MATRIX 30th Anniversary Events

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2009 Events

January 1, 2009 - April 30, 2009

MATRIX 30th Anniversary Book

April 2009

In the spring of 2009, BAM/PFA will release a book celebrating the art and artists featured over thirty years of the MATRIX Program for Contemporary Art. Designed by the New York-based team Project Projects, the book will creatively interpret the archive of more than 225 MATRIX exhibitions and include new conversations with MATRIX artists—among themselves, with the curators, and with other commentators—that consider the breadth of the artists’ work from the time of their MATRIX exhibitions to the present.

Artist and Curator in Conversation: Paul Chan and Elizabeth Thomas

January 2009 (date to be determined); 3:00 p.m.

Museum Theater

Elizabeth Thomas, current MATRIX curator at the Berkeley Art Museum, welcomes future MATRIX artist Paul Chan. Chan is an artist and activist who works across many media, from charcoal drawing to digital animation, and most recently performance, to create symbolically rich and intellectually incisive commentaries on human power and politics. His most recent project, Waiting for Godot in New Orleans, was a community-based project involving workshops and collaborations towards the realization of an intimate and deeply pointed performance of the play in the streets of flood-ravaged New Orleans, leaving in its wake support for social and community programs in the region. Chan’s MATRIX project is tentatively scheduled for Spring 2009.

Artist and Curator in Conversation: Susan Rothenberg and Michael Auping

November 2, 2008; 3:00 p.m.

Museum Theater

Michael Auping was the first MATRIX curator, directing the program from 1978 to 1980. Auping will be in conversation with Susan Rothenberg, one of three artists in the first MATRIX rotation (MATRIX 3). Rothenberg’s expressive figurative paintings of the late 1970s were an important bellwether for the turn towards painting that followed the cool dominance of minimalism and conceptual art. Over the years, from her iconic horse paintings to more recent explorations of daily life, Rothenberg has pursued an individual course of painting with an abiding interest in surface and tactility that mines both abstraction and representation. Michael Auping is currently chief curator at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

Artist and Curator in Conversation: Nayland Blake and Lawrence Rinder

October 19, 2008; 3:00 p.m.

Museum Theater

Our yearlong celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of the MATRIX Program continues with a public conversation between artist Nayland Blake, who was featured in the program in 1989, and Lawrence Rinder, MATRIX curator from 1988 to 1998 and current director of BAM/PFA.

Throughout his career, Nayland Blake’s work has explored the complexities of identity, race, relationships, and representation, and has revealed a diverse set of interests and concerns—from popular culture and Camp to the queer body in the age of AIDS and the legacy of racism in America. His early work was twice exhibited in MATRIX, in his psychoanalytically inspired solo installation The Schreber Suite and as part of the artist collective Group Material’s project The AIDS Timeline. In 1995, Blake and Lawrence Rinder co-curated In a Different Light, a landmark BAM exhibition that considered the cultural resonances of gay, lesbian, and queer experience in a cross-generational context.

Artists and Curator in Conversation: Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan with Constance Lewallen

June 22, 2008; 3:00 p.m.

Museum Theater

Continuing our series of public programs celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of MATRIX will be a conversation between former MATRIX artists Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan and former MATRIX Curator Constance Lewallen.

Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan showed strong photographic and photography-based work in their 1983 MATRIX 61 exhibition Newsroom. Sultan continues to work in photography and teaches in the Bay Area. Mandel, currently based in Massachusetts, makes innovative public art projects inspired by photography.

Originally hired as the museum’s second MATRIX curator (after Michael Auping), Constance Lewallen organized dozens of shows by then-emerging artists from 1980 through 1988. As senior curator of exhibitions at BAM from 1997 to 2007, she curated many large-scale traveling exhibitions, including major retrospectives of Joe Brainard, Paul Kos, Ant Farm, and Bruce Nauman.

Artist and Curator in Conversation: Peter Doig and Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson

April 27, 2008; 3:00 p.m.

Museum Theater

Kicking off a yearlong series of public programs celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of MATRIX will be a conversation between artist Peter Doig, who was featured in the MATRIX program in 2000, and Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson, MATRIX curator from 1999 through 2005.

Peter Doig was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, and is currently based in Trinidad, West Indies. MATRIX 183 Echo-Lake was his first one-person museum exhibition in the United States. Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson is currently director and chief curator of the Aspen Art Museum.

MATRIX 30th Birthday Bash

April 25, 2008; 8:00 p.m.

Join us for an evening of art, music, food and wine, and the opportunity to engage with a vibrant group of guests including past MATRIX artists, the curators who shaped the program, and the arts community of the Bay Area.

Don’t miss the live music performance by Deerhoof in collaboration with upcoming MATRIX artist and filmmaker Martha Colburn.

All proceeds will benefit the MATRIX program. For details including ticket prices, please contact Sylvia Parisotto at (510) 643-9989 or sparis@berkeley.edu.

MATRIX/REDUX

March 9, 2008 - July 6, 2008

Over the past thirty years, BAM’s acclaimed MATRIX Program has charted a unique course through the landscape of contemporary art. This anniversary exhibition samples from the program’s history with special loans and works from the museum collection, including new acquisitions such as Kiki Smith’s Crèche.