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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: OCTOBER 2, 2009
Please note that dates and exhibition titles listed in this schedule may change. To confirm any information or for image requests, please call the BAM/PFA Communications Office at (510) 643-6494.
EXHIBITION SCHEDULE:
Deborah Grant: Bacon, Egg, Toast in Lard
MATRIX 228
Through October 11, 2009
Angelo Plessas
NetArt
Through November 30, 2009
netart.bampfa.berkeley.edu
Material Witness
Through December 20, 2009
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Earth
Through February 7, 2010
Ari Marcopoulos: Within Arm’s Reach
Through February 7, 2010
Fernando Botero: The Abu Ghraib Series
Through February 7, 2010
Robert Beavers: My Hand Outstretched to the Winged Distance
and Sightless Measure
October 13, 2009 through October 20, 2009
Omer Fast: Nostalgia
MATRIX 230
October 25 through December 17, 2009
New Pathways to Ancient Traditions: Recent Acquisitions to the Asian Art Collection
October 30, 2009 through February 14, 2010
Joe McKay: Big Time
NetArt
December 1, 2009 through February 28, 2010
netart.bampfa.berkeley.edu
Ahmet Öğüt: Exploded City
MATRIX 231
January 24, 2010 through April 11, 2010
Thom Faulders: BAMscape
January 29, 2010 through Fall 2011
Realm of Enlightenment: Buddhist Art from Asia
January 2010 through June 2010 (dates TBA)
James Castle: A Retrospective
February 3, 2010 through April 25, 2010
Assignment Shanghai: Photographs on the Eve of Revolution
March 3, 2010 through June 27, 2010
What’s It All Mean: William T. Wiley in Retrospect
March 17, 2010 through July 18, 2010
Delightful Pursuits: Highlights from the Clark Center for Japanese Art and Culture
August 2010 through December 2010 (dates TBA)
Opening in 2011:
Eva Hesse: Studiowork
January 26, 2011 through April 24, 2011
EXHIBITION DESCRIPTIONS
Deborah Grant: Bacon, Egg, Toast in Lard
MATRIX 228
Through October 11, 2009
Deborah Grant’s MATRIX exhibition at the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA) premieres, in its entirety, the long-term project Bacon, Egg, Toast in Lard, which includes several shaped paintings on panel and a sound component (created by artist Jennie C. Jones) in addition to the twenty-foot-long centerpiece painting, Suicide Notes to the Self. Grant conceived the painting to represent a kind of dream in which Jackie “Moms” Mabley, a pioneering comedienne on the African American Vaudeville circuit, and Francis Bacon, an Irish-born painter known for his grotesque, often violent figurative portrayals, are brought together in a London pub called House of Chantilly by a time-traveling character named Random Select. Although the association of the two historical characters might appear random, their biographies converge: both lived as out gay adults and both experienced traumatically violent events in their youth, exorcising these demons in their creative work by directly confronting issues of racism (Mabley), violence (Bacon), and sexuality (both). Bacon, Egg, Toast in Lard is curated by Phyllis Wattis MATRIX Curator Elizabeth Thomas.Angelo Plessas
NetArt
Through November 30, 2009
netart.bampfa.berkeley.edu
The first presentation of the new BAM/PFA NetArt portal features whimsical and meditative works by Greek-Italian artist Angelo Plessas that offer a nuanced critique of social spectacle. In a series of four related “mini-sites,” Plessas’s works are like small derailments or turnabouts that disrupt the dominant glitz blitz via the Internet. In Plessas’s work, the viewer may quietly spend time balancing balls on a scale or styling the hair of a silhouetted woman. The purposeful and limited interactivity of these hypnotic works alludes to no goal, no score, no mastery to attain; it functions like electronic prayer beads instead of a virtual joystick. Though wryly critical, these works are anything but dystopic. They do not propose a retreat from contemporary media and society into neo-Luddism or the romantic myth of the artist. This series exhibits a highly personal touch and a sense of transcendent play. BAM/PFA NetArt is curated by Richard Rinehart, Digital Media Director & Adjunct Curator.Material Witness
Through December 20, 2009
