{"id":372047,"date":"2026-06-23T22:01:12","date_gmt":"2026-06-23T22:01:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/372047\/"},"modified":"2026-06-23T22:01:12","modified_gmt":"2026-06-23T22:01:12","slug":"the-transformative-art-of-maren-hassinger-comes-to-berkeley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/372047\/","title":{"rendered":"The transformative art of Maren Hassinger comes to Berkeley"},"content":{"rendered":"

For decades, Maren Hassinger didn\u2019t consider the political impact her art might have. She created work not to influence others, but to express how she felt about our shared humanity.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe problems that we associate with life here on Earth are problems that are caused by our inability to see each other as one,\u201d Hassinger has said<\/a>. \u201cOne thing that we all share is nature.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Born in Los Angeles in 1947, Hassinger is widely considered a foundational figure in Black conceptual art. She rose to prominence in the 1970s with a series of wire-rope installations, where she unbraided rigid industrial materials like steel cable and twisted and curved them to mimic natural elements or ecosystems, like rain or grasses blowing in the wind.<\/p>\n

\"AnHassinger\u2019s \u201cLeaning,\u201d originally created in 1980 and shown here at BAMPFA in 2026, features industrial wire-rope sculptures configured to tilt across the gallery floor. \u201cMovement is always a part of her work, whether they\u2019re in steel or branches or performance,\u201d said BAMPFA chief curator Margot Norton. <\/p>\n

Chris Grunder<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s quite inspiring to see how she\u2019s able to take a simple material and manipulate it in ways that it feels so monumental, yet so intimate,\u201d said Margot Norton, chief curator at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA).\u00a0<\/p>\n

Hassinger went on to pioneer community-driven public rituals and integrate modern dance into sculpture, and spent 20 years mentoring generations of younger artists as the director of the Rinehart School of Sculpture at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Her work has been acquired into the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"ArtistFrom left: BAMPFA executive director Julie Rodrigues Widholm, chief curator Margot Norton, artist Maren Hassinger, curatorial assistant Omar Jason Farah and senior curator Anthony Graham. Norton and Graham, with Farah, curated Maren Hassinger: Living Moving Growing, now on display in BAMPFA\u2019s main gallery through November.<\/p>\n

Courtesy of BAMPFA<\/p>\n

Long fascinated by Hassinger\u2019s work, Norton wanted to honor the artist in a way she hadn\u2019t been before. So Norton, along with BAMPFA senior curator Anthony Graham, decided to put together a landmark retrospective that would showcase Hassinger\u2019s five-decade career, from her early 1970s wire-rope innovations to her latest community-driven installations \u2014 vibrant landscapes of hand-twisted newsprint and hundreds of pink plastic bags inflated by the breath of strangers.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a lot of research involved in working with an artist that has been so influential,\u201d Norton said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The curators got to work. They tracked down 50 years of performance documentation, commissioned an illustrated 344-page exhibition catalogue and worked closely with the artist\u2019s studio to plan complex recreations of Hassinger\u2019s early, ephemeral installations. And now, three years later, the exhibition \u2014 Maren Hassinger: Living Moving Growing<\/a> \u2014 has opened in BAMPFA\u2019s main gallery. The show, a collaboration with the UC Botanical Garden, is the largest retrospective of Hassinger\u2019s art practice to date.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Rather than mount the artworks strictly chronologically, Norton said the curators focused more on themes present throughout Hassinger\u2019s decades of work \u2014 nature, community, equality and the interconnectedness of all living things \u2014 and attempted to put them in conversation with one another.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI do feel like every artwork is alive,\u201d said Norton. \u201cPart of our job as curators is to let them sing.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"AnAt BAMPFA, Hassinger\u2019s \u201cBirthright\u201d (left) is across from \u201cLove\u201d (right), inviting a conversation between the two artworks.<\/p>\n

