Maren Hassinger: Living Moving Growing @ BAMPFA - Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive + Catalogue

Maren Hassinger: Living Moving Growing

Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

June 6 - November 29, 2026

Maren Hassinger: Tree Duet I, 

5617 San Vicente Blvd, Los Angeles, c. 1977/2021 

Silver gelatin print, 20 x 30 in 

Photo: Adam Avila

Courtesy of Susan Inglett Gallery, NYC

Maren Hassinger

Love (Pyramid), 2008/2015 

Installation view, The Sondheim Finalists,

Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD. 

Pink plastic bags filled with air, breath, and

love notes, steelhead pushpins, Dimensions variable (unique) 

Courtesy of the Artist and Susan Inglett Gallery, NYC

The most comprehensive retrospective to date of MAREN HASSINGER will be on view at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), featuring half a century of work by one of the most influential living artists in the United States. Maren Hassinger: Living Moving Growing encompasses the full scope of Hassinger’s output across an eclectic range of forms, including large-scale sculpture, site-specific installations, video, and performance. The exhibition displays more than twenty of Hassinger’s most notable works from the 1970s to the present, as well as participatory and performance elements executed in partnership with the artist. Maren Hassinger: Living Moving Growing is accompanied by an extensive exhibition catalogue, featuring new scholarly essays and previously unpublished documentation of Hassinger’s work.

Maren Hassinger began her career in the 1970s and brought new perspectives to contemporary art, positioned in dialogue with a cohort of Black artists, feminist artists, and artists addressing ecological concerns. Known for constantly experimenting with impermanent and industrial materials as well as performance, she has worked at the intersection of dance, sculpture, video, and installation over the past five decades. While her work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions at leading museums across the country, the ephemerality of her practice requires that many of her sculptures and installations be recreated anew for each presentation. Maren Hassinger: Living Moving Growing is the most ambitious retrospective to date of the artist’s body of work, assembling major sculptures alongside temporary installations that will be recreated at BAMPFA. Notable examples include Love (2008), a site-specific sculpture composed of pink plastic bags inflated by human breath and filled with love notes; Beach (1980), a floor installation consisting of sand, plaster, and wooden dowels; and multiple sculptures that incorporate recently harvested tree branches, which BAMPFA will realize in partnership with the University of California Botanical Garden.

Over the course of Maren Hassinger: Living Moving Growing, BAMPFA will host a series of participatory workshops engaging visitors to co-create to a new work that will be incorporated into the retrospective. This has become a major aspect of Hassinger’s practice, extending her work in performance to engage directly with audiences. Hassinger will invite visitors to join her in twisting and knotting newspapers to create a new, large-scale installation. Assembled within the gallery, the installation will continue to grow throughout the run of the exhibition. The exhibition also features archival documentation, including video and photographs of many of Hassinger’s performances and ephemeral public art projects. BAMPFA is also working with Maren Hassinger to restage one of her most iconic performances, Pink Trash (1982) on UC Berkeley’s Crescent Lawn, across the street from the museum. 

Born in Los Angeles in 1947, Maren Hassinger studied dance and sculpture at Bennington College and received an MFA in Fiber Structure from UCLA. In the 1970s, she began collaborating with other artists as part of the collective Studio Z, including Senga Nengudi, Ulysses Jenkins, and David Hammons, among others. In 1980, Hassinger had her first solo exhibition at Just Above Midtown Gallery in New York; the following year, she became the first Black artist to have a solo exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Hassinger relocated to the East Coast in 1984 to participate in the artist-in-residence program at the Studio Museum in Harlem. After several years on Long Island, she moved to Baltimore, where she became Director of the Rinehart School of Sculpture at the Maryland Institute College of Art, a position she held for twenty years. She currently lives and works in Harlem, New York.