This exhibition, drawn from the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive’s permanent collection, is in dialogue with Fernando Botero: The Abu Ghraib Series (on view through February 7, 2010). Encompassing journalistic reportage and engaged critique, ironic commentary and impassioned calls to action, the works in Material Witness provide essential perspectives on war, politics, social conscience, and cultural memory. Works range from Francisco Goya’s The Disasters of War to a selection of new acquisitions including Carrie Mae Weems’s The Capture of Angela (2008). Goya’s famous series, created between 1810 and 1820, falls into three categories: the drama of a violent war with the French; starvation and famine in Madrid; and scenes that refer to the Inquisition, and the judicial practice of torture. Weems’s work, acquired in 2009, captures the arrest of Angela Davis, the political activist and professor who was associated with the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense and was a notable Civil Rights activist. Material Witness also features recent pieces by Kota Ezawa, Trevor Paglen, and Fred Wilson—pieces that can be seen as forms of witness. This exhibition was curated by Lucinda Barnes, BAM/PFA chief curator and director of programs and collections.Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Earth
Through February 7, 2010
This one-gallery exhibition featuring works drawn from the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Archive in BAM/PFA’s Conceptual Art Study Center focuses on a selection of works by the artist that evoke the idea of earth. Concepts such as falling leaves, the sun rising and setting, and the elements—earth, air, fire, and water—will be presented in the form of artist’s books, works on paper and fabric, sculpture, video, and a color-slide work by Cha that has never been exhibited in the United States.Ari Marcopoulos: Within Arm’s Reach
The exhibition is set to coincide with the release of a new book of Cha’s writings, Exilée and Temps Morts: Selected Works by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, edited by Constance M. Lewallen and published by UC Press. The Pacific Film Archive will present a rare screening of Cha’s 1980 film/video installation Exilée as part of the series Alternative Visions. Earth is curated by Stephanie Cannizzo, curatorial associate, and Constance M. Lewallen, adjunct curator.
Through February 7, 2010
The University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA) presents a mid-career survey of the work of photographer Ari Marcopoulos in his first one-person exhibition at a West Coast museum. Born in Amsterdam in 1957, Marcopoulos came to New York in 1979 and got a job printing black-and-white photographs for Andy Warhol, and two years later, tired of spending so much time in the darkroom, he found a position as a studio assistant with the photographer Irving Penn. His own artistic practice began on the streets of New York City, echoing a long tradition of work made in this arena by photographers such as Helen Levitt, Robert Frank, and Garry Winogrand. Marcopoulos currently lives in Northern California and works and exhibits around the world. Within Arm’s Reach, which occupies two large galleries in the museum, includes early New York works portraying street life, the downtown art scene, and the early days of rap music; images of skateboarders and snowboarders from the 1990s; and portraits of the artist’s family at home in California. The formats range from small black-and-white images to large color prints to photocopied images enlarged to look like posters. Interspersed among the photographs in the galleries are flat-screen monitors showing clips from the artist’s films and videos, and his artist’s books and zines are presented in vitrines. This exhibition is curated by Stephanie Cannizzo, curatorial associate.Fernando Botero: The Abu Ghraib Series
In conjunction with the exhibition, Ari Marcopoulos: Within Arm’s Reach, BAM/PFA produced a 120-page exhibition catalog, co-published by the Switzerland-based company JRP/Ringier and designed by Marcopoulos. Ari Marcopoulos: Within Arm’s Reach, essay by Stephanie Cannizzo. $39.95 (softcover).
