The UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive showcases recent acquisitions of works by pioneering Conceptual artist Sol LeWitt and SECA Award–winner Rosana Castrillo Díaz.

Berkeley, CA, September 12, 2006 - The University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA) is pleased to present two recent museum acquisitions: Sol LeWitt's A sphere lit from the top, four sides, and all their combinations (2004) and Rosana Castrillo Díaz's Untitled (2006) - both important new works by these contemporary artists. LeWitt's A sphere is currently on display as part of the museum exhibition Measure of Time, running through June 24, 2007. Díaz's Untitled is now on display through November 26, 2006, as part of the ongoing exhibition Selections from the Collection.

Sol LeWitt
A sphere lit from the top, four sides, and all their combinations, 2004
Pure pigment ink jet prints on paper; 80 x 141 1/2 inches

Pioneering Conceptual artist Sol LeWitt's A sphere lit from the top, four sides, and all their combinations is a major addition to the museum's expanding Conceptual art collection, which includes a concentration of works by the first generation of Conceptual artists, such as Bruce Nauman, Tom Marioni, Ant Farm, Terry Fox, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. The work was purchased by BAM/PFA last year with funds made possible through a gift from Therese Bonney, by exchange.

As with many of LeWitt's works, an idea is central to A sphere lit from the top, four sides, and all their combinations. The installation's title lays out a logical process for taking twenty-eight photographs of a sphere. The resulting photographs are arranged in a grid four frames high and seven frames wide, beginning with the featureless sphere starkly lit from the top (at the upper left) and ending with the sphere blindingly lit from all sides (on the bottom right). Each photograph documents a specific state of illumination while becoming part of an abstract narrative as the artist works out his plan. As LeWitt notes about his grid works, "Intervals and measurements can be important to a work of art…. Regular space [can] become a metric time element, a kind of regular beat or pulse."

This "regular beat or pulse" situates LeWitt's installation within Measure of Time, BAM/PFA's major collection-based exhibition that explores the idea of time - frozen, fragmented, mechanized, accelerated, and slowed down to an almost imperceptible pace - and its relationship to art. Part of the exhibition's second rotation, the installation is displayed alongside works by many of the great American artists of the 20th-century, including Jackson Pollock, Alfred Stieglitz, Man Ray, Joseph Stella, Dennis Oppenheim, and Jay DeFeo. Currently on view at BAM/PFA, Measure of Time continues until June 24, 2007.

Born in Connecticut in 1928, Sol LeWitt's drawings, paintings, and sculptures have been exhibited at museums and galleries all over the world. In 1978, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, presented the first retrospective of his work. A more recent retrospective was exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, in 2000, before traveling to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Rosana Castrillo Díaz
Untitled, 2006
Matte-finish transparent tape; 12 x 24 feet

Constructed out of overlapping cellular forms made entirely out of Scotch-tape loops, Rosana Castrillo Díaz's installation Untitled is visually challenging, presenting an intense optical effect as the loops subtly fade in and out of focus. The large, labor-intensive installation also represents a considerable leap from the similar Scotch-tape work the young artist created for the Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art (SECA) Awards exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) in 2005.

Untitled is on display as part of BAM/PFA's ongoing exhibition Selections from the Collection. This evolving exhibition in the museum's central atrium gallery features many masterworks from the museum's collection, including Peter Paul Rubens's majestic oil sketch The Road to Calvary (1632), Mark Rothko's contemplative and ethereal Number 207 (Red over Dark Blue on Dark Gray) (1961), and David Smith's monumental sculpture of welded steel and found objects Voltri XIII (1962).

Diaz's installation is complimented by a related exhibition, Tara Donovan: Colony (on view through April 15, 2007), presenting another work constructed out of every-day materials - in this case, pencils. For Colony (2002), Donovan has amassed hundreds of short pencils into a sprawling topographical sculpture that can be viewed from above, by looking down from the museum lobby, or up close on the gallery floor.

Spanish-born and San Francisco–based, Rosana Castrillo Díaz received a B.F.A. from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1996 and an M.F.A. from Mills College in 2003. She received a prestigious SECA Award in 2004 and participated in the annual awards exhibition at SFMOMA the following year.

A beautiful addition to BAM/PFA's collection, Untitled was commissioned for the museum with funds provided by the Acquisitions Committee Fund and the Herringer Family Foundation.

Also at BAM/PFA

The Bancroft Library at 100: A Celebration 1906 – 2006
Through December 3, 2006
Rare - and rarely seen - treasures from UC Berkeley's Bancroft Library, including a pictographic scroll from 16th-century Oaxaca, the earliest known drawings of San Francisco and the Yosemite Valley, and the nugget that sparked the Gold Rush.

Semina Culture: Wallace Berman and His Circle
October 18 – December 10, 2006
More than 300 rarely exhibited works inspired by Beat artist and creative mentor Wallace Berman and his influential, free-form publication Semina.

Allen Ruppersberg: The Singing Posters
October 18 – December 10, 2006
An exhibition of hundreds of Day-Glo posters paying tribute to Allen Ginsberg's famous poem "Howl."

Grapefruit
October 18, 2006 – March 28, 2007
A selection of "instruction paintings" from Yoko Ono's groundbreaking 1964 book Grapefruit, which inspired John Lennon to write his peace hymn "Imagine."

Credit Line

The University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive is supported by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Additional support is provided by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Koret Foundation, the Bernard Osher Foundation, Packard Humanities Institute, the Henry Luce Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Columbia Foundation, the Christensen Fund, the William H. Donner Foundation, San Francisco Foundation, Gap Inc., other private foundations and corporations, and our individual donors and members. Major endowment support has been provided by the Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation and by George Gund III.

Gap Inc. is proud to support First Impressions: Free First Thursdays at BAM/PFA. For more information about Free First Thursday gallery tours and screenings visit our website at bampfa.berkeley.edu.

University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
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