If BAMPFA’s grand coming-out party in their now two-year-old Center Street location addressed their immediate surroundings (new building, who dis?), their latest foray into large-scale group exhibition-making expands that area of self-reflection to encompass the entire Bay Area.
Way Bay, an wide-ranging retrospective of Bay Area art running through June 3, is smaller in square footage than Architecture of Life, but packed full, salon-style, with objects from the museum’s collection (along with a few pieces from the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology and the Bancroft Library).
The result is (way) overwhelming and (way) exhilarating. Instead of identifying artworks with wall labels, the exhibition relies on a 36-page gallery guide, complete with diagrams that indicate pieces by the black vinyl numbers mounted discretely near them. Those groupings aren’t chronological or media-specific, but poetic — literally. Lines written by Bay Area poets appear as headings for works related to categories which could be loosely interpreted as “light,” “gesture” and “interior spaces,” to name a few.
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