Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) is a combined art museum, repertory movie theater, and film archive associated with the University of California, Berkeley. Located in Berkeley, United States, the institution serves as a major center for both visual art and cinema. It holds a significant place in the cultural landscape of the Bay Area, bridging university scholarship with public engagement. The museum is a member of the North American Reciprocal Museums program, and its current Executive Director is Jules Rodrigues Widholm, who assumed the role in August 2020, succeeding Lawrence Rinder.

The University of California art collection began in 1870 with a gift of a 16th-century oil on wood panel by the School of Joachim Patinir from San Francisco financier François Louis Alfred Pioche. In 1881, the Bacon Art and Library Building opened, funded partly by Henry Douglas Bacon, who also donated his library and paintings. The museum was officially founded in 1963 following a substantial donation from abstract expressionist artist and teacher Hans Hofmann, who gifted 45 paintings and 250,000 dollars. A design competition was announced in 1964, and the museum opened to the public in 1970. Peter Selz, formerly of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, served as founding director from 1965 to 1973, championing unorthodox Bay Area artists. James Elliott succeeded him, serving until 1988. The Pacific Film Archive (PFA) was founded in 1967 by Sheldon Renan, who had begun screening films on the UC campus in 1966.

The art collection encompasses over 22,000 works spanning diverse periods and geographies, including Chinese Ming and Qing dynasty paintings, Indian Mughal miniatures, Baroque painting, European old master prints and drawings, early American painting, nineteenth and twentieth century photography, and modern and contemporary art. The PFA specializes in international film, programming works within theoretical or critical contexts, such as exploring film noir in the post-war ethos. It houses 18,000 films and videos, including the largest collection of Japanese films outside of Japan, and maintains a library, a study center, and online documentation databases.

The art collection features works by artists such as Albert Bierstadt, Jonathan Borofsky, Joan Brown, Robert Colescott, Jay DeFeo, Paul Gauguin, Juan Gris, Helen Frankenthaler, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Sebastião Salgado. In 2009, the museum acquired 56 paintings and drawings from Fernando Botero's Abu Ghraib Series. In 2014, it acquired Steven Leiber's collection of Conceptual art and Fluxus materials, establishing the institution as a major center for Conceptual art study. A 2019 bequest of the Eli Leon Collection brought almost 3,000 works by African American quilt makers, including over 500 by Rosie Lee Tompkins, accounting for 15 percent of the art collection. In 2021, the Richard and Mary L. Gray Collection added 15 significant works on paper by artists including Guercino, Tiepolo, Guardi, Géricault, Paul Klee, and Miró. The MATRIX Program for Contemporary Art, founded in 1978 by James Elliott, has exhibited contemporary figures like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Louise Bourgeois, Sol LeWitt, and Shirin Neshat.

BAMPFA is located in Berkeley, California, on Center Street, directly across from the main entrance to the University of California campus. As a university-associated institution, it serves both academic and public audiences through its exhibitions, film screenings, and educational programs. The museum maintains an active schedule, organizing exhibitions such as the 2020 Rosie Lee Tompkins retrospective and the planned 2025 exhibition Routed West: Twentieth Century African American Quilts in California. The institution's official website is bampfa.berkeley.edu.