From Quilts to Protest Texts:
Rethinking What Belongs in the Museum at UC Berkley
8/30/2025
Hector Chen
On a sunny afternoon in the Bay Area, I find myself surrounded by objects that do not sit comfortably within the traditional frame of art history: a quilt displayed with its seams exposed, a monumental textile woven from unravelled sweaters, a wall covered in fragments of activist texts, a figure assembled from prosthetic parts. Each work negotiates a balance between utility and artistry, memory and modernism, care and confrontation. Museums often speak in the past tense; this work insists on the present. It sets the tone for the rest of the museum, framing the institution not as a repository of objects but as a forum where scholarship, activism, and memory collide.
This is the work of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), the museum for UC Berkeley. As a university museum, BAMPFA occupies a particular position: neither purely academic nor purely public, it must serve scholarship, pedagogy, and community all at once. That hybrid role makes it uniquely suited to take risks that larger institutions often avoid, but it also leaves it especially vulnerable to political pressures and funding constraints. The exhibitions currently on view reveal both the promise and the precarity of this model, offering a case study in how museums might remain relevant in a moment when both content and resources are under attack.
Children playing in the atrium and friends talking on the stairs, beneath Stephanie Syjuco’s Present Tense (Roll Call), capture the essence of BAMPFA as a space where art, community, and civil liberty meet.
As one enters the museum, Stephanie Syjuco’s Present Tense (Roll Call) makes the building itself into a civic stage. Enlarged book spines and archival documents resurrect Berkeley’s long history of protest—the Free Speech Movement, the Third World Liberation Front—but speak directly to 2025, when ethnic studies and public education are again contested. Syjuco’s mural draws on the Ethnic Studies Library and the Bancroft Library, reframing their holdings as public pedagogy. She invited artist-educators across the country to nominate their own teaching texts, expanding authorship beyond herself. In doing so, she turns the museum into a classroom without walls, collapsing the line between archive and audience.
Installation View at Routed West - Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California
Inside, Routed West expands the frame. The exhibition traces the flow of African American quilts during the Second Great Migration, when millions of Black families moved west in search of freedom and opportunity. Some carried quilts for warmth; many carried only the skill to make them. For those stretched across geographies and generations, the quilts became more than function—they were containers for ancestral memory, tethers to mothers and grandmothers, emblems of survival. In bell hooks’s words, quilts were “maps charting the course of our lives. They were history as life lived.” Featuring over one hundred quilts by nearly ninety makers, predominantly women tied to the Bay Area, the show threads the needle of American history through objects that were never intended as “artworks” in the canonical sense.
When one thinks of quilts in the museum, the name Faith Ringgold inevitably comes to mind. Her story quilts have long been recognized as contemporary art, collected by major institutions and canonized in textbooks. But the quilts here occupy a different register: they were utilitarian objects of daily life, stitched from scraps of clothing and bedding, carried across states, passed down through families. Their artistry lies in improvisation, survival, and resilience, rather than in their alignment with institutional definitions of art. By displaying them, sometimes with their backs visible and with samples to touch, BAMPFA makes a radical statement: art history must expand to include the everyday labor of women whose contributions were long overlooked.
MATRIX 287 / Berenice Olmedo: To ti ên einai is the first museum exhibition in the United States for artist Berenice Olmedo
The quilts’ fragility mirrors the fragility of the institution itself. The collection comes from Eli Leon’s extraordinary 2019 bequest of over three thousand quilts, yet just months before the exhibition opened, the federal government revoked $230,000 in conservation funding, dismissing the project as “woke.” UC Berkeley has pledged stopgap support, but the episode underscores the precariousness of public institutions engaged in repair. The very work that broadens our understanding of American art is often the least secure.
Adjacent to the quilts, Berenice Olmedo’s sculptures introduce another register of care and confrontation. Assembled from prosthetic sockets, orthopedic implants, and scoliosis corsets, they stand as anthropomorphic beings that defy normative expectations of form. They propose a world in which disability is not stigma but variation, where difference is a condition of existence rather than its exception. These figures are intimate and commanding, collapsing the boundaries between medical device and sculpture, patient and artist. They remind us that museums can be sites where the politics of embodiment are reimagined.
On another floor, Lee ShinJa: Drawing with Thread reframes modernism from a Korean vantage point. Curated by Victoria Sung with Tausif Noor, the exhibition presents Lee as a pioneer of fiber art who began working in the 1950s with yarn salvaged from sweaters, bedding, and mosquito nets. Her monumental abstractions collapsed distinctions between art and craft, figuration and abstraction, offering an entirely different genealogy of postwar experimentation. To encounter these works in Berkeley—many for the first time outside Korea—is to realize how partial our existing narratives of modernism have been. But the scaffolding that makes such an exhibition possible is complex. Major support came from private donors, family foundations, and endowments, but also from Tina Kim Gallery, which represents Lee in the commercial sphere. This is not unusual—indeed, it is the norm. Galleries and donors are part of the ecology that sustains ambitious scholarship. The challenge for a university museum is to balance these sources of support with its pedagogical mission, to ensure that private patronage enables rather than dictates the stories being told.
A group of students visiting Lee ShinJa: Drawing with Thread, the first North American survey on the work of the artist.
Taken together, these exhibitions position BAMPFA as more than a museum. They present it as a civic laboratory, where archives are activated, overlooked voices are restored, and artistic categories are destabilized. Yet they also highlight the inherent conflict facing institutions today. From a financial perspective, the canon remains indispensable: a Picasso show guarantees crowds, a Warhol show secures donor enthusiasm. And increasingly, commercial galleries and private donors underwrite exhibitions, intertwining market validation with institutional programming. From an artistic and historical perspective, however, the canon alone is insufficient. The quilts, fibers, prosthetics, and activist texts on view here represent the real work of repair, the reason museums matter in the present tense. The question is whether institutions can use the visibility of the canon, and the support of donors and galleries, to expand the archive—to stage juxtapositions that reveal both the canon’s authority and its limits.
As public institutions face unprecedented difficulties, both in terms of funding and in the scrutiny of what they choose to display, BAMPFA stands as an icon of how others might follow. It demonstrates that museums need not be passive storehouses of the canon but can be active forums where archives become public, where pedagogy becomes art, and where the exclusions of history are confronted head-on. To walk through its galleries is to see how survival, protest, and reimagination can be stitched, woven, assembled, and inscribed into the cultural record. The good museums bring not only objects but responsibilities: to repair what has been overlooked, to expand what has been excluded, and to remind us that art is as much about care as it is about beauty. A museum cannot mend the world outright, but it can model what repair looks like—and remind us why defending its capacity to do so matters more than ever.
© 2025 by Hector Chen