2155 Center St.
Berkeley CA
(510) 642-0808
The UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive is the visual arts center of the University of California, Berkeley, the nation’s leading public research university. Our mission is to inspire the imagination and ignite critical dialogue through art and film, engaging audiences from the UC Berkeley campus, the Bay Area, and beyond. Each year BAMPFA presents more than twenty art exhibitions, 450 film programs, and dozens of performances, as well as lectures, symposia, and tours. Learn more about our history.
Collections
The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive’s comprehensive collection—more than 19,000 works of art and 17,500 films and videos—is characterized by artistic excellence and innovation, intellectual exploration, and social commentary. Representing a tremendous diversity of global cultures and historical periods, the collection has particular strengths in Ming and Qing dynasty Chinese painting, Mughal dynasty Indian miniature painting, Baroque painting, old master prints and drawings, early American painting, nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century photography, Conceptual art, and international contemporary art, classic and international cinema, West Coast avant-garde film, international animation, Soviet cinema, early video art, and the largest collection of Japanese films outside of Japan. BAMPFA’s Modern collection is built around a remarkable core holding of fifty paintings by the Abstract Expressionist painter and teacher Hans Hofmann and includes significant works by Mark Rothko, Helen Frankenthaler, Ad Reinhardt, Jackson Pollock, David Smith, and Clyfford Still.
Exhibitions
BAMPFA offers one of the most distinguished and provocative programs of art and film exhibitions in North America, reflecting the diverse interests of the University and Bay Area communities. Each year, we present and important temporary exhibitions that range from classical Asian art to challenging work by today’s artists.
Our exhibition program includes installations that highlight the richness and scope of our collections, recent avant-garde work presented in the MATRIX Program, thematic exhibitions, artist retrospectives, and the annual UC Berkeley MFA exhibition. We have mounted important exhibitions of the works of Ant Farm, Joe Brainard, Joan Brown, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Robert Colescott, Jay DeFeo, Juan Gris, Eva Hesse, Paul Kos, Robert Mapplethorpe, Barry McGee, Richard Misrach, Bruce Nauman, Peter Paul Rubens, Martin Puryear, Sebastião Salgado, William Wiley, and many others, as well as thematic exhibitions such as Made in U.S.A.: An Americanization in Modern Art, the ‘50s & ‘60s; State of Mind: New California Art Circa 1970; In a Different Light: Visual Culture, Sexual Identity, Queer Practice; Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet; and Masterworks of Chinese Painting: In Pursuit of Mists and Clouds.
http://bampfa.org/