Maren Hassinger: Living Moving Growing marks the culmination of a renewed interest in Hassinger’s work in recent years, during which she has been featured in acclaimed group exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and The Whitney Museum of American Art, among other leading art institutions. Her retrospective at BAMPFA will be co-curated by BAMPFA Chief Curator Margot Norton and Senior Curator Anthony Graham.

In conjunction with the retrospective, BAMPFA is partnering with DelMonico Books / D.A.P. to publish a fully illustrated catalogue on Maren Hassinger, the most extensive scholarly publication on this artist ever assembled. The catalogue will feature an introductory essay by Graham and a roundtable conversation moderated by Norton with Hassinger’s collaborators, including gallery owner, filmmaker, and activist Linda Goode Bryant, and artists Senga Nengudi and Ava Hassinger—Maren’s daughter and an accomplished artist in her own right. In addition, the catalogue will include an original interview with Hassinger conducted by the distinguished art historian Lowery Stokes Sims. Additional essays will be contributed by Robyn Farrell, Senior Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs of The Kitchen; Kristen Juarez, Senior Research Specialist at the Getty Research Institute; and Hilton Als, UC Berkeley professor and longtime critic and essayist at The New Yorker.

“Maren Hassinger’s practice has been of great influence for generations of artists–from her early collaborative performances and experimental installations with Studio Z and JAM to her direct impact over decades as a teacher, and through her monumental sculptural installations in major museum collections across the United States,” said Margot Norton. “We are thrilled to finally bring her artworks and their stories from across her career together through our exhibition, and to showcase Hassinger’s profound contributions to contemporary art.”

“For decades, Maren Hassinger has created sculptures and installations that transcend disciplinary boundaries, transforming industrial and mass-produced materials into evocative abstractions,” said Anthony Graham. “This exhibition showcases how these innovative works have drawn attention to subtle movements and forms of our everyday lives, connecting us to one another and to the world around us.”

“Maren Hassinger’s work invites us to reflect on the beauty and complexity of human connection—through movement, material, and shared experience. Presenting this landmark retrospective at BAMPFA underscores our commitment to amplifying artists whose practices challenge conventions and inspire collective engagement across generations,” said BAMPFA’s Executive Director, Julie Rodrigues Widholm. 

Artist Maren Hassinger

Maren Hassinger (b. 1947) has spent the past five decades building an interdisciplinary practice that articulates the relationship between nature and humanity. Carefully choosing materials for their innate characteristics, Hassinger has explored the subjects of movement, family, love, nature, environment, consumerism, identity, and race. The artist uses her materials to mimic nature, whether bundling them to resemble a monolithic sheaf of wheat or planting them in cement to create an industrial garden. Over the past decade, Hassinger has been commissioned to make work for Sculpture Milwaukee (curated by Ugo Rondinone); The Art Institute of Chicago; Dia Bridgehampton; Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; the Rockefeller Foundation, Tarrytown; and the Aspen Art Museum. Hassinger was recently honored with an exhibition focused on her collaborative performance work with Senga Nengudi at the Cooley Gallery, Reed College, Portland, OR traveling to the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH (2024), as well as a two-person survey alongside Nengudi at the Institut Valencià d'Art Modern, Valencia (2025). Hassinger is the recipient of the Women’s Caucus for the Arts Lifetime Achievement Award. Her work can be found in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; the Guggenheim Museum; the Hirshhorn Museum; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Art; the Walker Art Center; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.

Maren Hassinger: Living Moving Growing is curated by Margot Norton, Chief Curator, and Anthony Graham, Senior Curator.

BERKELEY ART MUSEUM AND PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE - BAMPFA

2155 Center Street, Berkeley, CA 94720

bampfa.org

Helen Mirra & Sean Thackrey @ BAMPFA, Berkeley - No Horizon

No Horizon: Helen Mirra and Sean Thackrey
UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA)
July 3 - August 25, 2019

An exhibition at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) showcases new series by two Bay Area artists whose work is influenced by Zen Buddhism. No Horizon: Helen Mirra and Sean Thackrey marks the first dual exhibition of work by Helen Mirra and Sean Thackrey, two artists based in Marin County whose respective practices emphasize simplicity, texture, and a deep awareness of place. The exhibition features more than a dozen recent works by each artist, most of which are receiving their first museum presentation.