BAM/PFA also presents a film series in conjunction with the exhibition, Fiercely Freestyle: Ari Marcopoulos. This series features a selection of video works by Marcopoulos, curated by Steve Seid. In the first program, Black Eyes and Blue Skies, Marcopoulos captures rapturous and radical characters including artists Jeff Koons and Dave Muller, snowboarder Craig Kelly, and frequent collaborators the Beastie Boys. In Loud and Clear, Sonic Youth, the Beastie Boys, snowboarder Craig Kelly, skaters, and others figure in six exhilarating works. Seid writes: “With camera in hand, Ari Marcopoulos walks among the denizens of what you might call the subcultural sublime––delirious hotdoggers, rapturous artists, bruised boarders, avant rockers, and the many nomads of adrenal bliss. Marcopoulos doesn’t document the inhabitants of the ecstatic outlands so much as he infiltrates the energy enveloping them, snowboarders on maniacal drops, artists in the whirl of creation, musicians communing with the visceral hum.”
Black Eyes and Blue Skies: Wednesday, November 11
Dave Muller, 5-02-09, Session I (2009, 7:50 mins, Color). Jeff Koons (1991, 13 mins, Color). Sabrosa (music by the Beastie Boys, 1994, 3:33 mins, B&W). Transitions and Exits (2000, 10:30 mins, Color). Larry Wright (with Maja Zrnic, 1990, 28 mins, B&W). Namaste/Live (music by the Beastie Boys, 1994, 3:05 mins, B&W). Walrus Dreams (with Chris Brunkhart, 2000, 29 mins, Color). Something’s Got to Give (music by the Beastie Boys, 1994, 3:46 mins, Color). Total running time: 95 mins, Beta SP, DigiBeta, from the artist.
Loud and Clear: Wednesday, November 18
Kim/Thurston (2009, 10:19 mins, Color). What’s This? (with Philip Taaffe, 1991, 10:30 mins, Color). Gratitude Live Remix (music by the Beastie Boys, 1994, 3:49 mins, B&W). Where the Wind Blows (2008, 57 mins, Color). Claremont (2008, 10:40 mins, Color). Hurrah (music by the Beastie Boys, 1994, 2:20 mins, B&W). Total running time: 96 mins, BetaSP, DigiBeta, 16mm, from the artist.
Through February 7, 2010
The University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA) presents a set of fifty-six paintings and drawings by the artist Fernando Botero, on the subject of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Botero generously donated these works to the museum. Born in Medellín, Colombia, in 1932, Botero studied in Madrid, Florence, and Mexico City. Inspired by day-to-day lives in small Latin American villages, Botero is internationally renowned for colorful paintings, drawings, and sculpture, often featuring his famously exaggerated figures.Robert Beavers:
In the artist’s own words, the Abu Ghraib works represent “both a broad statement about cruelty and at the same time an accusation of U.S. policies.” Soon after the reports of prisoner abuse came to light, Botero began the series of paintings and drawings. Surprisingly, responses to the Iraq war have been scarce in the American art world, which makes these works stand out. The images do not flinch from barbarity, portraying prisoners bound, bleeding, humiliated, sometimes set upon by dogs. Interestingly, Botero says that he did not base his works on the infamous photographs, but on descriptions of prisoner abuse he read in the press: “I think Seymour Hersh’s article was the first one I read. I was on a plane and I took a pencil and paper and started drawing. Then I got to my studio and continued with oil paintings. I studied all the material I could. It didn’t make sense to copy, I was just trying to visualize what was really happening there.”
