Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

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The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive(BAM/PFA) is the visual arts center at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of the largest university art museums in the United States, both in size and attendance.[citation needed] A single institution, BAM/PFA comprises separate departments for art and film. The BAM facility, a distinictive Modernist building located at the southern edge of the university campus, houses administrative and curatorial offices for both departments, as well as galleries for art exhibitions, a theater for public programs, storage for the university's art collection, and a film library and study center. PFA films are screened in a theater across the street from the BAM facility. The PFA collection is stored in a warehouse located offsite from the main facilities.

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[edit] BAM History, Collections, and Exhibitions

The museum was founded in 1963 following artist and teacher Hans Hofmann's donation of forty-five paintings and $250,000 to the University; today BAM/PFA's collection of work by this Abstract Expressionist artist remains the largest in any museum internationally. An architectural competition to design the new museum building was announced in November 1964, and the following year San Francisco architect Mario Ciampi and associates Richard L. Jorasch and Ronald E. Wagner were named the winners. Construction began in 1967, and the building opened on November 7, 1970.

Over three decades the museum's collection has evolved with particular strengths in historical and contemporary Asian art, early American painting, mid-twentieth-century art, Conceptual art, Contemporary art from around the world; and California and Bay Area art. Highlights include important works by Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Albert Bierstadt, Paul Gauguin, Helen Frankenthaler, Jay DeFeo, Joan Brown, Jonathan Borofsky, and Shirin Neshat. Significant additions in recent years include the Jean and Francis Marshall Collection of Indian miniatures and a Conceptual piece by Sol LeWitt: A sphere lit from the top, four sides, and all their combinations (2004).

The museum provides the UC Berkeley and Bay Area communities with a schedule of exhibitions exploring international art, both historical and contemporary. Each year, the museum presents temporary exhibitions that range from classical Asian art to challenging work by contemporary artists. The exhibition program also includes the MATRIX Program for Contemporary Art, presenting recent avant-garde work. BAM has mounted major exhibitions of the works of Juan Gris, Jay DeFeo, Robert Colescott, Joan Brown, Robert Mapplethorpe, Sebastião Salgado, Paul Kos, and many others. The museum is well known for such thematic exhibitions as Anxious Visions: Surrealist Art; Made in U.S.A.: An Americanization in Modern Art, the ’50s & ’60s; The Here and the Hereafter: Images of Paradise in Islamic Art; Hogarth and His Times: Serious Comedy; and Masterworks of Chinese Painting: In Pursuit of Mists and Clouds. In January 2007, the museum will present A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s, the first exhibition to focus on Nauman’s formative work in the Bay Area during the period 1965-1970.

[edit] MATRIX Program for Contemporary Art

In six to eight exhibitions each year, BAM/PFA's MATRIX Program for Contemporary Art presents international avant-garde artists to the Bay Area community. There have been over 200 MATRIX shows at the museum in twenty-five years, featuring artists such as John Baldessari, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Louise Bourgeois, Nan Goldin, Eva Hesse, Sol LeWitt, Nancy Spero, and Andy Warhol. In recent years the selection of MATRIX artists has become more international in scope, with the roster including Teresita Fernandez, Ricky Swallow, Tobias Rehberger, Ernesto Neto, Sanford Biggers, Berni Searle, and Anne Chu, representing countries including Germany, Iran, Australia, Brazil, and China. The current MATRIX curator is Elizabeth Thomas.

[edit] PFA History, Collections, and Programs

The Pacific Film Archive was conceived as an American version of the Cinémathèque Française in Paris—a center committed not only to exhibiting films under the best possible conditions, but also to increasing the understanding, appreciation, and preservation of cinema through its study center, collections, and publications. PFA began showing films on the UC Berkeley campus in 1966 and continued its screening programs in the new building when the museum opened in 1970. Today, PFA is one of the nation's film centers.

First established with an eye toward the Pacific Rim, the archive's 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, Eastern European and Central Asian productions, and international classics. American experimental pioneers such as Bruce Conner and Ant Farm share the shelves of PFA's storage vault with international past masters Sergei Eisenstein and Kenji Mizoguchi.

With daily screenings—over 600 different programs are offered each year—PFA presents rare and rediscovered prints of movie classics, new and historic works by the world's great film directors, restored silent films with live musical accompaniment, thematic retrospectives, and exciting experiments by today's film and video artists, including independently made fiction and documentary works. PFA screenings often involve in-person appearances by filmmakers, authors, critics, and scholars, who engage in discussion with audiences.

[edit] PFA Library and Film Study Center

The PFA Library is a resource for film research and education, offering access to PFA's film collection as well as to thousands of books, periodicals, posters, and still photographs. In addition, the library has compiled some 95,000 files of documentation about individual films, personalities, and subjects. Many of these files are now available online through CineFiles, PFA's film document image database.

[edit] New Building Project

In 1997, a seismic survey of the University of California, Berkeley campus found that BAM/PFA’s concrete structure did not meet current seismic standards. When it was determined that renovation costs would equal or exceed those of new construction, the BAM/PFA Board of Trustees proposed to build a new museum and gained university support. The museum and film archive is currently raising funds to build a new facility at the corner of Oxford and Center Streets in Downtown Berkeley on the site of the UC Printing Plant, which is abandoned and slated to be demolished. In the meantime, a partial seismic retrofit to the current building and the temporary relocation of the PFA Theater to a building across the street have allowed BAM/PFA to stay open until the new facility has been completed.

In September 2006, BAM/PFA announced that it had selected Japanese architect Toyo Ito to design the new building.

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