The title of the exhibition is inspired by Without Horizon, a series of works created by Sean Thackrey in collaboration with the artist and composer John Cage. A winemaker and art dealer who cofounded the San Francisco gallery Thackrey & Robertson in 1970, Sean Thackrey has sustained a decades-long photography practice, producing works he describes as “objects, marks on paper, produced by photography. . . meant to be objects of contemplation.” The BAMPFA exhibition presents work from Sean Thackrey’s latest extended series, created between 2012 and the present: photographs of weathered slabs of Venetian stone, capturing the subtle yet expressive transformations of Venice’s distinctive limestone surfaces as they slowly decay over time. Each of  Sean Thackrey’s photographs are mounted on dyed panels of wood, meticulously crafted by the artist to resonate with the distinctive texture of each image.

Sean Thackrey’s photographs invite viewers to engage with the uncanny beauty of seemingly ordinary surfaces, evoking through their simplicity a mood of contemplative repose that reflects the artist’s interest in Zen Buddhism. A fellow Zen practitioner, Helen Mirra arrives at a similar effect through her own distinctive series of works, a set of intimately scaled woven objects that capture her somatic experiences and the outdoor geography of the North Bay landscape. Named for the month in which they were made, these works are generally between two and three feet in size, and are characterized by subtle variations in color and texture that seem to shift when viewed from different angles. The nuances of the material—mostly linen, with some wool, cotton, and silk—combine with a restrained palate to convey intuitive sensations of place, atmosphere, and season. The exhibition at BAMPFA includes excerpts from this series of works created between 2017 and the present.

Emerging from different generations and working in different media, Sean Thackrey and Helen Mirra have both created bodies of work that similarly capture the ephemeral beauty of being and time. The minute variations of color and texture in their works reward close viewings and relaxed concentration, recalling the Zen instruction to “do nothing” as a stance of open engagement with the world. Notably both artists have chosen to focus their attention, and that of their viewers, on seemingly everyday materials, highlighting aesthetic and even spiritual dimensions in the simplicity of fabric and stone.

“We’re honored to bring together at BAMPFA two great Bay Area artists whose work embraces the simple act of seeing as an inspiration to deep reflection and understanding,” said BAMPFA Director and Chief Curator Lawrence Rinder, who organized the exhibition. “In both Helen Mirra and Sean Thackrey’s remarkable bodies of work, we are moved by the simultaneous expression of the particular and universal.”

In conjunction with No Horizon: Helen Mirra and Sean Thackrey, BAMPFA presents a reading by Bay Area poets Lyn Hejinian and Frances Richard, who respond to Mirra and Thackrey’s work with original compositions that grapple in language with wordlessness. The reading takes place on Friday, August 23 at 12 p.m. and is free with museum admission.

No Horizon: Helen Mirra and Sean Thackrey is organized by BAMPFA Director and Chief Curator Lawrence Rinder with Curatorial Assistant Lucia Momoh. The exhibition is made possible with lead support from Carla and David Crane.

BAMPFA
2155 Center Street, Berkeley, CA
bampfa.org

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha @ BAMPFA, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, University of California

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Avant Dictee
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, University of California
January 31 – April 22, 2018

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha 

A Ble Wail, 1975

Performance, Worth Ryder Gallery, University of California, Berkeley 

BAMPFA; gift of the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Foundation 

Photo: Trip Callaghan

The UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) presents an innovatively organized exhibition of work by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951–1982), the first solo presentation in more than a decade of work by the accomplished artist, filmmaker, and writer. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Avant Dictee features nearly fifty of Cha’s works in a range of media, organized for the first time into distinct thematic groupings inspired by the ten chapters of her iconic 1982 book Dictee.