My Hand Outstretched to the Winged Distance and Sightless Measure
October 13, 2009 through October 20, 2009
The films of Robert Beavers are exceptional for their visual beauty, aural texture, and depth of emotional expression. Born in 1949 in Brookline, Massachusetts, Beavers began to make films in the mid-sixties in New York City. By the end of that decade, he had relocated to Europe with fellow American filmmaker Gregory J. Markopoulos, who would be his lifelong companion until Markopoulos’s death in 1992. The majority of Beavers’s films were shot in the seventies and eighties in Italy, Switzerland, and Greece. Between 1994 and 2002, the artist involved himself in re-editing the images and creating new soundtracks for his eighteen-film cycle entitled My Hand Outstretched to the Winged Distance and Sightless Measure. Beavers’s films occupy a noble place within the history of avant-garde film, positioned at the intersection of structural and lyrical filmmaking traditions. This exhibition is a rare opportunity to see the cycle in its entirety. The program is curated by Susan Oxtoby, senior film curator.Omer Fast: Nostalgia
Program 1: Tuesday, October 13
Early Monthly Segments (Switzerland/Germany/Greece, 1968–70/2002, 33 mins, Silent, 35mm). Winged Dialogue (Greece, 1967/2000, 3 mins, 16mm). Plan of Brussels (Belgium, 1968/2000, 18 mins, 16mm). The Count of Days (Switzerland, 1969/2001, 21 mins, 16mm). Palinode (Switzerland, 1970/2001, 21 mins, 16mm). Robert Beavers and P. Adams Sitney in Conversation. Total running time: 96 mins plus conversation and intermission, Color.
Program 2: Thursday, October 15
Diminished Frame (Germany, 1970/2001, 24 mins, B&W/Color, 16mm). Still Light (Greece, 1970/2001, 25 mins, Color, 16mm). From the Notebook of . . . (Italy, 1971/1998, 48 mins, Color, 35mm). The Painting (Switzerland/U.S., 1972/1999, 13 mins, Color, 16mm). Robert Beavers in person. Total running time: 110 mins plus intermission.
Program 3: Sunday, October 18
Work Done (Italy/Switzerland, 1972/1999, 22 mins, Color). Ruskin (Italy/Switzerland/U.K., 1975/1997, 45 mins, B&W/Color). Sotiros (Greece/Austria/Switzerland, 1976–78/1996, 25 mins, Color). AMOR (Italy/Austria, 1980, 15 mins, Color). Robert Beavers in person. Total running time: 107 mins plus intermission, 35mm.
Program 4: Tuesday, October 20
Efpsychi (Greece, 1983/1996, 20 mins). Wingseed (Greece, 1985, 15 mins). The Hedge Theater (Italy, 1986–90/2002, 19 mins). The Stoas (Greece, 1991–97, 22 mins). The Ground (Greece, 1993–2001, 20 mins). Robert Beavers in person. Total running time: 96 mins plus intermission, Color, 35mm.
MATRIX 230
October 25, 2009 through December 17, 2009
Omer Fast’s video works conflate narratives of fact and fiction at the intersection of memory, history, and media. His varied subjects have included the Iraq war, Colonial reenactment, and the film Schindler’s List. Fast’s videos are carefully constructed, and range from early single-channel videos that manipulate found media through editing, to more recent installations that include multiple channels to complicate the singularity of stories told and received. Fast’s new commission for MATRIX comprises two films that work together to break open the uncanny relationship among internal imagination, external reality, and the images we consume through media and popular culture. Fast uses a metafilmic construction to tie together multiple narratives and comment on the mediation of images. In one film, the filmmaker interviews a Nigerian refugee seeking asylum in London about his experiences as a child soldier. The other adapts fragments of this story as stylized science fiction, the asylum-seeking process imagined as a bizarre dystopian system of processing and competition.New Pathways to Ancient Traditions:
Nostalgia is coproduced by the South London Gallery; the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; and the Nationalgalerie at the Hamburger Bahnhof: Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin. Omer Fast has exhibited most recently at ZKM, Karlsruhe; Liverpool Biennial 2008; Manifesta 7; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; and the 2008 Whitney Biennial, at which he received the Bucksbaum Award. This is Fast’s first West Coast solo exhibition and is curated by Phyllis Wattis MATRIX Curator Elizabeth Thomas.
