Current Exhibitions
| These Canyons: The 38th Annual University of California, Berkeley Master of Fine Arts Graduate Exhibition Through June 8, 2008 This year’s M.F.A. exhibition introduces seven promising emerging artists: Adrianne Crane, Renée Delores, Rosalynn Khor, Indira Martina Morre, Emily Prince, Wenhua Shi, and Sunaura Taylor. |
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| Hans Hofmann Through August 3, 2008 A cornerstone of the Berkeley Art Museum collection is an extraordinary group of paintings by Hans Hofmann (1880–1966), the world’s most extensive museum collection of this German-born artist’s work. The exhibition on view draws on this collection to span nearly thirty years of Hofmann’s practice, from the figurative works of the 1930s to the explosive abstraction of the postwar period. |
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| Protest in Paris 1968: Photographs by Serge Hambourg Through June 1, 2008 In May 1968 in Paris, student and worker strikes against the conservative government of General Charles de Gaulle brought the country to a standstill. Images by French photographer Serge Hambourg provide a striking eyewitness account of this pivotal moment in political and cultural history. |
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| Held Rectangles Through August 3, 2008 Conceptual works by John C. Fernie and Lawrence Weiner from the BAM collection foreground the frame. |
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| MATRIX/REDUX Through 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. |
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| Enrique Chagoya: Borderlandia Through May 18, 2008 Mickey Mouse meets Aztec gods and Francisco Goya meets Jerry Falwell in the first major museum retrospective of the work of Mexico-born, San Francisco–based artist Enrique Chagoya. Chagoya draws on the European canon, Mexican folk arts, and U.S. pop icons to create paintings, drawings, and prints that are politically charged, formally sophisticated, and often scathingly funny. |
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| James Lee Byars: The Perfect Audience Through August 3, 2008 The art of James Lee Byars could be as grand as a global gesture or as intimate and fleeting as a kiss. A new exhibition brings together the delicate and monumental sides of the artist’s work with artist’s books, mail art, performance documentation, and other ephemera from BAM’s Conceptual Art Study Center. |
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| Joan Jonas: The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things Through July 20, 2008 In this recent installation, pioneering video artist Joan Jonas mines the cultural terrain of the American Southwest, as well as more personal territories. Jonas’s work is “at once mysterious and transparent, strange yet familiar in an almost universal sense. She is like a magician who dazzles us while revealing the secret to every trick.”—N.Y. Times |
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| Parting the Curtain: Asian Art Revealed Through July 20, 2008 A showcase for the museum’s extraordinary holdings of Asian art, including ancient pottery, classical Chinese paintings, religious art from Tibet, and provocative works by contemporary artists. |
Upcoming Exhibitions
Scott Snibbe: Falling Girl June 1, 2008 - August 31, 2008 Media artist Scott Snibbe animates BAM/PFA’s Durant Avenue entrance, making it the backdrop for a silent, dreamlike narrative of mortality, empathy, and whimsy. |
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Jim Campbell: Home Movies May 31, 2008 - August 3, 2008 Jim Campbell’s work manifests a poetics of the digital, upsetting common assumptions about the relationship between technology and humanity, “information” and thought. His LED installation Home Movies “brings us emotionally close, without sentimentality, to the unshareable quotient of memories.”—S.F. Chronicle |
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Trevor Paglen: The Other Night Sky / MATRIX 225 June 1, 2008 - 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.” |
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Bruce Conner: Mabuhay Gardens June 4, 2008 - 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 outcry and the surrounding silence. |
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The Graphic Arts Loan Collection at UC Berkeley: 50 Years June 14, 2008 - 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 BAM. |
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Mahjong: Contemporary Chinese Art from the Sigg Collection September 10, 2008 - January 4, 2009 Coming this fall to BAM/PFA, this landmark exhibition offers a unique window onto four decades of extraordinary transformation in Chinese art, culture, and society. |