Drawing from Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s rarely exhibited archives—which were donated to BAMPFA in 1992—Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Avant Dictee captures the interdisciplinary scope of Cha’s artistic output, which encompassed photography, poetry, film, video, live performance, mail art, sculpture, works on paper, and more. The selected works highlight the artist’s interest in the spiritual and aesthetic dimensions of language, which is also a central focus of Dictee—a formally ambitious work that includes passages in English, French, and Korean. The exhibition is organized into ten sections that correspond to the chapters of Dictee, with excerpts from the book displayed alongside individual works to illuminate connections and themes that extend throughout the artist’s practice.

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

Re Dis Appearing, 1977

Video; black and white, sound, 3 min.

BAMPFA; gift of the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Foundation

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha 

Repetitive Pattern, 1975

Ink on cloth, sewn with thread; 46 x 46 in.

BAMPFA; gift of the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Foundation 

Photo: Benjamin Blackwell 

Born in South Korea, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha immigrated with her family to the United States as a child and settled in the Bay Area, where she studied French at San Francisco’s Convent of the Sacred Heart before enrolling at UC Berkeley. Much of the work in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Avant Dictee was created during Cha’s time as a student in Berkeley, where she earned four degrees and worked as an employee of BAMPFA. The exhibition includes rarely seen correspondence and other ephemera from Cha’s life, which ended in 1982 with her untimely death at the age of 31.

“By exploring Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s art through the lens of Dictee, and vice versa, the exhibition offers viewers an opportunity to appreciate the global resonance of the artist's oeuvre and the ways in which it was profoundly interconnected across works and media, returning again and again to certain key themes,” said Assistant Curator Stephanie Cannizzo, who curated the exhibition.

”We are excited to introduce Cha’s work to a new generation while at the same time offering a fresh take on this tremendously important and original artist,” said BAMPFA Director and Chief Curator Lawrence Rinder, who has previously curated multiple exhibitions of Cha’s work. “This exploration of Cha’s oeuvre through the lens of Dictee could really only happen at BAMPFA, where we are privileged to hold such an extraordinarily deep archive of the artist’s work and ephemera.”

In conjunction with Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Avant Dictee, BAMPFA is mounting a panel discussion and other public programs to reexamine the artist’s legacy; a full schedule of these events will be announced at bampfa.org. Copies of Dictee are on hand in the exhibition gallery and are available to purchase at the BAMPFA store.

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Avant Dictee is organized by Assistant Curator Stephanie Cannizzo and made possible with support from the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Archive Fund and Young Chul and Elizabeth Cha Park.

BAMPFA
www.bampfa.org

Conceptual Art @ BAMPFA, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Mind Over Matter: Conceptual Art from the Collection
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA)
October 19 - December 23, 2016

Ant Farm

Media Burn, July 4, 1975

Performance, Cow Palace, San Francisco

BAMPFA collection

Photo: © John F. Turner

The University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) presents Mind Over Matter: Conceptual Art from the Collection, on view October 19 to December 23, 2016. Showcasing BAMPFA’s considerable holdings of first-generation international Conceptual art, it is one of several shows spotlighting key areas of the collection during the inaugural year in BAMPFA’s new downtown Berkeley building. Mind Over Matter is a lively illustration of the Conceptualist notion, reflected in the exhibition title, that the idea behind an artwork is primary, and its manifestation is secondary. The exhibition is divided between language-based works and performance documentation, in the form photography, film and video, mail art, artists’ books, and ephemera by Ant Farm, James Lee Byars, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Lowell Darling, Gilbert & George, Fluxus, and others.

