The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA) are a combined art museum and repertory movie theater and archive, associated with the University of California, Berkeley. The director is Lawrence Rinder who was appointed in 2008.
The building underwent updates beginning in 2009 and which finished in 2015. The archive and art museum moved from its original home to a new location on Center Street; the museum opened to the public in 2016.
Collection
The museum was founded in 1963 after a donation was made to the university from artist and teacher Hans Hofmann 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, Jonathan Borofsky, Joan Brown, Robert Colescott, Jay DeFeo, Helen Frankenthaler, Paul Gauguin, Juan Gris, Ant Farm, Howard Fried, Paul Kos, Robert Mapplethorpe, Knox Martin, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Sebastião Salgado, and Arvo Györköny. It also offers 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.
In 2014, the museum acquired San Francisco collector and dealer Steven Leiber’s collection of Conceptual art and art materials, as well as his library of reference and artists’ books related to Conceptualism and the Fluxus movement.
The museum is a member of the North American Reciprocal Museums program.
Buildings
The former 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 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 printing plant at that site, a 1939 Art Deco building on the California Register of Historic Resources and qualified to be on the National Register of Historic Places.
In 2011, BAM/PFA presented the schematic design for the $100 million transformation of a former printing plant into its new home, designed by the New York firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro. Located at 2120 Oxford Street in Berkeley's arts district, the design combines the existing 1939 concrete Art Deco-style building, unoccupied since 2004, with a new metal-clad, skylighted structure that will include galleries, a 32-seat screening room, a store and a learning center. Construction began in 2013 and the building was expected to be completed in 2015 and opened to the public in 2016. It opened to the public on January 31, 2016.
Notes
See also
- List of film archives
External links
- Official BAM/PFA Website
- Blook
- CineFiles Film Document Database
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