 | |
|
| |
| |
|
| |
| |
|
| |
| |
|
| |
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: November 2007
Please note that dates and exhibition titles listed in this schedule may change.
To confirm any information, please call the publicity office at (510) 642-8691.
Exhibition Schedule:
Parting the Curtain: Asian Art Revealed
Ongoing
Selections from the Collection
Ongoing
Gay Outlaw: Black Hose Mountain
Through March 2008
One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now
Through December 23, 2007
Joan Jonas: The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things
Through July 20, 2008
RIP.MIX.BURN.BAM.PFA
Through March 2, 2008
Goya: The Disasters of War
Through March 2, 2008
Tomás Saraceno: Microscale, Macroscale, and Beyond: Large-Scale Implications of Small-Scale Experiments
November 18, 2007 – February 17, 2008
Enrique Chagoya: Borderlandia
February 13 – May 18, 2008
Protest in Paris 1968: Photographs by Serge Hambourg
March 12 – June 1, 2008
Trevor Paglen
June 1 – September 14, 2008
Bruce Conner
June 4 – July 20, 2008
Mahjong: Contemporary Chinese Art from the Sigg Collection
September 10, 2008 - January 4, 2009
Exhibition Descriptions:
Parting the Curtain: Asian Art Revealed
Ongoing
Parting the Curtain presents a broad selection of works from BAM/PFA’s Asian art collection alongside exceptional long-term loans from private collectors. The exhibition features works from a wide geographical territory—India, Tibet, China, and Japan—and spans 10,000 B.C.E. through the twentieth century. Ritual thangkas (Buddhist meditative paintings) from the Bernard-Murray Tibetan Collection are on view to the public for the first time, along with rare historical film footage of Tibetan ritual dance from the late 1930s. Other works include Chinese funerary bronzes and ceramics, sculptures embodying Indian ideals of feminine beauty, paintings from Chinese literati, and mesmerizing Japanese Nanga paintings.
Parting the Curtain: Asian Art Revealed is organized by BAM/PFA and curated by Julia M. White, senior curator of Asian art. The exhibition will not tour.
Selections from the Collection
Ongoing
Selections from the Collection features a range of BAM/PFA’s signature works, from Albert Bierstadt's majestic painting Yosemite Winter Scene (1872), to Helen Frankenthaler's oil painting Before the Caves (1958), Paul Gauguin's provocative Still Life with Quimper Pitcher (1889), Joan Miro's magical Composition (1937), Willem de Kooning's The Marshes (ca. 1945), and David Smith's steel sculpture Voltri XIII (1962). The exhibition also includes selected works from BAM/PFA’s renowned collection of paintings by Hans Hofmann, the largest collection of work by this Abstract Expressionist artist in any museum internationally.
Selections from the Collection is organized by BAM/PFA and curated by Lucinda Barnes, chief curator and director of programs and collections. The exhibition will not tour.
Gay Outlaw: Black Hose Mountain
Through March 2008
Experimentation with unusual materials is a hallmark of San Francisco–based artist Gay Outlaw’s labor-intensive approach to sculpture. Outlaw’s most monumental sculpture to date, Black Hose Mountain (1998), on view in Gallery A, weighs two tons, stands ten feet tall, and is more than ten feet wide and deep. A wooden armature supports an exterior web of black dishwasher drain hoses, filled with white plaster and cut into segments of differing lengths. From one perspective, the irregular pyramidal “mountain” appears to be black; from another, the white plaster that fills the hoses dominates the view.
Gay Outlaw: Black Hose Mountain is organized by BAM/PFA and curated by Lucinda Barnes, chief curator and director of programs and collections. The exhibition will not tour.
One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now
Through December 23, 2007
One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now features work by seventeen of today’s emerging Asian American artists, most born after 1970, working in a wide variety of media, including painting, sculpture, installation, and video. Organized by the Asia Society, New York, this uniquely conceived exhibition juxtaposes works by individualistic, iconoclastic artists—Michael Arcega, Patty Chang, Ala Ebtekar, Chitra Ganesh, Glenn Kaino, and Laurel Nakadate among them. By bringing together widely divergent points of view, the exhibition captures a particular moment in the American cultural landscape, suggesting new meanings for the “Asian American” experience.