The wide-ranging exhibition offers text-based works by such well-known artists as John Baldessari, Jenny Holzer, Allen Ruppersberg, and Ed Ruscha. Text also figures importantly in objects by Alice Hutchins, and maps in more documentary-like works by Howard Fried, Douglas Huebler, Richard Long, and Robert Smithson. Posters by Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris, Tom Marioni, and Lawrence Weiner show how ephemera was integrated into Conceptual exhibitions of the late 1960s to the 1980s, while Yoko Ono’s instructional “paintings,” collected in the artist’s book Grapefruit, provide a link to Fluxus’s event scores in which text and object, viewer and performer are inseparable.

Performance documentation was a focus of early video art, and the exhibition features key examples by Marina Abramovic and Ulay, Eleanor Antin, Scott Burton, Terry Fox, and Carolee Schneemann, to name a few. In video art by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Bruce Nauman, Linda Montano, Ant Farm, and Paul Kos we see the various ways artists adopted this new medium.

Not all the artists in Mind Over Matter reject the art object altogether. Among the most intriguing and delightful pieces on view are the various boxes and Fluxkits, including George Maciunas’s Burglary Fluxkit, providing all the keys needed for break-ins, but no addresses.

BAMPFA is one of the world’s leading centers for the study of Conceptual art and related materials. Its collection, housed in the Steven Leiber Conceptual Art Study Center, includes the archives of the Museum of Conceptual Art, the Ant Farm collective, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, as well as significant Fluxus and mail art holdings and extensive materials on James Lee Byars and Lowell Darling. The recently acquired Steven J. Leiber collection added a wide selection of works on paper, posters, mail art, artists’ books, and ephemera by virtually all of the major international Conceptualists.

As part of BAMPFA’s ongoing commitment to engage students with our collections, curator Constance Lewallen invited UC Berkeley professor of art history Julia Bryan-Wilson to bring her students to view Conceptual works from the collection during the planning stages of the exhibition. Twelve undergraduates enrolled in the course Contemporary Art in the Americas were selected to engage withand write about works included in Mind Over Matter. Their essays, as well as contributions by Bryan-Wilson and Lewallen, are presented in an accompanying booklet that will be available for download on the BAMPFA website.

Mind Over Matter: Conceptual Art from the Collection is organized by BAMPFA Adjunct Curator Constance M. Lewallen. The exhibition is supported in part by Alexandra Bowes and Stephen Williamson, Rena Bransten, and Robin Wright and Ian Reeves.

Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA)
2155 Center Street Berkeley, CA 94704
www.bampfa.org

Cecilia Edefalk @ the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Cecilia Edefalk / MATRIX 261
The University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive  

June 29 - October 16, 2016

CECILIA EDEFALK

Silver Roots, 2010

Polished bronze; 21 ½ x 7 ¼ in.

© Cecilia Edefalk, courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels

The University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) presents Cecilia Edefalk/MATRIX 261. The Stockholm-based artist Cecilia Edefalk’s work explores historical memory, fluctuations of time, and the symbolic significance of light. Her paintings, photographs, watercolors, and sculptures reveal an intuitive and reflective approach to making art. Edefalk’s works typically originate from a single motif—whether it be the crane fly that she discovers on her kitchen window, or a transfixing Roman sculpture she encounters in a museum—that she then represents repeatedly in various forms. The work selected for MATRIX 261 focuses on Edefalk’s decades-long engagement with the natural environment.

In recent years Edefalk has been documenting a dandelion-filled meadow near her home in various moments of light and states of bloom. One large photograph in the exhibition shows part of the field illuminated by resplendent, filtered light that turns the bulbs of the flowers into glowing orbs. Another large-scale photograph shows a hand delicately holding a perfect, spherical seed head before the wind carries the seeds away. Also on display are three small paintings which Edefalk produced in thin washes of black-and-white tempera, each revealing the meadow in different sunlit states, much as an Impressionist painter might have done in the nineteenth century. 

