Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Encyclopedia
The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA) is associated with the University of California
University of California
The University of California is a public university system in the U.S. state of California. Under the California Master Plan for Higher Education, the University of California is a part of the state's three-tier public higher education system, which also includes the California State University...

 at Berkeley
Berkeley, California
Berkeley is a city on the east shore of the San Francisco Bay in Northern California, United States. Its neighbors to the south are the cities of Oakland and Emeryville. To the north is the city of Albany and the unincorporated community of Kensington...

. The director is Lawrence Rinder
Lawrence Rinder
Lawrence R. Rinder is the Director of Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive , a position to which he was appointed in 2008.Previously, he was the Dean of the College at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco...

 who was appointed in 2008.

Collection

The museum was founded in 1963 after a donation was made to the university from artist and teacher Hans Hofmann
Hans Hofmann
Hans Hofmann was a German-born American abstract expressionist painter.-Biography:Hofmann was born in Weißenburg, Bavaria on March 21, 1880, the son of Theodor and Franziska Hofmann. When he was six he moved with his family to Munich...

 of forty-five paintings plus $250,000. A competition to design the building was announced in 1964, and the museum opened in 1970. The museum has featured works by Albert Bierstadt
Albert Bierstadt
Albert Bierstadt was a German-American painter best known for his lavish, sweeping landscapes of the American West. In obtaining the subject matter for these works, Bierstadt joined several journeys of the Westward Expansion...

, Jonathan Borofsky
Jonathan Borofsky
Jonathan Borofsky is an American sculptor and printmaker who lives and works in Maine.Borofsky was born in Boston, Massachusetts. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University in 1964, after which he continued his studies at France's Ecole de Fontainebleau and received his...

, Joan Brown
Joan Brown
Joan Brown was an American figurative painter who lived and worked in Northern California. She was a notable member of the "second generation" of the Bay Area Figurative Movement....

, Robert Colescott
Robert Colescott
Robert H. Colescott, was an American painter. He is known for satirical genre and crowd subjects, often conveying his exuberant, comical, or bitter reflections on being African-American. He studied with Fernand Léger in Paris...

, Jay DeFeo
Jay DeFeo
Jay DeFeo was a visual artist associated with the Beat generation who worked c.1950-1989 in the San Francisco Bay Area....

, Helen Frankenthaler
Helen Frankenthaler
Helen Frankenthaler is an American abstract expressionist painter. She is a major contributor to the history of postwar American painting. Having exhibited her work in six decades she has spanned several generations of abstract painters while continuing to produce vital and ever-changing new work...

, Paul Gauguin
Paul Gauguin
Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin was a leading French Post-Impressionist artist. He was an important figure in the Symbolist movement as a painter, sculptor, print-maker, ceramist, and writer...

, Juan Gris
Juan Gris
José Victoriano González-Pérez , better known as Juan Gris, was a Spanish painter and sculptor who lived and worked in France most of his life...

, Ant Farm
Ant Farm (group)
Ant Farm was an avant-garde architecture, graphic arts, and environmental design practice, founded in San Francisco in 1968 by Chip Lord and Doug Michels.-The group:...

, Howard Fried
Howard Fried
Howard Fried is an American conceptual artist who became known in the 1970s for his pioneering work in video art, performance art, and installation art.He lives and works in Vallejo, California.-Biography:...

, Paul Kos, Robert Mapplethorpe
Robert Mapplethorpe
Robert Mapplethorpe was an American photographer, known for his large-scale, highly stylized black and white portraits, photos of flowers and nude men...

, Knox Martin
Knox Martin
Knox Martin is an American painter, sculptor and muralist.Born in 1923 in Barranquilla, Colombia, he studied at the Art Students League of New York from 1946 till 1950. He is one of the leading members of New York School - a group of artists and writers. He lives and works in New York City."Art is...

, Jackson Pollock
Jackson Pollock
Paul Jackson Pollock , known as Jackson Pollock, was an influential American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. During his lifetime, Pollock enjoyed considerable fame and notoriety. He was regarded as a mostly reclusive artist. He had a volatile personality, and...

, Mark Rothko
Mark Rothko
Mark Rothko, born Marcus Rothkowitz , was a Russian-born American painter. He is classified as an abstract expressionist, although he himself rejected this label, and even resisted classification as an "abstract painter".- Childhood :Mark Rothko was born in Dvinsk, Vitebsk Province, Russian...

, and Sebastião Salgado
Sebastião Salgado
Sebastião Salgado is a Brazilian social documentary photographer and photojournalist.-Biography:Salgado was born on February 8, 1944 in Aimorés, in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil. After a somewhat itinerant childhood, Salgado initially trained as an economist, earning a master’s degree in...

. It also offers the The MATRIX Program for Contemporary Art.

The Pacific Film Archive (PFA) was founded by Sheldon Renan and began screening films in 1966 and specializes in international films. The PFA also includes a library which includes an online database of documentation associated with the films.

The museum is a member of the North American Reciprocal Museums
North American Reciprocal Museums
The North American Reciprocal Museums program is a consortium of museums in the United States, Canada, Bermuda, El Salvador and Mexico which offers benefits to museum membership holders in more than 530 institutions...

 program.

Buildings

The current Berkeley Art Museum building was built in 1970 and designed by Mario Ciampi. The building was deemed seismically unsafe in 1997, and iron braces were added in 2001 to slightly improve its safety. In 1999, the Pacific Film Archive moved to a temporary building across the street.

In 2008, BAM/PFA unveiled plans for a new visual arts center, to be designed by the Japanese architect Toyo Ito
Toyo Ito
is a Japanese architect known for creating conceptual architecture, in which he seeks to simultaneously express the physical and virtual worlds. He is a leading exponent of architecture that addresses the contemporary notion of a "simulated" city, and has been called "one of the world's most...

 and located in downtown Berkeley, across the street from UC Berkeley's main entrance. However, in 2009, those plans were cancelled. Citing the weak economy and trouble raising the necessary funds, BAM/PFA decided to retrofit and enlarge the former University of California Press
University of California Press
University of California Press, also known as UC Press, is a publishing house associated with the University of California that engages in academic publishing. It was founded in 1893 to publish books and papers for the faculty of the University of California, established 25 years earlier in 1868...

 printing plant at that site, a 1939 Art Deco
Art Deco
Art deco , or deco, is an eclectic artistic and design style that began in Paris in the 1920s and flourished internationally throughout the 1930s, into the World War II era. The style influenced all areas of design, including architecture and interior design, industrial design, fashion and...

 building on the California Register of Historic Resources and qualified to be on the National Register of Historic Places
National Register of Historic Places
The National Register of Historic Places is the United States government's official list of districts, sites, buildings, structures, and objects deemed worthy of preservation...

.

External links

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