Recent Acquisitions to the Asian Art Collection
October 30, 2009 through February 14, 2010
New Pathways to Ancient Traditions reveals the latest gifts to the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive’s permanent collection of Asian art, including the George and Frances Fong Collection of Chinese Ceramics and the Edward Gans Collection of Chinese Seals. These two donations bring over 150 new objects to the BAM/PFA collection. The Fong collection includes representative ceramic vessels from the second century BCE through the seventeenth century with the majority of the pieces dating to the Tang (618–906) and Song (960–1279) dynasties. Each of the Gans’s seals are sculpture in miniature: the top is frequently carved or cast in the shape of an auspicious animal, while the base is either a person’s name, a poetic reference, or an indication of rank. These objects served a very practical role in marking official documents as well as claiming ownership on papers, writings, and paintings. The seals are made of a wide range of materials including cast bronze, molded ceramic, carved jade and other hard stone, and ancient ivory. These generous gifts help to fulfill the museum’s ambition to present a broad range of work representing artistic excellence across Asia. New Pathways to Ancient Traditions is organized by BAM/PFA and curated by Julia M. White, senior curator of Asian art.Joe McKay: Big Time
NetArt
December 1, 2009 through February 28, 2010
netart.bampfa.berkeley.edu
This new Internet artwork and iPhone app takes a tongue-in-cheek approach to the notion of “personal time.” Big Time uses GPS to measure your precise distance from the prime meridian and tell you what time it is—for you. The time may be different for someone across town. The tongue-in-cheek Big Time critiques the techno-positivism that emanates from Silicon Valley, where micro-payments, targeted marketing, myThisorThat, and iEverything reduce the world to a series of bite-sized “personalized” experiences. But, rather than attempting to turn back the clock, Big Time uses the latest technology to reestablish time as a close relationship between the sun, the earth, and your body. As an artwork, Big Time is contingent on our bodies’ motion in space and our ongoing negotiations with one another. It is a social sculpture that allows us to reengage with time, a social construct so primary that it has become invisible. BAM/PFA NetArt is curated by Richard Rinehart, Digital Media Director & Adjunct Curator.Ahmet Öğüt: Exploded City
MATRIX 231
January 24, 2010 through April 11, 2010
With Exploded City, Ahmet Öğüt envisions an imaginary city comprising the buildings, monuments, and vehicles that have figured in acts of violence and terrorism over the past two decades. Structures from Turkey, Ireland, India, Yugoslavia, Great Britain, and the United States, among other countries, form a unified urban scale model, reconstructing these spaces in the moments before they were destroyed. The installation, originally commissioned for the Turkish Pavilion at the 2009 Venice Biennale, is accompanied by a text that situates the included locations within a Calvinoesque narrative engaging the poetics and politics of space, architecture, violence, and international relations. The work also engages with Öğüt’s ongoing interest in the construction of history and memory through image, which will be reinforced in the exhibition by the inclusion of video works. Öğüt recently had solo exhibitions at Kunstlerhaus Bremen; Centre d’Art Santa Mònica, Barcelona; and Kunsthalle Basel. His work was also recently included in group exhibitions at Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; De Appel, Amsterdam; New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Malmö Konsthall; Van Abbemuseum; and the Berlin Biennale. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition in the United States. Born in Turkey in 1981, Öğüt lives and works in Amsterdam. Ahmet Öğüt: Exploded City is curated by Phyllis Wattis MATRIX Curator Elizabeth Thomas.Thom Faulders: BAMscape
January 29, 2010 through Fall 2011
The University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA) presents BAMscape, a major new commissioned work by Thom Faulders, the award-winning architect and founder of Berkeley-based Faulders Studio. Faulders’s BAMscape blurs the boundaries between architecture, art, and furniture design, serving as a site for rest, relaxation, and study, as well as a platform for the experience of live performance and multimedia events. This innovative seating-sculpture is a shaped elevation of undulating curves, inviting participants to sit, recline, and lounge in a variety of positions, singularly or in groups. The piece is in physical and aesthetic dialogue with the museum’s dramatic 6,692 sq. ft. atrium space, Gallery B, and is viewable from numerous vista points in the galleries and walkways above. From their BAMscape vantage point, visitors can observe some of the museum’s most dynamic attributes: dramatically cantilevered balconies, radiating patterns of interconnected structural beams, and bright skylight planes. Visitors can also assemble on BAMscape to participate in, or view, a host of newly programmed events: artist and curatorial talks, musical performances, film and video screenings, and other activities that will occur both during daytime and Friday evening hours. In addition, free wireless Internet will allow students and other visitors to enjoy BAMscape as a site for study and social networking during daytime hours. Visually bold, structurally innovative, kinesthetically engaging, Faulders’s design communicates a playful inventiveness resonant with both the museum’s ground-breaking architecture and with BAM/PFA’s dynamic and risk-taking programs.Realm of Enlightenment: Buddhist Art from Asia
Thom Faulders’s work has been exhibited at La Triennale di Milano, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Lisbon International Biennale, and at Kunstlerhaus in Vienna. His work is included in the Permanent Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). He has received awards from the Architectural League of New York, Bienal Miami + Beach, American Institute of Architects, and the Society of Environmental Graphic Design. Faulders is also a recipient of the SFMOMA Experimental Design Award. He is an associate professor in architecture at California College of the Arts (CCA), San Francisco.
