Photo courtesy of BAMPFA
Featuring Joe Overstreet's Untitled, 1971, What Has Been and What Could Be: The BAMPFA Collection inaugurates a year-long presentation of the BAMPFA collection, bringing a contemporary perspective to the museum’s global art holdings. With over 25,000 artworks, BAMPFA’s collection spans multiple generations and geographies. Organized into focused thematic sections, this exhibition emphasizes key strengths of the collection while also identifying areas for further reflection and growth. What Has Been and What Could Be showcases seventeenth-century Japanese scrolls, eighteenth-century European paintings by women artists, and American landscapes and folk art of the nineteenth century, alongside mid-century abstract painting, feminist art, quilts, and conceptual art. The works are arranged thematically across time periods, some revisiting familiar genres such as landscape and still life while others focus on pioneering work of women artists and East Bay artists. Another section showcases a significant group of works by Black artists that were brought into the collection in 1972. This exhibition strives to connect this expansive past to the urgent ideas and issues of our present. Bringing together works from disparate times and locales, it foregrounds the gallery as a space for questioning and expanding art historical narratives.