One Way or Another draws its title from the 1978 Blondie hit song, reflecting the visible influence of popular culture on this fresh generation of artists. Some of the works are newly commissioned for the exhibition, and many of the participating artists either live in or are firmly based in three significant population centers of Asian Americans: Los Angeles, New York, and the San Francisco Bay Area.
One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now is organized by the Asia Society, New York, and curated by Susette S. Min, Karin Higa, and Melissa Chiu. The exhibition is organized at BAM/PFA by Elizabeth Thomas, Phyllis Wattis MATRIX curator. After its presentation in Berkeley the exhibition will travel to the Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles.
Joan Jonas: The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things
Through July 20, 2008
Video and performance artist Joan Jonas has focused on the performing body and its relationship with media and space since the late 1960s. In her video installation The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things (2004/05), which BAM/PFA acquired jointly with the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in early 2007, Jonas responds to an essay by the German art historian Aby Warburg, whose nineteenth century visit to the American Southwest shaped his later view of the history of art. The piece also reflects on Jonas' own journey to the region in the '60s, when she saw several Hopi rituals.
The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things consists of five video projections, creating a kind of stage for Jonas to re-perform and re-investigate her work. Evolving from a work originally commissioned by Dia: Beacon, the piece now includes many iterative stages. It was first exhibited in 2004 at the Renaissance Society in Chicago and Galerie Yvon Lambert in Paris with multiple video projections and various props. Jonas continued to develop the work, adding videotaped sequences from her 2005 and 2006 performances at Beacon with jazz music composed by Jason Moran.
Joan Jonas: The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things is organized by BAM/PFA and curated by Lucinda Barnes, chief curator and director of programs and collections. The exhibition will not tour.
RIP.MIX.BURN.BAM.PFA
Through March 2, 2008
BAM/PFA celebrates the cultural and artistic practice of re-mix this fall, inviting guest artists Michael Joaquin Grey, Alison Sant, Jonathan Keats, and Nathaniel Wojtalik to “rip, mix, and burn” elements from two digital-media works in the museum's collection—Ken Goldberg’s Ouija 2000 (1999) and Valery Grancher’s 24h00 (1999)—resulting in new artistic creations. Drawing on the open-source tradition, and with the full permission of artists Goldberg and Grancher, the re-mix artists alter or revise original code or media files from the source works. Other artists take a more conceptual route, re-mixing some of the methods or behaviors of the originals into their own new works.
RIP.MIX.BURN.BAM.PFA is organized by BAM/PFA and curated by Richard Rinehart, digital media director and adjunct curator. The exhibition will not tour.
Goya: The Disasters of War
Through March 2, 2008
In anticipation of the forthcoming exhibition Enrique Chagoya: Borderlandia (February 13 – May 18, 2008), BAM/PFA exhibits a landmark series of prints by one of Chagoya's major influences: Francisco Goya. The exhibition resonates strongly in another time of war; The Disasters of War unflinchingly depicts Napoleon's bloody conflict with Spain. This particular edition of Goya's series from BAM/PFA's permanent collection will be presented in its entirety for the first time, and coincides with the bicentennial of Napoleon's invasion of the Iberian peninsula. The etchings have lost none of their power over the ensuing two centuries, featuring intense scenes of battle and its aftermath, as well as satirical pieces that question religious institutions and humanity's culpability in wartime atrocities.
Goya: The Disasters of War is organized by BAM/PFA and curated by Stephanie Cannizzo, curatorial associate. The exhibition will not tour.
Tomás Saraceno: Microscale, Macroscale, and Beyond: Large-Scale Implications of Small-Scale Experiments
November 18, 2007 – February 17, 2008
Tomás Saraceno, an Argentine artist currently based in Frankfurt, looks to the sky and sees possibilities for rethinking how we live in relation to one another—for reshaping notions about nationality and property, and revising our ideas about physical structures and how we organize them. His work combines elements of engineering, physics, chemistry, aeronautics, and architecture. Saraceno's ongoing project Air-Port-City envisions networks of habitable platforms that float in the air. This exhibition, for BAM/PFA's MATRIX Program for Contemporary Art, is Saraceno's first solo show in the United States, and allows viewers to see his ambitious vision in multiple ways: through photographs of unique natural environments, small-scale sculptures that explore materiality and form, and a large-scale installation created specifically for the Berkeley Art Museum.
