The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive announced on Monday that it will receive a bequest of artworks from Berkeley-based collectors Penny Cooper and Rena Rosenwasser. The promised gift comprises over 150 pieces of modern and contemporary art by women.
Cooper, a criminal defense attorney and advocate for social justice, and Rosenwasser, a poet and cofounder of the Bay Area–based feminist publishing house Kelsey Street Press, have long made collecting a part of their support for women in the arts.
Since 1977, when they purchased a textile piece by Lenore Tawney, they have focused exclusively on collecting art by women, much of it acquired early in those artists’ careers. The bequest to BAMPFA comprises works in all media by such pioneering figures as Lynda Benglis, Louise Bourgeois, Mona Hatoum, Agnes Martin, Julie Mehretu, Catherine Opie, Doris Salcedo, Kara Walker, and Carrie Mae Weems.
“Museums have a responsibility to reflect the full breadth of human creativity, and for too long our collections—like those of institutions across the field—have fallen far short of that promise,” said BAMPFA executive director Julie Rodrigues Widholm. “The Cooper Rosenwasser Collection bequest gives us the rare opportunity to meaningfully right-size the representation of women artists in our holdings, and to do so with works of extraordinary depth and range.”
BAMPFA is marking the gift with the exhibition “Rhapsody: Works from the Cooper Rosenwasser Collection,” a selection of 65 paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture, and photographs from the promised bequest. On view from March 4 through June 28, the show traces the influence of second-wave feminism on women artists over the past 60 years.
