Member Bonus Reciprocity Week at BAMPFA

Join us in a celebratory partnership between the Oakland Museum of California and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) with this bonus reciprocity week-long event! 

From March 11-15th, enjoy free admission reciprocity to BAMPFA for 2 guests per membership and 50% off of current and future film screenings! Use code OMCA2026 for film reservations online.

BAMPFA is open 11 am–7 pm, Wednesday through Sunday.

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Current Exhibitions Include:

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Multiple Offerings

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Multiple Offerings is the first retrospective in twenty-five years dedicated to the groundbreaking work of the artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (b. 1951, Busan, South Korea; d. 1982, New York City). Cha produced an expansive range of works across text-based media, video, and performance, including her posthumously published book, Dictée (1982). The artist’s interdisciplinary practice gave shape to the experimental art scenes in San Francisco, New York City, and beyond.

After emigrating from South Korea to the United States, Cha enrolled in 1969 at UC Berkeley, where she studied art practice, comparative literature, and film. Keenly attuned to the active role that audiences play in the creation of meaning, she prioritized nonlinear narratives to allow for more open-ended forms of interpretation—what she termed a method of “Multiple Telling with Multiple Offering.” The retrospective adopts this framework to allow for a range of entry points into Cha’s work, guiding visitors through the themes—memory, displacement, and the mutability of language, among others—that recur in her oeuvre.

Since 1992, owing to a generous gift from the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Foundation, BAMPFA has served as the steward of Cha’s art and archives. Gathering over one hundred artworks and archival materials from across her short but prolific career, as well as select loans of works by Cha and other artists, Multiple Offerings highlights the inventive, playful, and meditative methods of Cha’s practice while also situating her work within a constellation of artistic forebearers, peers, and contemporary artists for whom she has long been a lodestar. 

The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue—the first museum monograph dedicated to the artist in over twenty years.

Art Wall / Stephanie Syjuco: Present Tense (Roll Call)

Debuting her largest wall installation to date, artist Stephanie Syjuco (b. 1974, Manila, Philippines; lives and works in Oakland) presents Present Tense (Roll Call). Referencing the classroom routine of announcing one’s presence, the exhibition explores radical pedagogy in the politics of education. Syjuco’s practice spans from handcrafted textiles to archival excavations, interrogating how photography and archives shape racialized narratives of being and belonging.

For this exhibition, Syjuco, a UC Berkeley professor since 2013, reflected on her role as an educator while drawing from the Bancroft Library and the Ethnic Studies Library, engaging with their extensive holdings on student activism and research by marginalized communities. As part of the artist’s process, she collaborated with multiple participants, inviting educators nationwide to contribute pedagogical materials, thus reinforcing the interconnected nature of knowledge production.

Present Tense (Roll Call) cascades across the wall as a sprawling visual field of text and imagery, which uses documents referencing the first ethnic studies programs in the United States, including UC Berkeley’s program, born in the late 1960s. With this project, Syjuco urgently responds to the broad backlash against and recent legislative attacks on ethnic studies, book bans, and the defunding and removal of diversity programs. She transformed ordinary didactic materials into a layered constellation of fragmented and reassembled information. Her photographic approach reenacts archival parsing, selectively sharpening elements while letting others fade into illegibility, revealing how knowledge is precariously preserved, erased, and fiercely contested. By working through the logic and limits of archives, Syjuco invites viewers to reconsider the tension through which history—and its daily presence—is recalled, constructed, and controlled.

Object Oriented: Abstraction and Design in the BAMPFA Collection

Object Oriented: Abstraction and Design in the BAMPFA Collection explores how artists have represented, reshaped, and reimagined familiar objects, drawing attention to the role of design in our everyday lives. This exhibition encourages acts of close looking, asking viewers to question their immediate recognition of what they see. In this way, an object that might at first appear to be a chair could also be considered a sculpture, a stand-in for a body, or simply a piece of metal.

This exhibition brings questions of design into conversation with abstraction. The paintings on view emphasize their own materiality rather than picturing or alluding to something outside of themselves. At the same time, items that might seem functional are also explorations of color, shape, pattern, and texture. By highlighting these formal aspects of the pieces, the exhibition calls into question our assumptions around the utility of objects.

Drawing from BAMPFA’s expansive holdings, Object Oriented positions abstract painting and sculpture alongside works designed for architectural spaces, maquettes, and artist’s books. Seen together, these works bring a new awareness to the ways we think about and categorize objects through art and design.

Experience the best of world cinema on the big screen in BAMPFA’s state-of-the-art Barbro Osher Theater, including the following films:

Far from Home by Sohrab Shahid Saless

Kill the Documentary by Harun Farocki, Hanspeter Krüger, Eckart Kammer, and Caroline Gremm

Compensation by Zeinabu irene Davis

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant by Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Last Year at Marienbad by Alain Resnais

Advanced purchase is highly recommended as films sell out quickly! Check your March calendar of events email for the discount code or email the Membership team at [email protected].

For gallery admission, simply present your OMCA membership card at the Visitor Experience welcome counter and enjoy.  

Question or comments? Please contact us at [email protected] or 510-318-8520. 
Please note that BAMPFA is closed on Labor Day, September 1.

*Header image: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Other Things Seen, Other Things Heard, 1978. Gift of the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Foundation.