Chris Grunder<\/p>\n

In one room, there\u2019s a piece called \u201cBirthright,\u201d a documentary-style video where Hassinger examines her family\u2019s complicated history, confronting the thievery of slavery and interviewing relatives she\u2019d never spoken to before. And on the opposite wall is a work called \u201cLove,\u201d an installation of hundreds of pink plastic bags that are filled with breath and little notes that say \u201clove\u201d inside of each bag. These two pieces, Norton imagines, have a lot to say to one another.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That dialogue is amplified by the humble, industrial media that Hassinger uses to tell these profound stories \u2014 and the way those ordinary materials invite others into her creative process.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn a lot of her art, Maren works with everyday materials that are just part of our surroundings,\u201d said Norton. \u201cThroughout her career, she has foregrounded ideas of community, ideas of collaboration, ideas of the potential when people create things together.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

In \u201cPink Trash,\u201d<\/a> which Hassinger will perform with Berkeley students on the campus\u2019s Crescent Lawn in September, she collects garbage, paints it pink \u2014 a prominent color in her work \u2014 and strews it across the lawn to draw attention to the immense waste humans produce. Another artwork, \u201cWrenching News<\/a>,\u201d invites the community to collectively twist and knot newsprint to build an installation that will grow throughout the exhibition. Led by Berkeley-based artist Julia Goodman, these collaborative sessions will run monthly through November.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"ArchivalHassinger performs \u201cPink Trash\u201d in 1982. <\/p>\n

Photo by Horace Brockington; courtesy of Susan Inglett Gallery, NYC<\/p>\n

Deeply moved by nature, Hassinger frequently brings the outdoors inside the museum walls. In collaboration with the UC Botanical Garden \u2014 its staff provided limbs from a recently felled cherry tree \u2014 the curators carefully selected branches to recreate Hassinger\u2019s historic late-1970s sculptures, including \u201cPas de Deux,\u201d \u201cDeep Down\u201d and \u201cDry Flow.\u201d In these pieces, the organic branches intertwine with industrial wire rope in meticulous, grid-like compositions, with each material intersecting and adapting to the other\u2019s shape.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s this constant conversation between inside and outside, organic and industrial, and also how the human body navigates through it all,\u201d said Norton. \u201cThe way the viewer moves around her artwork, I think, is just as essential as the artworks themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n

The exhibition extends far beyond the physical museum galleries, too. Nestled in the UC Botanical Garden\u2019s Oak Knoll, with a sweeping view of San Francisco\u2019s Golden Gate Bridge, stands \u201cMonument (Pyramid)\u201d<\/a> \u2014 a massive, 10-foot-tall public sculpture. Sustainably constructed entirely out of fallen redwood branches sourced directly from the Garden, the towering piece required a week of collaborative labor from Garden and BAMPFA staff, as well as dozens of the Garden\u2019s volunteers, to meticulously weave together.<\/p>\n

\"AHassinger\u2019s \u201cMonument (Pyramid)\u201d is a 10-feet-tall public sculpture constructed of fallen redwood branches from the UC Botanical Garden. It will be on display in the Garden\u2019s Oak Knoll through November.<\/p>\n

Susan Sharman\/UC Botanical Garden<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s like these two monuments are looking at each other,\u201d said Christine Manoux, director of education and visitor engagement at the Garden. \u201cOne is a natural material, the other steel and cable, both created by human hands.\u201d<\/p>\n

In its entirety, Norton hopes the exhibition acts as a vibrant connection \u2014 linking the natural world with the industrial, and bringing people and the artworks into conversation with one another. By inviting the public to touch, build and navigate her art, Hassinger invites us to contemplate our temporary place in the environment.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of what Maren\u2019s work celebrates is the potential held within the very brief time that we exist,\u201d said Norton.<\/p>\n

For Norton, bringing this history together has been a profound privilege.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is such an honor to be able to tell Maren\u2019s story in this way,\u201d she said. \u201cI do think that\u2019s where museums do their best \u2014 when they can combine scholarly research with awe-inspiring art, and be a bridge linking publics from wide-ranging backgrounds to an artist whose works spark important conversations,\u201d Norton said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Living Moving Growing will be on display through November. Learn more about the exhibition and related events<\/a>, including ongoing interactive public programming and curator tours.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For decades, Maren Hassinger didn\u2019t consider the political impact her art might have. She created work not to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":372048,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[5282,2311,143,145,144],"class_list":["post-372047","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-arts","tag-museums","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/372047","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=372047"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/372047\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/372048"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=372047"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=372047"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=372047"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}