In the late 1970s Edefalk set out on a three-year journey across Europe with a botanist friend to document and draw coastal wildflowers they encountered in areas of historical significance in England, Italy, Spain, and Portugal. The flowers and plants she captured in watercolor act as her lens onto these ancient landscapes. Edefalk originally made 160 of these works to comprise a botanical book on Mediterranean flora, which was never published; a selection of twenty of these appear in the exhibition. Birch trees, common in Sweden, are another subject that has inspired over the last several years. Edefalk’s interest in the tree originated from a traumatic moment when the artist witnessed the felling of a beloved Weeping Birch on her neighborhood block. She recovered bark, branches, and leaves from the site and transformed them into dozens of cast bronze sculptures to memorialize the tree.

Other paintings, sculptures, and photographs displayed in the exhibition point to her interest in historical sculpture, in particular a Roman marble mask of Marcus Aurelius that she encountered in the Malmö Konstmuseum, which became the foundation for a large, growing body of work. This spawned the series of paintings To view the painting from within (2002), which depicts Aurelius set against a pale blue background. The perspective from which Edefalk painted the sculpture corresponds with the phase of the moon of the day on which it was painted. A related series of photographs, To view the painting from outside, similarly shows the artist’s eye traveling around the bust with the paintings behind, again capturing many different sitelines. Edefalk’s exploration of the Aurelius portrait continues in another series of bronze sculptures that combine the visage with leaves and pieces of tree bark. In each work, she captures the evanescence of subjects that often exude a mystical and fragile quality marked by time and space.

MATRIX 261 is the artist’s first solo exhibition in a US museum in a decade, and her first ever on the West Coast.

Artist biography

Born in 1954 in Norrköping, Sweden, CECILIA EDEFALK studied at the Royal Academy of Art, Stockholm, from 1981 to 1986; and Konstfack, University College of Arts, Craft, and Design, Stockholm, from 1973 to 1977. One of Sweden’s most celebrated artists, Edefalk has had numerous one-person museum exhibitions, including at Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland; Moderna Muséet, Stockholm; Malmö Konstmuseum, Malmö; Lunds Konsthall, Lund; Kunsthalle Kiel, Germany; Nationalmuseum, Stockholm; Art Unlimited, Basel; The Art Institute of Chicago; Nordic Watercolor Museum, Skärhamn, Sweden; Parasol unit, London; and Museum für Kunst, Bremerhaven, Germany. A major retrospective will open in the fall of 2016 at Prins Eugens Waldmarsudde in Stockholm. Her work has appeared in many group shows at various international venues including at the the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Documenta 11, Kassel, Germany; Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the 22nd São Paolo Biennial. She has received many awards and grants including the Barbro & Holger Bäckströms stipendium, Sweden; Edstrandska stiftelsen, Malmö, Sweden; and the Hans-Viksten-stipendium, Sweden. Edefalk lives and works in Stockholm. She is represented by Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels; and Stene Projects, Stockholm.

BAMPFA
UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
http://bampfa.berkeley.edu

Beauty Revealed: Images of Women in Qing Dynasty Chinese Painting at BAM/PFA, Berkeley, California

Beauty Revealed: Images of Women in Qing Dynasty Chinese Painting 

University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive - BAM / PFA 

September 25 - December 22, 2013 

Beauty About to Bathe, China, 18th century 

Hanging scroll, ink and colors on silk; 61 x 34 ¼ in. 

Private collection: Ferdinand M. Bertholet, Amsterdam 

Photo courstesy BAM / PFA 

Featuring nearly thirty works, Beauty Revealed: Images of Women in Qing Dynasty Chinese Painting is the first to bring together a genre of Chinese painting known as meiren hua, or paintings of beautiful women. Situating the works within the social and economic contexts of the High Qing period (midseventeenth to the late eighteenth century), the exhibition challenges the prevailing opinion that these subjects are high status women—either members of the court or other privileged women. By reading the visual codes embedded in the images, Beauty Revealed instead makes the case that these women are courtesans.