Tomás Saraceno: Microscale, Macroscale, and Beyond: Large-Scale Implications of Small-Scale Experiments is organized by BAM/PFA and curated by Elizabeth Thomas, Phyllis Wattis MATRIX curator. The exhibition will not tour.
Enrique Chagoya: Borderlandia
February 13 – May 18, 2008
Cultural collisions and hybrids inform the work of Mexican-born, San Francisco–based artist Enrique Chagoya. Tapping into Mexico’s complex history, international politics, world religion, and popular culture, the artist’s lively paintings, drawings, prints, and sculpture often intermingle contemporary icons like Mickey Mouse, Wonder Woman, and George W. Bush with more ancient figures like Aztec gods, the Virgin of Guadalupe, and Jesus Christ. These fantastical juxtapositions satirize and, at times, celebrate the cultural and psychological consequences of the more than 500 years of contact between cultures in the western hemisphere.
The first comprehensive survey of Chagoya’s work, Enrique Chagoya: Borderlandia will present more than 60 works made from 1983 to 2007. These include paintings on metal, ink drawings, and prints, as well as codices, which have assumed a central position in Chagoya’s body of work over the past fifteen years. These pictorial and textual narratives are painted on long sheets of accordion-folded amate paper in the style of traditional sixteenth-century Aztec codices, and are intended to be read both forward and backward, the way history itself unfurls.
Enrique Chagoya: Borderlandia is organized by the Des Moines Art Center, and curated by Patricia Hickson. The exhibition is organized at BAM/PFA by Lucinda Barnes, chief curator and director of programs and collections. After its presentation in Berkeley the exhibition will travel to the Palm Springs Art Museum.
Protest in Paris 1968: Photographs by Serge Hambourg
March 12 – June 1, 2008
The thirty-five black-and-white photographs in this exhibition by French photographer Serge Hambourg provide a striking eyewitness account of the events of May 1968 in Paris, when student and worker strikes against the political and social establishment brought the country to a standstill. Barricades went up, arrests were made, and street fighting and other violence roiled France during a time of similar protests around the world. Hambourg’s photographs, which had never been printed or displayed until recently, depict protesters marching in the streets of Paris, as well as the reactions of bystanders and opposition members, who were loyal to the government of President Charles de Gaulle.
Protest in Paris 1968: Photographs by Serge Hambourg is organized by the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. The exhibition is organized at BAM/PFA by Stephanie Cannizzo, curatorial associate. The exhibition will not tour. The exhibition catalogue is published by the Hood Museum of Art.
Trevor Paglen
June 1 – September 14, 2008
Artist, writer, and self-described “experimental geographer” Trevor Paglen creates work that Artforum called “as emblematic of our era as (the image) of the naked Vietnamese girl scorched by napalm was of its.” Currently a Ph.D. candidate in geography at UC Berkeley, Paglen has pioneered a form of photography that uses astronomical tools to take photographs at a distance of dozens of miles. This has resulted in photographic evidence of covert US military operations and facilities, a subject he has also explored in his writing, which includes a book on the CIA practice of “extraordinary rendition.”
For this exhibition, the latest in the MATRIX Program for Contemporary Art, Paglen presents an entirely new body of work, turning his lens towards the heavens, documenting the orbit of classified American satellites through photographs made by high-magnification telescopes and wide-angle large-format film cameras. The exhibition also features a 3-D video installation that tracks and projects the real-time positions of these satellites, developed through a production commission with the art and technology center Eyebeam in New York.
Trevor Paglen is organized by BAM/PFA and curated by Elizabeth Thomas, Phyllis Wattis MATRIX curator. The exhibition will not tour.
