Recent Exhibitions at Berkeley Art Museum

After a series of blogs about exhibitions and collections at Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, I need to talk about the local museum - Berkeley Art Museum.

There was a very interesting photography exhibit - Assignment Shanghai. BAM's website states: "In 1946, Life magazine assigned the young photographer Jack Birns to Shanghai with instructions to document the ongoing Chinese civil war. A selection of the resulting photographs, drawn from the BAM collection, portrays the upheaval of war, societal changes, and the approaching revolution that would transform Shanghai and China forever. Birns documented the new Shanghai, with its foreign concessions and cosmopolitan attitude, and captured the clash between a nascent consumer culture, enabled by the introduction of Western goods, and the traditions of China's past."



What’s It All Mean: William T. Wiley in Retrospect presents a fifty-year survey of the work of Bay Area artist William T. Wiley's work, which took up three exhibition floors. All of his work are very complex and some of them looked quite dated while the others fared much better. I like his crazily crowded graphite and charcoal drawings, also paintings inspired by Pieter Bruegel, particularly its strange and nightmarish landscape and vibrate and daring color schemes. I don't like his superimposing Miro like bright geometrical patterns on painterly landscape. I found the contrast brought out neither drama nor conflict, but a crude message should be expressed by other better means.


Sketch for the Tower of Babloid & the Monitor, 1998; charcoal, graphite, and acrylic, William T. Wiley


Study for Parable of the Blind, Details after Bruegel, 1994, Mixed media, William T. Wiley

After the looking back, I was glad to glance forward to No Right Angles: The 40th Annual University of California, Berkeley Master of Fine Arts Graduate Exhibition.

There are usual gimmicky works for sure but several interesting work really made strong impression on me, particularly the oil painting by Rebecca Suss: 1974, 1984, which encompass huge spatial, temporal and emotional span.


1974, 1984, Oil on Canvas, 72 x 84 in., 2010, Rebecca Suss

Finally, a most unusual piece -- a commissioned work, a hybrid of sculpture, furniture, and stage, as the new centerpiece of Gallery B, BAM’s expansive central atrium from Thom Faulders. It is part of a new vision of the gallery as a space for interaction, performance, and improvised experiences.

Again, according to BAM, "Faulders has designed a landscape of undulating forms, constructed from curved, brightly painted wood over a core of foam. Viewed from the lobby and balconies above, the piece resembles an abstracted archipelago or a rendering of breaking waves. The shifting optical experience of the work becomes spatial and tactile as you approach and climb onto it, settling in among its varied lumps and bumps. The structure offers multiple seating possibilities and focal points, providing settings for large-scale performance, intimate discussion, or solitary yet sociable relaxation. "