Past Exhibits

HARD WORDS: Memory & Death in the Wild West

Prints by Peter Rutledge Koch
Exhibit
Monday, Aug 25, 2014 12:00 am -
| Townsend Center, 220 Stephens Hall

For the past forty years Peter Koch has cultivated a cross-media dialogue between art, philosophy, and literature. HARD WORDS is thirty-seven prints assembled from re-configured photographs, historical documents; manuscript journals and newspaper engravings; accompanied by short legends (one and two syllable messages) by the artist and hand-set in antique lead and wood type. The prints are accompanied by selected texts appropriated from the journals and letters of Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, Ross Cox, William T. Hornaday, L.A. Huffman, Elers Koch, and others.

Imaginations

Paintings by Bill A. Dallas
Exhibit
Tuesday, Sep 3, 2013 12:00 am -
| Townsend Center, 220 Stephens Hall

Imaginations features the paintings of Oakland artist and UC Berkeley alumnus Bill A. Dallas. Often incorporating a mixture of calligraphy, figure studies, and abstract painting, Dallas’ work is also heavily influenced by jazz music.

Palace Square 1968

by David Linger
Exhibit
Monday, Mar 11, 2013 12:00 am -
| Townsend Center, 220 Stephens Hall

David Linger's work takes the form of thin, translucent porcelain panels, often in large-scale works composed of multiple elements. The panels contain halftone photographs in black underglaze, overprinted with intaglio embossment of original text. His 1968 trip to Leningrad introduces us to the fragility of the human condition and opens up the viewers’ mind to the fundamental elegance of the un-extraordinary.

Friday, Sep 14, 2012 12:00 am -
| Townsend Center, 220 Stephens Hall

As staff photographer for the Oakland Tribune between 1968-1982, Kenneth P. Green Sr. captured in the still image some of the most dramatic and dynamic social changes occurring not only in Oakland, but in our time. His work reflects the best of both photojournalism and photography – a chronicle of the here and now, and a collection of personal portraits that illustrate the timeless, human side of the people involved. This exhibition highlights early photographs taken at DeFremery Park in Oakland, a center for community organizing, an important base for the Black Panther Party and for the nascent Black student movement that was taking place at Laney and Merritt Colleges.

Letters from Emptiness

Paintings by Eva Bovenzi
Exhibit
Tuesday, Jan 10, 2012 12:00 am -
| Townsend Center, 220 Stephens Hall

With their iridescent shapes emerging from blue or red backgrounds, Eva Bovenzi’s paintings at one moment suggest outer space, at another the sea. The forms described are similarly ambiguous: they could be tiny or enormous. Like apparitions from a world that is both familiar and unfamiliar, these forms seem caught in the ephemeral moment between appearing and disappearing. They are mysterious messages: letters from emptiness.

Winged Energy of Delight

Paintings by Kathleen Thompson
Exhibit
Monday, Aug 22, 2011 12:00 am -
| Townsend Center, 220 Stephens Hall

Taking inspiration from Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem “As Once the Winged Energy of Delight,” Kathleen Thompson’s recent work emphasizes the vibration of color. Combining references to flowers and natural elements with the use of fluorescent paint, Thompson’s work is not just an abstraction of nature but a bridge to a timeless place.

Luminous

Watercolor Paintings by Darril Tighe
Exhibit
Monday, Aug 22, 2011 12:00 am -
| Townsend Center, 220 Stephens Hall

Darril Tighe’s watercolors explore abstraction as a means for expressing a range of emotions through color, layering of washes and choices about composition. Tighe’s complex color combinations suggest a quality of translucence and evoke a state of reverie and reflection, through which the viewer is momentarily transported, and then returns, enriched.

Here and There

Paintings by Matthew Mullins
Exhibit
Tuesday, Feb 8, 2011 12:00 am -
| Townsend Center, 220 Stephens Hall

Matthew Mullins’s large scale watercolor paintings feature private collections, archives and storage facilities, mostly associated with the natural sciences. Fascinated at the amount of material they house, Mullins envisions these spaces as giant curio cabinets housing the souvenirs of people and experiences we’ll never know.

Fractured Planes of Coherence

Paintings by Laura Paulini
Exhibit
Monday, Jan 17, 2011 12:00 am -
| Townsend Center, 220 Stephens Hall

Opposites attract. We yearn for stability and security, but our desire for variety and adventure invites risk. We know that setting goals and sticking to them will get results, yet we give in to the pleasure of breaking rules we ourselves have deliberately crafted.

Body of Light

Photographs by Jean-Paul Bourdier
Exhibit
Thursday, Feb 11, 2010 12:00 am -
| Townsend Center, 220 Stephens Hall

Body of Light features the stunning photography of Jean-Paul Bourdier, Professor of Architecture at UC Berkeley. Bourdier's colorful images of painted bodies in a desert landscape are a combination of painting, photography, sculpture, body art, land art, performance, design, gymnastics, dance, and acrobatics.