Anyone who still views museums as imposing repositories of art history and their curators as snobby tastemakers has much to learn from Christina Yang, the next chief curator at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.
Her appointment, which BAMPFA announced Thursday, Oct. 7, signals an invigorating understanding of the role visual art and its institutions can play — specifically when they are attached to universities, as BAMPFA is.
“You have a built-in audience that wants to learn,” said Yang, who was once a Cal undergrad herself and still remembers the feeling of descending into BAMPFA’s basement for the film library, the smell of the cafe.
Plus, she added, “we have a chance to partner with and showcase emerging trends in a way that scholars are thinking, in a way that artists are thinking.”
Those views were a key component of what made Yang an attractive candidate, said DirectorJulie Rodrigues Widholm,她被任命为去年。
“When you think about higher learning as a place of writing the canon, determining the canon, which in fact UC Berkeley has had an incredibly significant role in, it makes a lot of sense that we’re the place to rewrite our historical narrative,” Widholm said.
For Yang, a museum is not a rarefied, dusty monument to the past but a partner that works with its artists and visitors on the concerns of their lives.
A recent project at Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown, Mass., where Yang currently serves as deputy director of engagement and curator of education, offers a small glimpse of what to expect from her curatorial vision. A collaboration among eight New England organizations and municipalities, “Resist COVID / Take 6!” byCarrie Mae Weemsused visual art to spread public health messages about COVID-19’s disproportionate effects on people of color in terms of case numbers, jobs lost and health care access. Yang worked to get the messaging on a local bus shelter and on tote bags students could take home.
“We were closed during the pandemic,” she recalled. “We really had to think, how could we still be relevant to the public and still have presence, but outside of the walls of the museum?”
Another telling past project is “The Francis Effect” by Tania Bruguera at the Guggenheim Museum, where Yang worked for 14 years before Williams College. That piece directly enlisted museum visitors to petition Pope Francis for citizenship for refugees in Vatican City.
As a scholar of performance studies — she expects to defend her dissertation in the subject at New York University next year — Yang is deeply interested in exploring how visiting BAMPFA is itself a performance.
“Everything from someone who greets you at the ticket desk, to the security guards, to the height works are hung — those are all intentional performance acts,” she said. That means they are choices, not defaults; that means they can be changed or played with or commented on, as part of the art itself, not some neutral vessel holding it.
Yang, who has also previously worked at the Kitchen and the Queens Museum in New York, said she wants to get reacquainted with museum visitors and staff as well as UC Berkeley students and faculty before naming any specific artists or types of art she hopes to bring. But she emphasized that making guests feel safe and welcome is no afterthought, especially since she often works with controversial art.
“When you learn something you don’t know, you want to be in a place where you feel safe to take a risk,” she said. “Learning is work. Learning is a change in your consciousness. If you as a visitor are willing to take that risk, as an institution we should honor that and respect that and hold that as precious.”