January 2010 through June 2010 (dates TBA)
Drawn from the permanent collection and long-term loans to the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA), this exhibition includes a selection of Buddhist sculptures and paintings from India, Tibet, Nepal, Japan, and China depicting images of enlightened states of being. The centerpiece of the exhibition is a fourteenth-century five-foot-high seated gilt bronze image from Tibet of the historical Buddha Shakyamuni at the moment of enlightenment. Seated in meditation, the image is shown touching his right hand to the earth in a gesture that calls upon Mother Earth to testify to his struggles to achieve this state of perfection. Realm of Enlightenment is organized by BAM/PFA and curated by Julia M. White, senior curator of Asian Art.James Castle: A Retrospective
February 3, 2010 through April 25, 2010
James Castle: A Retrospective marks the first comprehensive museum exhibition of the work of James Castle (1899–1977), an artist from rural Idaho who, despite undergoing no formal or conventional training, is especially admired for the unique homemade quality, graphic skill, and visual and conceptual range that characterize his works. By all accounts deaf since birth, and presumably never having learned much language, Castle turned his obsessive and constant production of drawn images into his primary mode of communication. The exhibition examines the full visual and conceptual range of Castle’s work, bringing together almost 300 examples from 60 public and private collections. It explores the variety of modes Castle employed throughout his life, from drawings and colored wash pieces to handmade books, assemblages, and text works, for all of which he used found pieces of paper or cardboard and homemade inks and colorants primarily of his own invention.Assignment Shanghai: Photographs on the Eve of Revolution
Originally organized by Ann Percy, the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s curator of drawings, James Castle: A Retrospective is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue, which includes a DVD of a 53-minute documentary film on the life and art of James Castle (entitled James Castle: Portrait of an Artist), sponsored by the Foundation for Self-Taught American Artists in Philadelphia. The curator in charge for the BAM presentation is Lucinda Barnes, BAM/PFA chief curator and director of programs and collections.
March 3, 2010 through June 27, 2010
In 1946 Life magazine assigned the young, relatively inexperienced photographer Jack Birns to Shanghai with the instructions that he document the ongoing Chinese civil war. A selection of these photographs from the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive’s (BAM/PFA) permanent collection portray the upheaval of war, societal changes, and the approaching revolution that would change Shanghai and China forever. Birns documented the new Shanghai, with its foreign concessions and cosmopolitan attitude, and captured the clash of cultures between a world of consumption posed by the introduction of Western goods and the traditions of China’s past.What’s It All Mean: William T. Wiley in Retrospect
This exhibition is organized in conjunction with a Bay Area–wide cultural celebration of Shanghai that includes exhibitions and programs by a number of local institutions on the occasion of the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai next May. In March 2010, BAM/PFA also presents a film series and an academic symposium in partnership with UC Berkeley’s Institute of East Asian Studies. A catalog of Jack Birns’s photographs with essays by Orville Schell, Carolyn Wakeman, and Birns accompanies the show.
