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. [1] [2] Since 2014, Rinder has been a board member and advisor of Kadist.
Rinder received a B.A. in art from Reed College and an M.A. in art history from Hunter College. He has held teaching positions at UC Berkeley, Columbia University, and Deep Springs College.
He was the Dean of Graduate Studies at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, a position he was appointed to in 2004. [3]
Rinder served as the Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Curator of Contemporary Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art where he organized exhibitions including "The American Effect", "BitStreams", the 2002 Whitney Biennial, and "Tim Hawkinson", which was given the 2005 award for best monographic exhibition in a New York museum by the United States chapter of the International Association of Art Critics. Prior to the Whitney, Rinder was founding director of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, in San Francisco, and served as Assistant Director and Curator for Twentieth-Century Art at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Among the many exhibitions he organized at these institutions are "Searchlight: Consciousness at the Millennium" (1999), "Knowledge of Higher Worlds: Rudolf Steiner's Blackboard Drawings" (1997), "Louise Bourgeois: Drawings" (1996), "In a Different Light" (1995), "Félix González-Torres" (1994), and "Where There Is Where There: The Prints of John Cage" (1989).
In September 2007, the Judah L. Magnes Museum in Berkeley, California, opened an installation guest curated by Rinder entitled Shahrokh Yadegari: Through Music. This installation served as the latest exhibition in the Museum's REVISIONS series, in which contemporary artists create original installations based on objects in the Museum's extensive collections.
He has published poetry, fiction, and art criticism in Zyzzyva, Fresh Men 2: New Voices in Gay Fiction, Flash Art, Artforum, nest, The Village Voice, Fillip, and Parkett. He is the author of a novel, Revenge of the Decorated Pigs, and a novella (with Colter Jacobsen) "Tuleyome", which was described by Colin Herd in 3:AM Magazine as "Comic and melancholy in equal measure, Tuleyome is the most fully realised example of a text-photo-novel I can think of, where the text and the photos are equal players in the advance of a complex and fascinating narrative, and where the formal properties of both text and photograph are interrogated and laid bare." [4]
Art Life: Selected Writings, 1991-2005, published by Gregory R. Miller and Company in Spring 2006, is his first book of essays. His first play, “The Wishing Well," co-authored with Kevin Killian, premiered in 2006 and was published that year in The Back Room Anthology (Clear Cut Press). In 2003, Rinder was inducted into the National Register of Peer Professionals of the U.S. General Services Administration, and in 2005, he was appointed to the San Francisco Arts Commission by Mayor Gavin Newsom.
Rinder led a major move for the museum from an older – seismically unstable – brutalist building, to a new building designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro in downtown Berkeley. He announced his retirement from BAMPFA in September 2019. [2]
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.
The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive 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. The museum is a member of the North American Reciprocal Museums program.
Terry Alan Fox was an American conceptual artist known for his work in performance art, video, and sound. He was of the first generation conceptual artists and was a central participant in West Coast performance art, video and conceptual art movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Fox was active in San Francisco and in Europe, living in Europe in the latter portion of his life.
Established in 1998, the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts is a contemporary art center in San Francisco, California, US, and part of the California College of the Arts. It holds exhibitions, lectures, and symposia, releases publications, and runs a residency program, Wattis.
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.
Peter Sarkisian is an American new media artist based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He combines video projection and sculpture to create hybrid-format, multi-media installations.
Amalia Mesa-Bains, is a Chicana curator, author, visual artist, and educator. She is best known for her large-scale installations that reference home altars and ofrendas. Her work engages in a conceptual exploration of Mexican American women's spiritual practices that addresses colonial and imperial histories of display, the recovery of cultural memory, and their roles in identity formation.
Howard Fried is an American conceptual artist who became known in the 1970s for his pioneering work in video art, performance art, and installation art.
Molly Springfield is an American artist whose work includes labor-intensive drawings of printed texts and visual explorations of the history of information and mediated representation.
Ala Ebtekar is a contemporary artist known primarily for his work in painting, drawing, illumination, and installation. His work frequently orchestrates various orbits and cadences of time, bringing forth sculptural and photographic possibilities of the universe, and time, gazing back at us.
Natasha Boas is a French-American contemporary art curator, writer, and critic. She has taught art history and curatorial studies at Yale, Stanford, and the San Francisco Art Institute. Her exhibition on the Modernist Algerian artist, Baya Mahieddine Baya: Woman of Algiers in 2018 at the Grey Art Gallery at New York University garnered her international critical attention. In 2017 she was featured in Lynn Hershman Leeson's Vertighost, playing the role of herself as an art historian. She also authored the Facebook Artist in Residence book on the recent history of Art and Technology in the Bay Area for the 5th anniversary of Facebook's artist-in-residency program. An adjunct professor at the California College of the Arts, she is an expert in the art of California countercultures, the modernist avant-garde, surrealist women artists, the Mission School and Outsider artists.
John G. Hanhardt is an American author, art historian, and curator of film and media arts. Hanhardt was the Consulting Senior Curator for Media Arts at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, where he developed exhibitions, collections, and archives in film and the media arts. He is considered to be one of the leading scholars on video artist Nam June Paik.
Lindsey White (1980) is a visual artist working across many disciplines including photography, video, sculpture, and book making. Her work has been described as "reveling in lighthearted gags and simple gestures to create an experience that is all the more satisfying for the puzzles it contains."
John Zurier is an American abstract painter, known for his minimal, near-monochrome paintings. His work has shown across the United States as well as in Europe and Japan. He has worked in Reykjavik, Iceland and Berkeley, California. Zurier lives in Berkeley, California.
Jeff Kelley is an art critic, author, and curator. A practicing art critic since 1977, his reviews and essays about artists including Chinese conceptual artist Ai Weiwei have appeared in publications including Artforum, Art in America, and the Los Angeles Times.
Laurie Reid is an American artist living in Berkeley, California.
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.
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.
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.