San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Women-focused collection headed to BAMPFA
A celebrated Bay Area collection with an emphasis on women artists will be getting a big homecoming this fall.
The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive plan to present the exclusive West Coast engagement of “Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection” this fall, museum officials announced Monday, March 25. The collection was founded in 2014 by Atherton philanthropists Komal Shah, a former tech engineer and executive, and her husband Gaurav Garg, a tech entrepreneur.
The show will open in the first floor galleries on Oct. 26 and be on view through April 20, 2025.
“I felt that for our show, this would be the right place,” Shah said, “a place where there has been so much support for feminist art and for supporting women artists.”
The exhibition was originally curated in 2023 at the former Dia Center for the Arts space at 548 W. 22nd St. in New York by Cecilia Alemani, chief curator of High Line Art. The local show will be curated by Alemani in collaboration with BAMPFA Chief Curator Margot Norton.
This second iteration is expected to highlight artists in the collection with deep ties to the Bay Area such as Mary Corse, Trude Guermonprez, Mary Heilmann, Mary Lovelace O’Neal, Elizabeth Murray and Kay Sekimachi, in addition to celebrated international artists including Lynda Benglis, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sonya Gomes, Maria Lassnig, Joan Mitchell, Julie Mehretu, Howardena Pindell and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith.
The fall opening of the exhibition will coincide with the launch of the new Shah Garg Women Artists Research Fund, which will allow the museum to
create new public programs, publications and exhibitions featuring women artists.
Additionally, Shah and Garg have promised several works from the collection to BAMPFA.
“The significant investment in the work of women artists by Komal and Guarav is truly inspiring and groundbreaking,” said BAMPFA’s Executive Director Julie Rodrigues Widholm in a statement. “We are so grateful that their vision dovetails with ours at BAMPFA to create public access to such excellent examples of artwork by leading artists of our time, which will generate new scholarship and new art histories for years to come.”
Shah is a graduate of the Haas School of Business; Rodrigues Widholm noted that it is particularly “fitting that this partnership is with an esteemed UC Berkeley alumna.”
Originally from Ahmedabad, India, Shah came to California in 1991 to study computer science. She has a master’s degree from Stanford University in addition to her MBA from UC Berkeley. Shah has held positions in the executive suites of Oracle, Netscape and Yahoo but in 2008 retired from tech to focus on philanthropy.
Shah is a trustee at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art as well as a former board member at the Asian Art Museum.
“It’s been a very busy year. We published a book on the collection, we’ve had about 50,000 visitors in New York, and at least two-thirds of the artists that are alive and in the show have visited,” Shah said of last year’s East Coast showing. Now with it in the Bay Area, she believes “it’s a great opportunity for students from UC Berkeley and in the Bay Area to come together and see these works showcased.”
Norton is especially excited to see how the collection will present at BAMPFA.
“The galleries on the top floor of the museum are almost made for this kind of work. It is a very high-ceiling space that was once a printing press,” she said. “Spaces like this really crave bold, large-scale works that have an impact. I can’t wait for that giant Mary Weatherford to come into the space and really take over the the walls in a more immersive way, and to see Simone Leigh’s majestic sculpture sit so proudly in those galleries will be incredible.”