Borrowing seldom-before-utilized techniques from the West, including one-point perspective and heavy opaque colors, the artists, many of them unknown professional painters who painted on demand and for a fee, pursue a realism not previously seen in Chinese painting. Rather than the willowy beauty shown in a garden setting or surrounded by family among luxurious furnishings typical of earlier periods, these paintings generally feature a single, near life-size figure, often in a brazenly unladylike posture. Their garments tend to be low cut and transparent, and their bound feet exposed. 

For example, the direct gaze of the woman in Putting out the Lamp, addressed to the (presumably male) intended viewer, offers a suggestive undercurrent of greater intimacy, one of the hallmarks of this genre. Other codes of accessibility include the woman’s relaxed posture with right leg drawn up under left, the open sleeves that reveal her arms, and the highly stylized extension of her right hand in a controlled gesture reaching to snuff out the light. Her expression engages the audience in a way never before seen in Chinese figure painting. 

Putting Out the Lamp, China, late 18th century (detail) 

Hanging scroll, ink and colors on paper; 65 x 24-5/8 in. 

University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Gift of James Cahill and Hsingyuan Tsao 

Photo courstesy BAM / PFA 

The backdrops further draw viewers into the women’s world, conveying significant information about their wealth, taste, learning, and accomplishments. The women are depicted surrounded by everyday objects packed with erotic symbolism. The art has an immediate impact, inviting viewers to enter and enjoy another world, one perhaps longed for and unattainable. 

In addition to several paintings from BAM/PFA’s own collection, Beauty Revealed features loans from institutions and private collections from around the US and Europe. It is organized into distinct sections that explore the intimate life of women within the garden, home, bath, and brothel. Curated by Senior Curator for Asian Art Julia M. White in collaboration with UC Berkeley Professor Emeritus James Cahill, the exhibition is accompanied by an exquisitely illustrated catalog with essays by Cahill, White, and noted historian Sarah Handler. The catalog entries are by Chen Fongfong, with contributions by Nancy Berliner and White. Published by UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Distributed by D.A.P. , 126 pages; 67 color illustrations.

Colloquium, November 22, 2013: In tribute to James Cahill's fundamental insights regarding Chinese experiments with perspectival representation during the late-imperial period, the Institute for East  Asian Studies will host a symposium on perspective in Chinese painting to accompany Beauty Revealed. Participants will include Eugene Wang, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Professor of Asian Art, History of Art & Architecture, Harvard University; Richard Vinograd, Christensen Fund Professor in Asian Art, Department of Art & Art History at Stanford University; and Nancy Berliner, Curator of Chinese Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. 

University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive - BAM / PFA

Museum's website: bampfa.berkeley.edu

Omer Fast Nostalgia 2009 Film

 

Nostalgia, a new film by the artist OMER FAST, receives New York Debut at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Nostalgia is currently receiving its West Coast premiere at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, in Berkeley, CA.

 

Omer Fast, Nostalgia III (production still), 2009. Super 16mm film transferred to high-definition video, color, sound; 32:48 minutes. Photograph by Thierry Bal.
Courtesy gb agency, Paris; Postmasters, New York; and Arratia, Beer, Berlin

 

Omer Fast: Nostalgia is a new three-part film and video installation that continues Omer Fast's fascination with exploring configurations of fact and fiction through narrative and filmic constructions, intertwining modes of documentary and dramatization. In this exhibition, organized by Tina Kukielski, senior curatorial assistant, the work receives its New York debut at the Whitney Museum of American Art. It is presented as part of the 2008 Bucksbaum Award.

Nostalgia (2009) begins with a fragment from an interview between the Omer Fast and an African refugee seeking asylum in London, during which the artist/interviewer is told how the refugee built a trap for catching a partridge back home in his native Nigeria. Themes of cultural and geographical dislocation fall against a backdrop that seamlessly distorts a sense of time, blending past, present, and future in each of the three parts of Nostalgia. The installation itself becomes a metaphor for the traps of storytelling, history, and memory, the experience of making our own truths and building our own identities from these truths.

