Making Their Mark at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA)

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.

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."

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.

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. 

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. 

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.