championing bay area art since 1967
Designed by architect ROBERT RATCLIFF and built by the Rotary Club as a gift to the City, the Berkeley Art Center was run by the Parks and Rec Department for many years until it became a private nonprofit in the late 1970s. The day before his job interview, BAC’s first director, CARL WORTH, went to the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park, where a “happening” took place in the form of a man parachuting into the crowd. Wanting to appear sufficiently suitable for a city job, he hadn’t planned on sharing the experience in the interview, but something took hold of him:
“I said that I wanted to try to create an exhibition program that had some of the galvanizing, dynamic quality of the parachuting event that had brought people together. I felt art was a way of doing that, and I thought Berkeley was the right place to create that kind of ambiance.”
He got the job and quickly established BAC as a destination for experimental contemporary art by Bay Area artists. Worth would go on to produce 89 exhibitions over 12 years as the director through 1979.
Past Exhibitions 1967–69
1967
Six Figure Painters: Boyd Allen, Jerrold Ballaine, Robert Bechtle, Gerald Gooch, Erle Loran, Richard McClean, May 7 – June 10
Sidney Gordian: Painting & Sculpture, June 16 – July 23
Milton Komisar & Barbara Strassen: Painting, August 1 – September 3
Four Printmakers: Elwood Flitcraft, Richard Graf, Karl Kasten, George Miyasaki, August 10 – September 3
Chiura Obata: Sumi Painting, November 14 – December 28
1968
Heads: Richard Sargent, January 5 – February 18
James McCray: Painting, February 29 – April 7
Nine Artists, Sculpture & Painting: Jerrold Ballaine, Michael Bigger, Jay Heminway, Tyler Hoare, Phillip Makanna, Victor Royer, Mary Snowden, Patrick Tidd, George Wray, April 23 – May 26
Steve Waldneck: Electronic Events, June 14 – July 28
The Impact of African Sculpture on German Expressionism, August 5 – November 22
Jerry McDowell: Paintings, October 9 – November 17
John Thompson: Drawings, November 28 – January 5
1969
Patrick Tidd & Paul Pernish: Acrylics, January 16 – February 20
A Profile of Ben Hazard: Sculpture, Paintings, Drawings, Lithographs, February 27 – April 3
Carole Peel &Ted Odza: Painting & Sculpture, April 10 – May 15
Flower Show: Berkeley Garden Club (3 days)
Photo Show: Josepha Haveman, E.J. Montgomery, Donald Renfro, Leland Rice, Martin Sweitzer, Pat Tavenner, Indra Guy, Kelly Hart, Paul Pernish, Richard Sargent, June 6 – July 10
Pat McFarlin & Joe Slusky: Sculpture, July 7 – August 21
Inside the Moon: Buchla Bohrod, Ellis Holcome, Linggren Kliot, Rosa Baum, Paul Baum, Benjamin Franklin, Richard Friedman, Bryan Rogers, Mort Subotnick, September 9 – October 12
Arne Heirsoux: Paintings, October 23 – November 27
Pre-Yule Print Exhibit, December 4 – December 23
A painting by Gerald Gooch from BAC’s inaugural exhibition Six Figure Painters, which reflected an aesthetic challenge by Pop artists and Bay Area Figurative painters to the established art world’s lingering interest in Abstract Expressionism.
CHIURA OBATA emigrated to the United States from Japan in 1903. By the 1930s, he was a successful artist and an influential art professor at UC Berkeley. In 1942, his family was forced into Japanese internment camps for more than a year under racist anti-immigrant laws. While in the camps, he founded an art school. Obata eventually returned to teaching at Cal in 1945, where he remained until his retirement in 1954. He had a solo exhibition at BAC in 1967. Photo circa 1944 from the Archives of American Art.
Inside the Moon in 1969 was an interactive installation where audiences could lie down on foam pads covering the floor and look up at projections playing on scrims stretched across the beams of the ceiling. Visitors strummed the chords of a harp that hung in the middle of the gallery to create sound that emanated around the room.