Omer Fast (b. 1972) tracks individual stories in the midst of larger social or historical circumstances/situations, in this case immigration and asylum. His earlier works include Spielberg’s List (2003), a video installation in which the artist visited Krakow, the city in Poland that served as the setting for Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, and interviewed city residents who had worked as extras on the film. In Godville (2005), the artist interviewed costumed performers at the Colonial Williamsburg living-history museum in Virginia; they describe the lives of their eighteenth-century characters and their own personal lives in ways that seem interchangeable. In The Casting (2007), shown in the 2008 Whitney Biennial, Fast, appearing as himself, interviews a young American army sergeant who recounts two stories, which seem to be his own anguished memories, one about dating a woman while stationed in Germany, and the other of accidentally killing a civilian in Iraq. These two narrative strands are blended as if they had become inextricable in the mind of the narrator.

Writing in The Washington Post at the time of the showing of The Casting in the 2008 Biennial, Blake Gopnik singled out the work as one of the exhibition’s best: “It's no news to anyone that the stories that we tell about ourselves and our times are mostly built from fragments and imaginings. But I can't think of any artist who has managed to depict … the realities of that construction as subtly, as convincingly, or as engrossingly as Fast.”

 

About the Artist

Omer Fast was born in Jerusalem and currently lives in Berlin. His work has been shown at the Whitney in the 2002 and 2008 Biennials. In addition to receiving the Whitney’s Bucksbaum Award in 2008, he won the Nationalgalerie Prize for Young Art in 2009. Solo exhibitions include UC Berkeley Art Museum; South London Gallery, UK; Kunsthaus Baselland, Basel; Lunds Konsthall, Sweden; Kunstverein Hannover; and the Museum of Modern Art, Vienna. This fall his work is being featured in New York in Performa 09. Fast received his M.F.A. from Hunter College of the City University of New York. Omer Fast’s work has entered the collections of many museums, including the Whitney, the Guggenheim, Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof, the Hirshhorn, the Metropolitan Museum, the Tate, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He has been included in group exhibitions most recently at ZKM, Karlsruhe; Liverpool Biennial 2008; Manifesta 7; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. This is Omer Fast’s first solo museum exhibition in New York.

 

Nostalgia was co-produced by South London Gallery; the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; and the Verein der Freunde der Nationalgalerie, Berlin.

Major support for Omer Fast: Nostalgia is provided by an endowment from the Martin Bucksbaum Family Foundation.

 

Omer Fast: Nostalgia is on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art from December 10, 2009, through February 14, 2010.

Lise Sarfati - The New Life (2003)

In the serie of color photographs taken through United States -from Austin to Asheville, Portland to Berkeley, Oakland, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Louisiana and small towns in Georgia- each portrait dramatizes the complexity of adolescent identity showing an intensity that adults will never be able to experience again. Lise Sarfati explores the dividing lines between good and bad, happiness and sadness, innocence and perversity, reality and fantasy. With a minimal choregraphy, she activates connections with her subjects in their everyday spaces and situations – bedrooms, backyards, kitchens, grocery stores. The title The New Life refers to Dante Aligheri and Beatrice Portinari, who were children when they met in 1274 in Firenze "She died and La Vita Nuova is a poem of love for Beatrice, with whom he was in love all his life" - A book has been published La Vie Nouvelle The New Life -Twin Palms publisher, 2005.

Grew up in France, Lise Sarfati lives in Paris. She obtained a master’s degree in Russian studies from the Sorbonne. She was the official photographer of the Academy des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Sarfati moved to Russia and photographed there for ten years. She received grants from both the Fiacre and Villa Medicis. She received the Prix Niepce in Paris and the Infinity award of International Center of Photography in New York for her work.

Related Post:

Lise Sarfati - Mother & Daughter (2005-2007) Lise Sarfati - Immaculate (2006-2007)

Lise Sarfati Exhibition in Italy [08-2008]