Assignment Shanghai is organized by BAM/PFA and curated by Julia M. White, senior curator of Asian Art.
March 17, 2010 through July 18, 2010
William T. Wiley (b. 1937) attended the San Francisco Art Institute (B.F.A., 1961 and M.F.A., 1962) and later joined the faculty at U.C. Davis. His work was exhibited in group shows in San Francisco and New York even during his student years. In 1967, BAM/PFA founding director Peter Selz included Wiley in his notorious exhibition Funk Art. Wiley, along with Bruce Nauman, Robert Arneson, and Roy DeForest, formed the nucleus of the Bay Area Funk movement. Wiley and Robert Hudson presented a “happening” for the opening of the new University Art Museum (now the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive) in 1970, and in 1971 Brenda Richardson curated Wiley’s first major museum exhibition, Wizdumb, which traveled from Berkeley to several museums across the country including the Art Institute of Chicago and the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C.Delightful Pursuits: Highlights from the Clark Center for Japanese Art and Culture
What’s It All Mean features 88 works from the 1960s to the present and is the first full-scale look at Wiley’s career since 1979, exploring important themes and ideas expressed in his work. In What’s It All Mean, viewers enter the world of Wiley whose self-deprecating humor and sense of the absurd make his art accessible in spite of his many private symbols, allusions, narratives and layers of meaning. Wiley’s art has stood the test of time in the face of changing styles, successive movements, critical theories and passing fashion. Wordplay and wit disguise Wiley’s serious commentary on war, pollution, global warming, racial tensions, and other threats to contemporary civilization. What’s It All Mean is organized by The Smithsonian American Art Museum, where it premieres in October 2009.
The curator in charge for the BAM/PFA presentation is Lucinda Barnes, chief curator and director of programs and collections.
An accompanying book, co-published by the University of California Press and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, is forthcoming. It includes essays by the curator Joann Moser; John Hanhardt, consulting senior curator for film and media arts; and the critic John Yau. It will be available in the BAM/PFA museum store and online for $65 (hardcover) or $39.95 (paperback).
August 2010 through December 2010
A dazzling array of Japan’s greatest artistic traditions from ancient to modern will be presented in BAM/PFA’s major fall exhibition Delightful Pursuits. The Clark Center of Hanford, California, and the Berkeley Art Museum will collaborate on bringing one of the most significant collections of Japanese art in America to the Bay Area with a presentation of over 100 works of art. The exhibition will cover the broad collecting interests of the Center’s founder, fourth-generation San Joaquin Valley resident Willard Clark, whose passion for Japan’s art and culture has resulted in a collection representing all major areas of artistic endeavor, with dates ranging from the late Heian period to the 21st century. Selections from the collection will be organized thematically, addressing topics of Buddhist art, literati painting, the natural environment, everyday life, bamboo sculpture, and contemporary ceramics, as well as works that celebrate a uniquely Japanese sense of humor.Opening in 2011:
Delightful Pursuits is organized jointly by the Berkeley Art Museum and the Clark Center for Japanese Art and Culture and is co-curated by Andreas Marks, Clark Center Director, and Julia M White, senior curator of Asian Art at BAM/PFA.
In conjunction with the exhibition a symposium is being planned for Fall 2010.
Eva Hesse: Studiowork
January 26, 2011 through April 24, 2011
This solo exhibition of German-born American artist Eva Hesse’s work is on view at The Fruitmarket Gallery’s 2009 Edinburgh Art Festival through October 25, 2009. A major figure in post-war art, the exhibition reveals new insight into Hesse’s work, the result of new research by renowned Hesse scholar Professor Briony Fer. Eva Hesse: Studiowork is curated by Fer and Barry Rosen, Director of The Estate of Eva Hesse. The curator in charge for the BAM/PFA presentation is Lucinda Barnes, chief curator and director of programs and collections.