Bruce Conner
June 4 – July 20, 2008
In 1977 Bruce Conner—a key figure in the Bay Area avant garde scene since the '50s—discovered the Mabuhay Gardens, a seedy nightclub turned punk venue on Broadway in San Francisco. There he met publisher V. Vale, who in 1978 invited Conner to contribute to his new magazine Search and Destroy. Conner offered to photograph the club's punk rock shows, ultimately producing an indispensable record of one of the most vibrant segments of San Francisco's late '70s art scene. BAM/PFA acquired the Mabuhay Gardens series, which consists of fifty-three photographs, in late 2007, adding to a collection that already contained several important works by Conner, including films, assemblages, and works on paper. This installation presents BAM/PFA's collection of the photographs for the first time, celebrating a legendary local artist and his preservation of a vital Bay Area moment.
Bruce Conner is organized by BAM/PFA and curated by Steve Seid, video curator. The exhibition will not tour.
Mahjong: Contemporary Chinese Art from the Sigg Collection
September 10, 2008 - January 4, 2009
Mahjong: Contemporary Chinese Art from the Sigg Collection is drawn from the collection of Uli Sigg, a Swiss collector whose close links with China since the late 1970s have enabled him to build a collection unrivalled in quality, scope, and size. The exhibition will feature a selection of approximately 121 works by 92 artists, including exceptional paintings, drawings, sculptures, photographs, video works, and installations spanning four decades. Mahjong illustrates the development of contemporary art in China since the '70s, beginning with important Socialist Realist paintings and avant-garde works from the '80s and early '90s.
The exhibition explores the key social events and ideas that have shaped Chinese art and society in recent decades: the Cultural Revolution, consumerism, and the tensions between the individual and society. Many works consciously address China's national identity and pre-modern history by adopting the techniques of traditional Chinese art and placing them in a new context, while other works parody Western art and its art historical canon from a Chinese point of view. Also evident are the tensions between the socialist ideals that are still officially operative and the consumerism unleashed by capitalist reforms. Featuring pivotal works by artists both known and unknown in the West, the exhibit includes pieces by Liu Wei, Huang Yan, Ai Weiwei, Weng Fen, Yue Min Jun, Wang Du, Zhang Xioagang, Xu Bing, and Zhang Huan.
Mahjong: Contemporary Chinese Art from the Sigg Collection is being coordinated at BAM/PFA by Julia M. White, senior curator of Asian art, and is co-curated by Julia White and Lucinda Barnes, chief curator and director of programs and collections.
University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
The UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA) aims to inspire the imagination and ignite critical dialogue through contemporary and historical art and film, engaging audiences from the campus, Bay Area community, and beyond. BAM/PFA is one of the largest university art museums in the United States in both size and attendance, presenting fifteen art exhibitions and five hundred film programs each year. The museum’s collection of more than 14,000 works includes exceptional examples of mid-twentieth-century painting, including important works by Hans Hofmann, Jackson Pollock, Eva Hesse, and Mark Rothko, as well as historical and contemporary Asian art, early American painting, Conceptual and contemporary international art, and California and Bay Area art. The PFA 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, Central Asian productions, Eastern European cinema, and international classics.
Credit Line
The University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive is supported by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Additional support is provided by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Koret Foundation, the Bernard Osher Foundation, Packard Humanities Institute, the Henry Luce Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Columbia Foundation, the Christensen Fund, the William H. Donner Foundation, San Francisco Foundation, Gap Inc., other private foundations and corporations, and our individual donors and members. Major endowment support has been provided by the Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation and by George Gund III.
Museum Information
Location:
2626 Bancroft Way, just below College Avenue near the UC Berkeley campus.
Gallery and Museum Store Hours:
Wednesday to Sunday, 11 to 5. Closed Monday and Tuesday.
Admission:
General admission is $8; admission for seniors, disabled persons, non–UC Berkeley students, and young adults (13 – 17) is $5; admission for BAM/PFA members, UC Berkeley students, staff and faculty, and children under 12 is free; admission for group tours is $3 per person (to arrange a group tour, call (510) 642-5188). Admission is free on the first Thursday of each month.
Information:
24-hour recorded message (510) 642-0808; fax (510) 642-4889; PFA recorded message (510) 642-1124 TDD: (510) 642-8734
Website: bampfa.berkeley.edu
###
