformation of the former printing plant into its new home, designed by the New York firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro.[33] Located at 2155 Center Street in downtown Berkeley, the building combines the shell of the pre-existing art deco concrete structure with a new metal-clad, skylighted addition that includes several galleries, a 232-seat theater, a store and a learning center.[33] Construction began in 2013.[34] The museum re-opened to the public on January 31, 2016.[35] The building totals 83,000 square feet, with 25,000 square feet of gallery space.[36]
The vacated Mario Ciampi building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2014.[37] The building, seismically retrofitted and "reimagined", reopened in late 2021 as the Bakar BioEnginuity Hub, an incubator for biotechnology start-ups,[38][39] named Woo Hon Fai Hall in honor of the father of a donor, David Woo.[40]
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha was an American novelist, producer, director, and artist of South Korean origin, best known for her 1982 novel, Dictée. Considered an avant-garde artist, Cha was fluent in Korean, English, and French. The main body of Cha's work is "looking for the roots of language before it is born on the tip of the tongue." Cha's practice experiments with language through repetition, manipulation, reduction, and isolation, exploring the ways in which language marks one's identity, in unstable and multiple expressions. Cha's interdisciplinary background was clearly evident in Dictée, which experiments with juxtaposition and hypertext of both print and visual media. Cha's Dictée is frequently taught in contemporary literature classes including women's literature.
Lawrence R. Rinder is a contemporary art curator and museum director. He directed the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) from 2008 to 2020. Since 2014, Rinder has been a board member and advisor of Kadist.
Mario Joseph Ciampi was an American architect and urban planner best known for his modern design influence on public spaces and buildings in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Chiura Obata was a well-known Japanese-American artist and popular art teacher. A self-described "roughneck", Obata went to the United States in 1903, at age 17. After initially working as an illustrator and commercial decorator, he had a successful career as a painter, following a 1927 summer spent in the Sierra Nevada, and was a faculty member in the Art Department at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1932 to 1954, interrupted by World War II, when he spent a year in an internment camp. He nevertheless emerged as a leading figure in the Northern California art scene and as an influential educator, teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, for nearly twenty years and acting as founding director of the art school at the Topaz internment camp. After his retirement, he continued to paint and to lead group tours to Japan to see gardens and art.
Rosie Lee Tompkins (1936–2006) is the art pseudonym of Effie Mae Martin Howard, a widely acclaimed African-American quiltmaker and fiber artist of Richmond, California. The New York Times called her "one of the great American artists," and her work "one of the century’s major artistic accomplishments." More than 500 works by Tompkins reside at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.
Squeak Carnwath is an American contemporary painter and arts educator. She is a professor emerita of art at the University of California, Berkeley. She has a studio in Oakland, California, where she has lived and worked since 1970.
Katherine Westphal was an American textile designer and fiber artist who helped to establish quilting as a fine art form.
Sylvia Fein was an American surrealist painter and author. Inspired by the quattrocento, Fein painted in egg tempera, which she made herself. She studied painting at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she became part of a group of magical realist painters, including Gertrude Abercrombie, Marshall Glasier, John Wilde, Dudley Huppler, and Karl Priebe. A newspaper described her as "Wisconsin’s Foremost Woman Painter." Beginning in the 1940s, Fein lived for a time in Mexico, then in the San Francisco Bay Area of California, eventually settling in the town of Martinez. Her 100th birthday was marked with an exhibition at her alma mater, The University of California at Berkeley.
Megan Williams is a contemporary artist who creates wall drawings, three-dimensional drawings, and traditional sculpture.
Travis Collinson is a visual artist whose paintings take elements from photographs and sketches and reinterpret them at larger scale.
Pamela Helena Wilson is an American artist. She is best known for watercolor drawings and paintings derived from photographs, largely of news events, architectural forms and landscapes. Her journalistic sources frequently portray scenes of natural and human-made calamity and the conflict, devastation and reactions that follow, often involving teeming crowds and demonstrations. Wilson's process and visual editing obscure these events, translating the images into suggestive, new visual experiences with greater urgency, universality and an open-endedness that plays against expectations. In 2013, critic Michelle Grabner wrote, "The luminosity of watercolor on white paper and the alluring atmospheric effects [Wilson] achieves in this medium creates images that are neither photographic or illustrational but seductively abstract and representational."
Olya Dubatova is a Russian born visual artist. Since 2008 she has exhibited internationally. She lives in California and New York City.
Jacquelynn Baas is an independent curator, cultural historian, writer, and Director Emeritus of the University of California Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. She has published on topics ranging from the history of the print media to Mexican muralism to Fluxus to Asian philosophies and practices as resources for European and American artists.
Léonie Guyer is a contemporary artist known for abstract paintings, drawings and installations utilizing materials such as antique, vintage and handmade paper, marble remnants, wood panels, and in site-based projects, walls and windows.
Marlon Mullen is a painter who lives and works in Contra Costa County, California, maintaining a studio practice at NIAD Art Center.
Eli Leon (1935–2018) born as Robert Stanley Leon, was an American psychologist, writer and collector. As a self-taught scholar of African-American quilts, he helped bring attention to the field and especially to the quilts of Rosie Lee Tompkins.
Wesley Tongson was a Hong Kong artist with family roots in Guangdong Province. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia at age 15 and started painting at age 17. From that time until his death, Tongson dedicated himself to exploring various painting techniques with ink, ranging from Chinese brush painting, splash ink painting and eventually, finger painting.
Richmond Art Center is a nonprofit arts organization based in Richmond, California, founded in 1936.
Heidi Zuckerman is an American museum director and curator who is CEO and director of the Orange County Museum of Art in Costa Mesa, California.
Katherine Sherwood is an American artist living and working in the San Francisco Bay Area, California who is known for paintings that explore disability, feminism, and healing, and for her teaching and disability rights activism at the Department of Art Practice at the University of California, Berkeley.
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