Winter to spring 2025 exhibitions

Art Wall / Tanya Aguiñiga: Border Fall Height
January 18–July 13, 2025

Tanya Aguiñiga (b. 1978, San Diego; raised in Tijuana, Mexico) creates sculptures and installations using natural materials and objects gathered from her environment. Participating in a redefinition of the distinctions between art, design, and craft, Aguiñiga upsets these hierarchies through her innovative practice. She situates her work in conversation with urgent issues affecting our world today, from tensions that define national politics to rapid climate change affecting the environment.

Border Fall Height, Aguiñiga’s first solo presentation in the Bay Area, consists of a series of rust prints depicting a thirty-foot ladder. These works were made using an actual object that Aguiñiga found near the US–Mexico border, where the boundary between nations has been demarcated by a thirty-foot fence, among other militarized forms of division.

Tanya Aguiñiga: Border Fall Height is curated by Anthony Graham, Senior Curator.

MATRIX 286 / Amol K Patil: A Forest of Remembrance
January 18–April 20, 2025

Amol K Patil (b. 1987, Mumbai, India) works across painting, sculpture, performance, and installation to bring the lived experiences of India’s urban working-class inhabitants into vibrant relief. In his multipart exploration of Mumbai’s chawls, residential structures built in the early 1900s to house mill workers and other migrant laborers, Patil seeks to capture the everyday humanity of those historically on the margins. 

A Forest of Remembrance, Patil’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States, presents an installation of newly commissioned paintings and sculptures. The walls of the gallery have been coated in layers of blue and yellow hues, textured and weathered to mimic the layers of paint in the chawls. Within this mise-en-scène, small-scale paintings offer windows into intimate interiors, while the platforms that punctuate the space recall the makeshift stage sets on which his father and other theater activists often performed. The sculptures—modeled in clay and then cast in bronze—give shape to the people who have for generations occupied the chawls, their defiant hands and feet extending from their collective bodies in dynamic protest.

Amol K Patil: A Forest of Remembrance is curated by Victoria Sung, Phyllis C. Wattis Senior Curator, and Margot Norton, Chief Curator; with Tausif Noor, Curatorial Associate. The exhibition is part of BAMPFA’s ongoing MATRIX series of contemporary art exhibitions. Founded in 1978, MATRIX provides artists with an experimental platform to make and show new work.

New Acquisition / Sky Hopinka: Sunflower Siege Engine
March 12–August 17, 2025

Sky Hopinka (b. 1984; lives and works in New York) is a multidisciplinary artist in video, photography, text, and installation. A member of the Ho-Chunk Nation and a descendant of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians, his work navigates the poetics of place, memory, and Indigenous sovereignty. 

Hopinka’s lyrical video Sunflower Siege Engine (2022) intertwines archival footage of the 1969 Alcatraz occupation—led by Mohawk activist Richard Oakes (1942–1972)—with scenes from the Pacific redwoods and Cahokia Mounds, a precontact Indigenous urban center in present-day Illinois. The occupation of Alcatraz, a reclamation of Indigenous land, aimed to remind the world of Native histories. Blurring boundaries between documentary and personal narrative, Hopinka includes footage of Oakes reading “Proclamation: To the Great White Father and All His People” on a laptop in his studio, merging the intimate with the historical. Hopinka’s voice intermingles with Oakes’s words, creating a dialogue across time as the film reimagines the notorious Alcatraz prison as a symbol of resistance and liberation. 

Sky Hopinka: Sunflower Siege Engine is curated by Matthew Villar Miranda, Curatorial Associate.

Fifty-fifth Annual UC Berkeley Master of Fine Arts Exhibition
May 14–July 27, 2025

For over half a century, BAMPFA and the UC Berkeley Department of Art Practice have partnered to present an exhibition celebrating the work of Master of Fine Arts graduates. This year’s exhibition features six artists: Viviana Martínez Carlos, Priyanka D’Souza, Arianna Khmelniuk, Jasmine Nyende, bryant terry, and Zekarias Musele Thompson.

Spanning diverse practices—including olfactory experiments, ecological reimaginings, punk poetics, deep listening, and transdisciplinary social practice—these artists explore themes of grief, community healing, collective memory, and transformation. Each work reflects the culmination of a rigorous two-year study through the MFA program at UC Berkeley, pushing boundaries across media, genre, and bodies of knowledge.

The Fifty-Fifth Annual UC Berkeley Master of Fine Arts Exhibition is curated by Matthew Villar Miranda and Tausif Noor, Curatorial Associates. 

Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California
June 7, 2025–November 30, 2025

Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California traces the flow and flourishing of quilts in the context of the Second Great Migration. As millions of African Americans sought greater opportunities and escape from the South’s oppressive racial environment from 1940 to 1970, they carried quilts as functional objects and physical reminders of the homes they left behind. Simultaneously, the quiltmaking skills that many migrants brought with them—ones frequently learned from mothers, grandmothers, and other kin—spurred the creation of a new wave of African American quiltmaking in the later part of the twentieth century, effectively extending its roots in the western United States. Taken together, the quilts in Routed West explore the medium’s unique capacity for connecting kin across time and space, holding memory and ancestral knowledge, and opening up space for beauty and ingenuity.

Consisting of approximately 115 artworks by eighty individuals—many of whom hailed from Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi and Oklahoma and settled in the San Francisco Bay Area—Routed West draws exclusively from the African American quilt collection at BAMPFA. Enhanced by a fully illustrated exhibition catalog with significant new scholarship, this exhibition invites audiences into the conversation around their joyful power as objects of African American cultural heritage and artworks within expansive art histories of the United States.

Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California is curated by Elaine Y. Yau, Associate Curator and Academic Liaison, with Matthew Villar Miranda, Curatorial Associate.

Support
Art Wall / Tanya Aguiñiga: Border Fall Height is made possible by major funding from Frances Hellman and Warren Breslau.

The MATRIX program is made possible by a generous endowment gift from Phyllis C. Wattis. Additional support for MATRIX 286 / Amol K Patil: A Forest of Remembrance is provided by Project 88, Mumbai.

The annual MFA exhibition is made possible by the Barbara Berelson Wiltsek Endowment.

The Henry Luce Foundation has provided generous lead support for Routed West and its accompanying catalog, including significant funding for research, conservation, and care of the African American Quilt Collection at BAMPFA. Major exhibition support is provided by the Shah Garg Women Artists Research Fund and the Terra Foundation for American Art. Additional support for the Routed West catalog is provided by Brenda and Michael Drake and a grant from the Black Studies Collaboratory at UC Berkeley, an awardee of the Mellon Foundation’s Just Futures Initiative. Conservation of the quilt collection was made possible by major grants from the Bank of America Art Conservation Project, the Save America’s Treasures program of the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and the Office of the Chancellor at the University of California, Berkeley.