Making Their Mark at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA)
Curated by Cecilia Alemani and BAMPFA Chief Curator Margot Norton, Making Their Mark will be on view at BAMPFA from October 2024 to April 2025. Explore the premiering works below.
Celebrating California's artistic legacy
Making Their Mark: BAMPFA presents an array of California artists whose works embody significant art movements and local narratives, including the innovative approaches of Barbara Kasten and Kay Sekimachi from the California College of the Arts.
Untitled (Little Threesome) (2005) by Amy SillmanShah Garg Foundation
Amy Sillman's capture of the body in its abstraction
Amy Sillman is renowned for her oil paintings inspired by comics, Beat poetry, jazz, and Internet memes. The body is an important subject, though often depicted as fragmented or invisible, with detached limbs and features emerging from clusters of abstract lines and vibrant colors.
A liminal process: creation and destruction
Speaking of her approach, Sillman said, “Making paintings for me is liminal: not-quite-known, coming-into-being, not-yet-seen, being-remembered. It is a material process as much about destruction as construction, about going backwards and forwards."
Masked Eyes—Trustworthy #277 (2016) by Haegue YangShah Garg Foundation
Haegue Yang's Trustworthies, and the art of alienation
Incorporating both craft techniques and industrial fabrication into her practice, Haegue Yang produces sculptures, installations, and two-dimensional works that address experiences of alienation in an interconnected world.
Unveiling security through paper
In 2010 Yang began producing her Trustworthies, a series of wall-mounted works made from swatches of paper from the interiors of security envelopes from around the world.
Weaving heritage through generations
Melissa Cody is a fourth-generation Diné (Navajo) textile artist who began weaving at the age of five. As a child, she watched her mother, Lola Cody, and her grandmother Martha Schultz work at the loom.
Three Rivers (2021) by Melissa CodyShah Garg Foundation
Geometric overlays & experimentations with scale
In The Three Rivers, Cody reinterprets established Germantown styles with geometric overlays and plays with scale, asymmetry, and curvature to enhance the dimensionality of the design.
Kurban, a Sweeter Day to Come (1989/1989) by Mary Lovelace O'NealShah Garg Foundation
Panthers in My Father’s Palace: A journey of color and form
This work belongs to a series of mixed-media paintings entitled Panthers in My Father’s Palace, created between 1984 and 1990, by Mary Lovelace O’Neal. The works are characteristic of O’Neal’s abstractions of the period, which combine bold, saturated colors and gestural forms.
Magical inspirations
The series was conceived in 1984 during a residency that O’Neal undertook as part of the Asilah Arts Festival, held in Morocco. “The whole thing was magic,” the artist remembered. “The mosaics and the quietness and shadows just opened my imagination.”
Dyani White Hawk: Blending Lakota heritage with abstraction
A Minnesota-based artist and curator of Sicangu Lakota, German, and Welsh ancestry, Dyani White Hawk is known for merging histories of modern abstract painting with abstract traditions in Lakota art. White Hawk’s works echo her American upbringing and her Indigenous ancestors.
Evening Grand Entry (2023) by Dyani White HawkShah Garg Foundation
Honoring lineages of Indigenous women
Dyani's approach “places Native arts front and center, to implore people to think critically about how we talk about intersections of our artistic histories and to honor the legacies and lineages of Indigenous women and relatives who have shaped the ongoing artistic history of this land."
Photogenic Painting Untitled 76/7 (1976) by Barbara KastenShah Garg Foundation
Abstract photograms, a colorful experiment
Barbara Kasten is known for an unusual photographic practice that incorporates painterly, sculptural, and performative techniques. In 1974 her explorations led to the Photogenic Painting series—her first photographic (albeit cameraless) works.
Translucent impressions
In each of these “paintings”—actually photograms—abstract patterns of varying degrees of translucency appear against a ground that is typically blue. By the time she made this work, Kasten had begun to combine cyanotype chemicals with washes of ink and silkscreen printing.
Chamade (2021) by Rosemarie TrockelShah Garg Foundation
Textile practices and material fluidity
Widely regarded as one of the most influential artists of her generation, Rosemarie Trockel has always taken a profoundly fluid approach to her materials. In the early 1980s, however, she explored mostly textiles.
Revisiting monochrome works through wool
Recently, the artist has returned to wool to produce works such as Chamade and its study. Their monochromatic surfaces evoke the language of abstract painting in the same way her “knitting pictures” of the 1980s did.
Liquid Experience (1985) by Pacita AbadShah Garg Foundation
Pacita Abad: Global journeys in art and tradition
Pacita Abad began her formal art training in 1976. Thanks to her husband’s work as a development economist, the couple lived in multiple countries across six continents. In each new environment, Abad painted, researched traditional art-making techniques, and collected local materials.
Liquid experience: A bold embrace of color and reflection
Liquid Experience is one of the artist’s earliest abstractions. Its vivid surface—glimmering with tiny reflective disks that imply a familiarity with shishah, or mirror embroidery, from India—demonstrates Abad’s fearlessness as a colorist.
From Beirut to the Bay Area
Simone Fattal was born in Beirut, and studied philosophy in Paris. In 1969, she returned to Beirut and began working as a visual artist, exhibiting her paintings locally until the start of the Lebanese Civil War. In 1980 she moved to the Bay Area with her partner, the artist Etel Adnan.
Young Warrior (Trophy)Shah Garg Foundation
Simone Fattal's dialogue with ancient narratives
In 1988, Simone returned to her artistic practice with a new dedication to abstract and figurative sculpture. Her works in ceramic, stoneware, terracotta, bronze, and porcelain recall ancient narratives.Young Warrior (The Trophy), connects the present, the ancient, and the epic through a focus on the human form.
Amapiano Dance (2022/2022) by UmanShah Garg Foundation
Uman's transformative journey from Somalia
At age nine, Uman fled the Somali Civil War and moved to Kenya, before relocating to Denmark with her family when she was thirteen. Arriving in New York in the 2000s, she embraced an intuitive approach to painting by using saturated, bright hues.
A tribute to South African dance music
Uman’s work is a fusion of the various cultures in which she has lived, with her lived experiences finding their way into recurring motifs. This abstract painting, for instance, is an evocation of a well-known genre of South African dance music that is beloved by the artist.
drip, drip, drip (2017) by Wangechi MutuShah Garg Foundation
Afrofuturism, fantasy, and biomorphic imagery
Referencing various sources—from Afrofuturism to the fashion industry to science fiction—Wangechi Mutu is well known for a body of work that combines found materials, magazine cutouts, sculpture, and painted imagery.
drip, drip, drip (2017) by Wangechi MutuShah Garg Foundation
Unsettling allure
Her spectacular and provocative painted and collaged works, such as drip, drip, drip, depict plantlike biomorphic forms that are simultaneously unsettling and alluring, defying easy classification and identification.
