Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive Berkeley, CA
One of the largest university art museums in the United States, BAM/PFA opened the doors of its distinctive modernist building on the south side of the UC Berkeley campus in 1970. BAM's diverse exhibition programs and its collections of more than 16,000 objects and 14,000 films and videos are characterized by themes of artistic innovation, intellectual exploration, and social commentary, and reflect the central role of education in BAM's mission.
The mission of the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive is to inspire the imagination and ignite critical dialogue through art and film. BAM/PFA is the visual arts center of the University of California, Berkeley. Through art and film programs, collections, and research resources, it aspires to be locally connected and globally relevant, engaging audiences from the campus, community, and beyond.
The Berkeley Art Museum provides the UC Berkeley and Bay Area communities with an ambitious schedule of exhibitions exploring international art, both historical and contemporary. Each year, the museum presents diverse and important temporary exhibitions that range from classical Asian art to challenging work by today's artists. The exhibition program includes installations that highlight the richness and scope of the museum collections, as well as the MATRIX Program, presenting recent avant-garde work.
A place to explore cinema from every film-producing country in the world, the Pacific Film Archive reaches out through the art of cinema to the many cultures that make up the lively Bay Area community. With daily screenings—over 600 different programs are offered each year—PFA presents rare and rediscovered prints of movie classics, new, and historic works by the world's great film directors, restored silent films with live musical accompaniment, thematic retrospectives, and exciting experiments by today's film and video artists, including provocative, independently made fiction and documentary films.
