An installation view of 'Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection' at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. (Drew Altizer)
I am of two minds when it comes to public museums exhibiting private collections. One mind grumbles, the other respects.
Collectors with the funds to support their art-buying habits can accumulate incredible amounts of work by “great” artists (see the Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art). They are free to pursue their desires as they see fit, without the democratizing goal of fleshing out a museum’s holdings beyond those “great” artists (see again, the Fisher Collection).
Collectors can also lean into niche fields (see Eli Leon’s African American quilts, now donated to the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; Pamela and Richard Kramlich’s focus on time-based media; or Rene di Rosa’s penchant for funk art). Such focus allows them to enact monomaniacal, sometimes visionary approaches to preserving art that might otherwise be undervalued, or even lost to time.
Komal Shah poses in front the ‘Craft is Art’ section of ‘Making Their Mark’ at BAMPFA. (Drew Altizer)
Making Their Mark is, hands down, a lovely show. The Shah Garg Collection, created by Bay Area philanthropist Komal Shah and her husband Gaurav Garg, has turned acquiring art into a political statement about the earnings gap between white men and … everyone else. And this presentation of over 70 women artists proves gender has nothing to do with the quality, scale or material of one’s artistic output.
Sponsored
Which we hopefully all know. But it’s always nice to witness that fact with one’s own eyeballs.
The show is filled with monumental pieces, in terms of both size and art historical import. Dominating the former, Mary Weatherford’s Light Falling Like a Broken Chain; Paradise (2021) is a 24-foot-wide swirl of luminous, rainbow-hued Flashe on linen, a painting of immense physicality that conjures images of giant, soaking-wet brushes.
Installation view of ‘Making Their Mark’ with work (L to R) by Joan Mitchell, Mary Weatherford and Aria Dean. (Kelly Sullivan)
Of the latter, the show opens with Janet Sobel’s much humbler Untitled (1946), an all-over composition of dripped paint mixed with sand. A simply rendered face peers through her dynamic squiggles of black, red and cornflower blue. We learn that Jackson Pollock saw Sobel’s work in the early 1940s, before his 1946 foray into drip painting. A woman in the background, indeed.
It’s some of the older pieces in Making Their Mark that are the most exciting to see, and the majority of those are contained within the “Luminous Abstraction” section of the show. Here we get Leonore Tawney’s elegant black-and-ivory weaving Inquisition (1961), Rosemarie Castoro’s languid sculptural relief Gentless (Brushstroke) (1972), a 1978 Howardena Pindell and a 1969 pour piece from Lynda Benglis.
Yes, there are examples in Making Their Mark of women working in small-scale, craft-adjacent ways, or creating depictions of their own bodily experiences, but there’s more of a “yes, and” emphasis here. Yes, an elegant Toshiko Takaezu ceramic vessel, and a Simone Leigh bronze. Yes, an eyeball-sizzling Freedom Quilting Bee piece, and Jacquline Humphries’ digitally enlarged, stenciled canvas pattern.
Installation view of ‘Making Their Mark’ at BAMPFA with the Freedom Quilting Bee’s ‘Pattern to Joseph’s Coat,’ at left and Mary Heilmann’s ‘San Francisco (Night)’ and ‘San Francisco (Day)’ at right. (Kelly Sullivan)
The Shah Garg Collection has a certain taste, but to our benefit, that is good taste. The collection tends toward the colorful and the abstract, and indulges in a variety of delicious textures. Its focus, while slightly more narrow than “all art,” leaves plenty of room for curators Cecilia Alemani (of the High Line) and Margot Norton (BAMPFA’s chief curator) to arrange the selected work into slightly unruly, yet educational groupings.
This exhibition also marks the beginning of a significant relationship between the Shah Garg Foundation and the museum, which includes the launch of a Women Artists Research Fund and the promised donation of “select artworks” to BAMPFA’s permanent collection. Part of me bristles at the ethically gray area of exhibiting the collection of a major museum donor, and yet this project feels more pure than your average pay-to-play.
Some day, hopefully, we won’t need such corrective measures.
