Over the past thirty years, with more than 220 exhibitions, the Berkeley Art Museum’s acclaimed MATRIX Program has charted a unique course through the landscape of contemporary art. From the beginning, MATRIX has been a space of active engagement with living artists, a progressive stance at the time of the program’s founding in 1978, when most museums made contemporary art the subject of their inquiry only infrequently. For then museum director James Elliott, who introduced and developed the idea during his tenure at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, before bringing it to Berkeley, the continuous (and, in the earlier days, also overlapping) exhibitions of contemporary art in the MATRIX Program were meant to be viewed as “discrete units in a cumulative and ongoing statement reflective of the wide range of ideas being explored by today’s artists.”
MATRIX was a key force in introducing many important contemporary artists to Bay Area audiences, and in supporting the careers and raising the profiles of Bay Area artists in the context of international contemporary art. The legacy of this influence lives on in the museum’s collection, which includes works by a majority of the artists who have exhibited in the MATRIX Program, and in the collections of patrons who have supported the museum over the history of the program.
MATRIX/REDUX, on view in Galleries 1 and B, samples from the history of the MATRIX Program with selections from the BAM/PFA collection and loans from local collections rarely seen by museum audiences. The exhibition places special emphasis on new gifts and acquisitions, such as Kiki Smith’s Crèche (1997), a recent gift from Richard and Lenore Niles. At the time of her MATRIX exhibition in 1994, Smith was best known for her exploration of the body, inside and out, through a variety of media, including wax, bronze, glass, fabric, and paper; she was just beginning to expand her focus to cosmological and natural phenomena. In Crèche, a menagerie of phosphorous bronze animals—fox, deer, bats, mice, rabbits, and owls—form their own colony of creatures suggesting spirited powers of transformation. “Art is about being curious. About knowing how things hold meaning—trying to make sense of oneself, one’s environment,” Smith has said.
