"Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection" October 27, 2024 - April 20, 2025

Bringing together more than seventy artworks by women artists from the Shah Garg Collection, Making Their Mark illuminates transgenerational affinities, influences, and methodologies among pathbreaking artists from the postwar era to the present.Making

"Making Their Mark: The Next Generation" March 26 - April 20, 2025

Organized as a collaboration between the Arts and Humanities Academy at Berkeley High School and BAMPFA’s Education Department, this monthlong show presents work in a range of media by students in Berkeley High School’s senior AP Art class made in response to the exhibition Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection.

Teaching Wall / Lives on Paper, Drawing as Trace January 30 - March 23, 2025

This exhibition presents works on paper from BAMPFA’s collection, organized in partnership with Todd Olson, Professor of Early Modern Art in the Department of History of Art at UC Berkeley. It offers historical and cultural perspectives on a keystone of fine arts training: drawing the human figure through direct observation of a live model. This display provides students with direct access to artworks and themes connected to their classes in the History of Art and Art Practice Departments. The foundations of life drawing as an academic practice can be traced to Renaissance Italy, where artists aspired to compose istoria, significant pictorial narratives of heroism and emotional power that featured men as primary subjects. Consequently, artistic training involved the execution of preparatory drawings based on male models in the studio that could later be adapted to diverse storylines. Despite the appearance of masculine authority in finished pictures, life drawings often reflect the duration of labor and stress of posing, and offer relics of studio props, such as supportive pedestals, sticks, crutches, or walls. They also allow us to consider how a model’s subordination and duress could be harnessed for telling abject narratives—such as those unfolding around Christ’s passion or the raging one-eyed Polyphemus spying on the unfaithful nymph Galatea—where drawings are haunted by the power relations between artist and model. Life drawings can also be seen as traces of intimate and mutually dependent relationships within artists’ domestic and teaching spaces, as in the twentieth-century works by Hans Boehler and Chiura Obata.

"MATRIX 286 / Amol K Patil: A Forest of Remembrance" January 18 - April 27, 2025

Amol K Patil (b. 1987, Mumbai, India) works across painting, sculpture, performance, and installation to bring the lived experiences of India’s urban working-class inhabitants into vibrant relief. In his multipart exploration of Mumbai’s chawls, residential structures built in the early 1900s to house mill workers and other migrant laborers, Patil seeks to capture the everyday humanity of those historically on the margins. Despite the poverty of their surroundings, the chawl residents have for over a century created lively communal spaces infused with the sounds, scents, and textures of their daily rhythms. In recent years, government-backed plans to redevelop these sites have displaced thousands of families, underscoring how the urban poor remain at the mercy of larger structures of power. Drawing upon his own family’s history of dissent—his father was an avant-garde playwright who performed in grassroots theater productions and his grandfather wrote songs in the powada tradition of spoken word protest—Patil shines light on the social and political injustices these communities face and the dignity, creativity, and resourcefulness with which they continue to fight for their rights. A Forest of Remembrance, Patil’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States, presents an installation of newly commissioned paintings and sculptures. The walls of the gallery have been coated in layers of blue and yellow hues, textured and weathered to mimic the layers of paint in the chawls. Within this mise-en-scène, small-scale paintings offer windows into intimate interiors, while the platforms that punctuate the space recall the makeshift stage sets on which his father and other theater activists often performed. The sculptures—modeled in clay and then cast in bronze—give shape to the people who have for generations occupied the chawls, their defiant hands and feet extending from their collective bodies in dynamic protest.

"Art Wall / Tanya Aguiñiga: Border Fall Height" January 18 - July 13, 2025

Tanya Aguiñiga (b. 1978, San Diego; raised in Tijuana, Mexico) creates sculptures and installations using natural materials and objects gathered from her environment. Her Art Wall installation at BAMPFA is her first solo presentation in the Bay Area. Participating in a redefinition of the distinctions between art, design, and craft, Aguiñiga upsets these hierarchies through her innovative practice. She situates her work in conversation with urgent issues affecting our world today, from tensions that define national politics to rapid climate change affecting the environment. For her Art Wall installation, Aguiñiga produced a series of rust prints depicting a thirty-foot ladder. These works were made using an actual object that Aguiñiga found near the US–Mexico border, where the boundary between nations has been demarcated by a thirty-foot fence, among other militarized forms of division.

Collection Focus / Sky Hopinka: Sunflower Siege Engine March 12 - August 17, 2025

Sky Hopinka (b. 1984; lives and works in New York) is a multidisciplinary artist working in video, photography, text, and installation. A member of the Ho-Chunk Nation and a descendant of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians, Hopinka examines the poetic relationship between place, memory, and Indigenous sovereignty. Hopinka’s lyrical video Sunflower Siege Engine (2022) layers archival footage of the 1969 Alcatraz occupation by Native activists with vivid scenes of the Pacific redwoods and Cahokia Mounds, a historical site in present-day Illinois.The work features footage of Mohawk activist Richard Oakes (1942–1972) reading the defiant “Proclamation: To the Great White Father and All His People” at the Alcatraz occupation—a reclamation of Native land and a defining moment in the rise of the American Indian Movement. The camera zooms out to reveal that this recording is playing on a laptop in Hopinka’s studio, blurring personal narrative with historical memory. In this scene, Hopinka interweaves his own voice with Oakes’s proclamation, creating a dialogue across time that reenvisions the notorious prison as a symbol of liberation.A new addition to BAMPFA’s collection, Sunflower Siege Engine reflects a lineage of Indigenous resistance connected to the Bay Area today. Through vivid cinematography, the grain of archival footage, and a layered soundscape, the film offers a meditation on resilience and belonging. Hopinka reminds us that the land and its histories hold both wounds and wisdom. In the artist’s words, “Being decentered from a land and a home burdens many of us. . . . It’s hard to parse out the pain of the elders and pain that’s your own. . . . Intergenerational suffering becomes a transgenerational reckoning.”

Images:

Installation view: Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, October 27, 2024–April 20, 2025

Installation view of To Exalt the Ephemeral: The (Im)Permanent Collection, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, 2024

Tanya Aguiñiga: Border Wall Ladder, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist.

Amol K Patil: Whispers of the Dust, 2024

Lorenzo Lippi: Young Man Holding a Staff, c. 1620; red chalk on buff laid paper; 10 x 6 3/4 in.; BAMPFA, Gift of Richard and Mary L. Gray, 2021.7.4

Sky Hopinka: Sunflower Siege Engine, 2022; courtesy of the artist, and Tanya Leighton, Berlin and Los Angeles.

Artwork by Colin McAllister