The last time I walked through the Berkeley Art Museum, I saw a ghost. She hovered in the corner of an upstairs gallery, wispy and sly, her hair disheveled, her body fading into transparency. She was called the Ghost of Oyuki and she was painted in the 18th century by Okyo Maruyama (1733–95), reputed to be the first Japanese artist to ever paint a ghost.

I saw other things that day as I wandered through the museum: A three-legged pitcher with an upturned spout that made it look as if it were sniffing the air. A series of photographs of rain-spattered windshields, winding roads, and stark trees by filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami. A blue Jambhala—the Buddhist god of wealth—holding a serpent and a mongoose. A disturbing construction of oil emulsion, lead objects, and steel traps on canvas by Anselm Kiefer that reminded me of meteors being devoured by monsters. A sweetly comic photograph of nine men standing nipple-deep in teal water.

Related Links

Bam, bam, bam

The new Berkeley Art Museum promises to explode the boundaries of traditional arts facilities. But it wasn’t the first museum to take this approach, and its designers gleaned inspiration from the reviled and adored Centre Pompidou in Paris. Reacquaint yourself with the building described as an “oil refinery” when it was opened in 1977.

Take a virtual tour of the BAM exhibition One Way Or Another: Asian American Art Now.

This year, Rinehart invited six artists to remix two digital art pieces from the museum’s collection. Download and remix here.

None of it was familiar to me. I had never heard of the artists who had produced these works, and knew very little about the cultures that had produced the artists. I could not walk out of the museum and announce to my friends, "I saw the Kiarostamis," the way I might announce that I'd seen the Matisses on display this summer at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, or the Rodins at the Legion of Honor. And yet, when I left the Berkeley museum, both my imagination and my curiosity had been ignited. Why a ghost? Why a mongoose? Why a windshield? Why steel traps?

Kevin Consey, director of the Berkeley Art Museum for the past eight years, has been spending a fair amount of time thinking about what an art museum should do or be, particularly one that must serve the needs of a leading research university and a community of educated and opinionated citizens. A few years from now, the 15,000 objects in the Berkeley Art Museum's collection will move from their current home—a Brutalist concrete structure on Bancroft Way—to a new building in downtown Berkeley being designed by the Japanese architect Toyo Ito. There, on a one-and-a-third-acre site currently occupied by a printing press and a parking garage, the museum will be rejoined with its sister institution, the Pacific Film Archive, which moved into separate quarters in 2000 after the current museum building was determined to be seismically unsafe. (It has since been partially retrofitted.)

Art's Edge Departing museum
director Kevin Consey has an almost
visceral dislike of blockbuster shows.
"Buy a catalog, but a T-shirt, buy a
poster, and if you're a venture
capitalist or hedge-fund manger,
buy a work of art," he says with a sigh.

The move is an opportunity to create a new museum, one that has the mission not only of collecting, preserving, and displaying works of art, but also of educating, inspiring, and sometimes infuriating the people who come to see the art. And it is not just the museum that is being remade. As it leaps from one side of campus to the other, the Berkeley Art Museum lands squarely in the midst of an ambitious re-design of Berkeley's downtown. A new downtown area plan, which is taking shape now and will be finalized by spring of 2009, envisions an urban center of grand boulevards and open-air plazas, packed with hotels, theaters, museums, restaurants, parks, and shops. The Judah L. Magnes Museum, which has the third largest collection of Judaica in the nation, is moving to the downtown, as is the Freight & Salvage, one of the region's premier venues for folk music. In this new context, and in a showy new building, the Berkeley Art Museum will be a public institution in a way that it hasn't been before—a place that invites a wider community to engage the question: What role should art play in public life?

Kevin Consey came to Berkeley in 1999, having spent time as director of art museums in Texas, Chicago, and Orange County. He is a large man with a shock of graying hair, a thick beard, and the deep voice of an FM radio announcer. There is an air of weariness about him, as if he has always just come from a transcontinental flight, but that might be because he usually has. These days he spends a fair amount of time jetting back and forth between Berkeley and Tokyo so that he can meet with Toyo Ito as the architect develops his plans for the new museum. The schedule has been grueling, as have the endless rounds of meetings required by the university bureaucracy, which probably explains Consey's surprise announcement in September that he will be retiring in January 2008 after the conceptual design for the new museum is finished.

page 1

|

6