BERKELEY, CALIF.- The most comprehensive retrospective to date of Maren Hassinger has opened at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, featuring half a century of work by one of the most influential living artists in the United States. Maren Hassinger: Living Moving Growing encompasses the full scope of Hassinger’s output across an eclectic range of forms, including large-scale sculpture, site-specific installation, video, and performance. The exhibition displays more than twenty of Hassinger’s most notable works from the 1970s to the present, as well as participatory and performance pieces executed in partnership with the artist. Maren Hassinger: Living Moving Growing is accompanied by an extensive exhibition catalogue, featuring new scholarly essays and previously unpublished documentation of Hassinger’s work.

Hassinger began her career in the 1970s and brought new perspectives to contemporary art, positioned in dialogue with a cohort of Black artists, feminist artists, and artists addressing ecological concerns. Known for constantly experimenting with impermanent and industrial materials as well as performance, she has worked at the intersection of dance, sculpture, video, and installation over the past five decades. While her work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions at leading museums across the country, the ephemerality of her practice requires that many of her sculptures and installations be recreated anew for each presentation. Maren Hassinger: Living Moving Growing is the most ambitious retrospective to date of the artist’s body of work, assembling major sculptures alongside temporary installations recreated at BAMPFA. Notable examples include Love (2008), a site-specific sculpture composed of pink plastic bags inflated by human breath and filled with love notes; Beach (1980), a floor installation consisting of plaster and wooden dowels; and multiple sculptures that incorporate recently harvested tree branches, realized by BAMPFA in partnership with the University of California Botanical Garden.

Over the course of Maren Hassinger: Living Moving Growing, BAMPFA is hosting a series of participatory workshops engaging visitors to co-create new work that is incorporated into the retrospective—a major aspect of the artist’s practice, extending her work in performance to engage directly with audiences. On the exhibition’s opening day, following a series of tributes from key figures in Hassinger’s career, the artist invited visitors to join her in twisting and knotting newspapers to create a new, large-scale installation entitled Wrenching News. The installation was assembled at BAMPFA in a public workshop led by Hassinger herself, the first in a series of workshops adding to the work throughout its presentation. Subsequent workshops continue on a monthly basis, led by Berkeley-based artist Julia Goodman.

Hassinger will return to Berkeley on September 20 to restage one of her most iconic performances, Pink Trash, which she will execute for only the third time since its debut in 1982. Hassinger will expand on previous iterations of the performance to work with six UC Berkeley undergraduates, who will join the artist to scatter a collection of discarded litter that will be gathered and repainted pink, offering a powerful metaphor for humanity’s obligation to care for the natural world. The performance will take place on UC Berkeley’s Crescent Lawn, across the street from BAMPFA; more information about this and other public programs will be announced at bampfa.org.

Maren Hassinger: Living Moving Growing also features archival video and photographs of many of Hassinger’s sculptures, performances, and installations—including previously unseen photos of the artist early in her career taken by Adam Avila, an early collaborator of Hassinger’s whom she met while working at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in the early 1970s. These black-and-white images, which are also included in the exhibition catalogue, serve as important documentation of early works by the artist that no longer exist.

Born in Los Angeles in 1947, Hassinger studied dance and sculpture at Bennington College and received an MFA in Fiber Structure from UCLA. In the 1970s, she began collaborating with other artists as part of the collective Studio Z, including Senga Nengudi, Ulysses Jenkins, and David Hammons, among others. In 1980, Hassinger had her first solo exhibition at Just Above Midtown Gallery in New York; the following year, she became the first Black artist to have a solo exhibition at LACMA. Hassinger relocated to the East Coast in 1984 to participate in the artist-in-residence program at the Studio Museum in Harlem. After several years on Long Island, she moved to Baltimore, where she became Director of the Rinehart School of Sculpture at the Maryland Institute College of Art, a position she held for twenty years. She currently lives and works in Harlem, New York.

Maren Hassinger: Living Moving Growing marks the culmination of a renewed interest in Hassinger’s work in recent years, during which she has been featured in acclaimed group exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and The Whitney Museum of American Art, among other leading art institutions. Her retrospective at BAMPFA is co-curated by Margot Norton, Chief Curator, and Anthony Graham, Senior Curator, with Omar Jason Farah, Curatorial Assistant.

In conjunction with the retrospective, BAMPFA has published a fully illustrated catalogue on Hassinger, in association with DelMonico Books / D.A.P. The most extensive scholarly publication on this artist ever assembled, the catalogue features an introductory essay by Graham and a roundtable conversation moderated by Norton with Hassinger’s collaborators, including Just Above Midtown gallery founder, filmmaker, and activist Linda Goode Bryant, and artists Senga Nengudi and Ava Hassinger—who is also Maren’s daughter. In addition, the catalogue includes a new interview with Hassinger conducted by art historian Lowery Stokes Sims. Additional essays are contributed by Robyn Farrell, Senior Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs of The Kitchen; Kristen Juarez, Senior Research Specialist at the Getty Research Institute; and Hilton Als, UC Berkeley professor, author, and longtime critic and essayist at The New Yorker.

“Maren Hassinger’s practice has been of great influence for generations of artists–from her early collaborative performances and experimental installations with Studio Z and JAM to her direct impact over decades as a teacher, and through her monumental sculptural installations in major museum collections across the United States,” said Norton. “We are thrilled to finally bring her artworks and their stories from across her career together through our exhibition, and to showcase Hassinger’s profound contributions to contemporary art.”

“For decades, Maren Hassinger has created sculptures and installations that transcend disciplinary boundaries, transforming industrial and mass-produced materials into evocative abstractions,” said Graham. “This exhibition showcases how these innovative works have drawn attention to subtle movements and forms of our everyday lives, connecting us to one another and to the world around us.”

“Maren Hassinger’s work invites us to reflect on the beauty and complexity of human connection—through movement, material, and shared experience. Presenting this landmark retrospective at BAMPFA underscores our commitment to amplifying artists whose practices challenge conventions and inspire collective engagement across generations,” said BAMPFA’s Executive Director, Julie Rodrigues Widholm.


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