![\"black-and-white](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/1977_2021_HASSINGER_Tree-Duet-I_2000.jpg\")
<\/p>\nAt BAMPFA, \u2018Living Moving Growing\u2019 chronicles over five decades of sculpture, performance, video and public art.<\/p>\n
Jun 18, 2026<\/p>\n
Updated 6:08 pm PT<\/p>\n
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Maren Hassinger, documentation of performance ‘Tree Duet I,’ at 5617 San Vicente Blvd., Los Angeles, c. 1974.\u00a0(Courtesy of Susan Inglett Gallery, NYC; Photo by Adam Avila)<\/p>\n
During the 55 years of her materially expansive art career, repetition has become one of Maren Hassinger\u2019s most powerful tools.\u00a0<\/p>\n
She started multiplying elements of her sculptures early on. In 1972, while still in graduate school at UCLA, she placed four large, loosely tied knots of thick hemp rope on the floor. Eight years later, she made Leaning, 32 bundles of wire rope arranged at tottering angles. Consolation, from 1996, is a grid of over 100 sprays of even thinner wire rope, an orderly rendition of ready-to-burst-apart dandelions.<\/p>\n
There could be something formulaic about repeating a gesture, of making a thing again and again. But in Living Moving Growing<\/a>, Hassinger\u2019s retrospective at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive<\/a>, her version of repetition is organic. What she captures is not the precision of mass-produced metal or plastic, but the proliferation of nature.<\/p>\n The exhibition, organized by BAMPFA curators Margot Norton and Anthony Graham, moves mostly chronologically from Hassinger\u2019s early grad school work to the present day, presenting Hassinger\u2019s fluid movement across sculpture, video, installation, performance and public art. The newest element, a participatory piece called Wrenching News<\/a> \u2014 made from twisted and tied pages of The New York Times \u2014 will grow over the course of the exhibition.<\/p>\n In the hands of another artist, Hassinger\u2019s materials (wire rope, tree branches, plastic bags) might feel cold and spare. But in pieces like River, a 1972 sculpture of steel chains entwined with nautical rope, the heft and scale of the industrial materials demonstrate the sheer physicality of Hassinger\u2019s practice. You can\u2019t see the art without seeing her, as photographed by her friend Adam Avila in the \u201970s, unwinding thick cables of wire, crouching by rows of cast plaster, posing with her sculptures as if they\u2019re dance partners.<\/p>\n Halfway through the show, duets abound. Recreations of three 1970s sculptures pair tree branches with wire rope. The silvery, bare bark blends with the slightly undulating wire, intermingling and simultaneously underlining their material contrasts. Movement \u2014 that the trees once experienced, that went into the making of this work \u2014 is never far away.\u00a0<\/p>\n This is especially the case with Beach, a 1980 piece Hassinger first installed at Linda Goode Bryant\u2019s Just Above Midtown Gallery<\/a> in New York. A simple, repeated arrangement of angled wooden dowels and irregular plaster bases immediately conjures an image of long grasses blowing in the wind. At BAMPFA, the dowels point the way forward to the next gallery, and to Hassinger\u2019s own move from Los Angeles to the East Coast.<\/p>\n Here, color enters Hassinger\u2019s work in the form of pink plastic bags, red crosses made from tape and the dark green of rose leaves affixed, like wallpaper, across two walls of a gallery. Heaven serves as a backdrop for Beige (1992) and Green (1993), Hassinger\u2019s first video works. The former documents the winter landscape seen on her commute across Long Island, the latter, the verdant images of summer.<\/p>\n In two other works, Hassinger turns the camera on herself and her family, examining the construction of race (the 16mm film Daily Mask) and her own complicated family tree (the video Birthright). The exhibition creates a dark, sequestered corner for visitors to watch these pieces, the pink plastic bags of Love warming the space.<\/p>\n As to lingering: Some of Hassinger\u2019s sculptural works are so large, so stunning, it might be easy to breeze by the much-smaller photographs and ephemera in and around the show\u2019s vitrines. These include images of her Malcolm X-quoting mosaics in the New York City subway; documentation of the 1982 performance Flying, Hassinger and her Studio Z collaborators smiling, arms spread; and pictures of the artist performing Pink Trash, dispersing pink-painted detritus across three New York City parks. (Hassinger will perform Pink Trash<\/a> on the Crescent Lawn, across the street from BAMPFA, on Sept. 20, 2026.)<\/p>\n These pieces of documentation depict a deeply collaborative and joyful practice. Even when it\u2019s Hassinger in the frame, we know there\u2019s a photographer on the other side of the lens, making sure this moment \u2014 if not this object \u2014 is preserved as art history.<\/p>\n Living Moving Growing is the latest in a string of especially strong shows at BAMPFA. The museum is, as executive director Julie Rodrigues Widholm writes in the catalog that accompanies this exhibition, \u201c[committed] to increasing the visibility of influential women artists and generating new scholarship on their work.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n![\"gallery](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/Install_Living-Moving-Growing_2026_024_AMFA_art_2000.jpg\")
Installation view of \u2018Maren Hassinger: Living Moving Growing\u2019 at BAMPFA, with \u2018Leaning,\u2019 1980 in the foreground.<\/p>\n![\"installation](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/Install_Living-Moving-Growing_2026_016_AMFA_art_2000.jpg\")
From left to right: Maren Hassinger, \u2018Beach,\u2019 1980\/2025; \u2018Pas de Deux,\u2019 1977\/2026; and \u2018Love,\u2019 2008\/2026.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/1982_HASSINGER_Flying_Documentation-View-5.jpg\")
Maren Hassinger, Juana Nash, Senga Nengudi, Ulysses Jenkins, Franklin Parker, Lofty Amono, \u201cNastyee,\u201d and N\u2019dugu Jungles, \u2018Flying,\u2019 1982. A performance at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Barnsdall Art Park.<\/p>\n