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The University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA) is the visual arts center of the University of California, Berkeley. One of the largest university art museums in the United States, in both size and attendance, BAM/PFA opened the doors of its distinctive Modernist building on the south side of the UC Berkeley campus in 1970. BAM/PFA's diverse exhibition programs and its collections of more than 14,000 objects and 10,000 films and videos are characterized by themes of artistic innovation, intellectual exploration, and social commentary, and reflect the central role of education in BAM/PFA's mission.
BAM History, Collections, and Exhibitions
The museum was founded in 1963 following artist and teacher Hans Hofmann's donation of forty-five paintings and $250,000 to the University; today BAM/PFA's collection of work by this important Abstract Expressionist artist remains the largest in any museum internationally. An architectural competition to design the new museum building was announced in November 1964, and the following year San Francisco architect Mario Ciampi and associates Richard L. Jorasch and Ronald E. Wagner were named the winners. The jury declared, "The richness of this building will arise from the sculptural beauty of its rugged major forms and will not require costly materials or elaborate details. We believe this design...can become one of the outstanding contributions to museum design in our time." Construction began in 1967, and the building opened on November 7, 1970.
Over three decades the museum's collection has evolved with particular strengths in historical and contemporary Asian art; early American painting; mid-twentieth-century, Conceptual, and contemporary international art; and California and Bay Area art. Highlights include important works by Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Albert Bierstadt, Paul Gauguin, Helen Frankenthaler, Jay DeFeo, Joan Brown, Jonathan Borofsky, and Shirin Neshat. Significant additions in recent years include the Jean and Francis Marshall Collection of Indian miniatures, and selected works from the renowned collection of Chinese painting belonging to UC Berkeley Professor Emeritus James Cahill and Cahill family members.
The museum provides the UC Berkeley and Bay Area communities with an ambitious schedule of exhibitions exploring international art, both historical and contemporary. Each year, the museum presents diverse and important temporary exhibitions that range from classical Asian art to challenging work by today's artists. The exhibition program also includes changing installations that highlight the richness and scope of the museum collections, as well as the MATRIX Program for Contemporary Art, presenting recent avant-garde work. BAM has mounted important exhibitions of the works of Juan Gris, Jay DeFeo, Robert Colescott, Joan Brown, Robert Mapplethorpe, Sebastião Salgado, Paul Kos, and many others. The museum is well known for such thematic exhibitions as Anxious Visions: Surrealist Art; Made in U.S.A.: An Americanization in Modern Art, the '50s & '60s; The Here and the Hereafter: Images of Paradise in Islamic Art; Hogarth and His Times: Serious Comedy; and Masterworks of Chinese Painting: In Pursuit of Mists and Clouds.
The MATRIX Program for Contemporary Art
In six to eight exhibitions each year, the MATRIX Program for Contemporary Art introduces the Bay Area community to provocative views expressed by international avant-garde artists, creating a local connection to the current global dialogue on contemporary art and demonstrating that the art of this moment is vital, dynamic, and often challenging. Encouraging new, open modes of display and analysis, MATRIX provides a framework for an active interchange between the artist, the museum, and the viewer. There have been over 200 MATRIX shows at the museum in twenty-five years, featuring artists such as John Baldessari, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Louise Bourgeois, Nan Goldin, Eva Hesse, Sol LeWitt, Nancy Spero, and Andy Warhol. In recent years the selection of MATRIX artists has become more international in scope, with the roster including Teresita Fernández, Ricky Swallow, Tobias Rehberger, Ernesto Neto, Sanford Biggers, Berni Searle, and Anne Chu, representing countries including Germany, Iran, Australia, Brazil, and China. MATRIX projects can be seen in person at the museum's Phyllis Wattis MATRIX Gallery, as well as virtually, through the production and distribution of a DVD archive, and online.
PFA History, Collections, and Programs
The Pacific Film Archive was conceived as an American version of the Cinémathèque Française in Paris—a center committed not only to exhibiting films under the best possible conditions, but also to increasing the understanding, appreciation, and preservation of cinema through its study center, collections, and publications. PFA began showing films on the UC Berkeley campus in 1966 and continued its screening programs in the new building when the museum opened in 1970. Today, PFA is one of the nation's most important film centers.
First established with an eye toward the Pacific Rim, the archive's film and video collection now includes the largest group of Japanese films outside of Japan, as well as impressive holdings of Soviet silents, West Coast avant-garde cinema, seminal video art, rare animation, Eastern European and Central Asian productions, and international classics. American experimental pioneers such as Bruce Conner and Ant Farm share the shelves of PFA's storage vault with international past masters Sergei Eisenstein and Kenji Mizoguchi.
A place to explore cinema from every film-producing country in the world, the Pacific Film Archive reaches out through the art of cinema to the many cultures that make up the lively Bay Area community. With daily screenings—over 600 different programs are offered each year—PFA presents rare and rediscovered prints of movie classics, new and historic works by the world's great film directors, restored silent films with live musical accompaniment, thematic retrospectives, and exciting experiments by today's film and video artists, including provocative, independently made fiction and documentary works. PFA is an inspiring cultural environment for students and the general public; screenings are often enlivened by in-person appearances by filmmakers, authors, critics, and scholars, who engage in discussion with audiences. Past series have included Pop and Circumstance: America in the '60s; Women Screenwriters in Hollywood; The Banned and the Beautiful: Czech Cinema; Blaxploitation's Back!; The Golden Age of Mexican Cinema; Red Hollywood; neo-eiga: New Japanese Cinema; and major retrospectives of the work of Buster Keaton, Satyajit Ray, Ida Lupino, Robert Bresson, Michelangelo Antonioni, Nagisa Oshima, R. W. Fassbinder, Stan Brakhage, Bill Viola, Frederick Wiseman, Nicholas Ray, and numerous others.
The PFA Library and Film Study Center
The PFA Library is an invaluable resource for film research and education, offering access to PFA's film collection as well as to thousands of books, periodicals, posters, and still photographs. In addition, the library has compiled some 95,000 files of documentation about individual films, personalities, and subjects. Many of these files are now available online through CineFiles, PFA's innovative film document image database.
BAM/PFA Funding Profile
Currently BAM/PFA has an annual operating budget of approximately $7 million and receives about 60 percent of its annual budget from private donors, earned income, membership, and admission fees. Approximately eight percent of BAM/PFA's operating funds come from university sources, and 15 percent from student registration fees. The remaining 16 percent of the budget is made up by endowment interest. BAM/PFA is also supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the California Arts Council, and California State Library. Additional support is provided by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Koret Foundation, Bernard Osher Foundation, Packard Humanities Institute, and other private foundations and corporations, as well as by individuals who wish to encourage the production, understanding, and appreciation of art within the UC Berkeley community and the entire Bay Area.
