At BAMPFA, Maren Hassinger’s art offers a powerful answer through care, community, and nature, tracing five decades of ecological imagination, collective care, and radical interconnectedness.
9 June 2026
The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive presents ‘Maren Hassinger: Living Moving Growing’, the most comprehensive retrospective of the celebrated American artist’s career to date. Spanning more than five decades, the exhibition brings together sculpture, performance, installation, and moving-image works that have consistently challenged the boundaries between art, nature, and social engagement.
Working with materials as varied as wire rope, tree branches, newspapers and plastic bags, Hassinger has developed a practice rooted in transformation and care. Her works foreground the fragile relationships that bind people to one another and to the natural world, proposing acts of collaboration and participation as forms of resistance against ecological and social fragmentation.
‘Living Moving Growing’ revisits key works from the 1970s to the present, activating the gallery through performances, workshops, and the recreation of significant ephemeral installations. The exhibition reveals the breadth of Hassinger’s interdisciplinary vision, illuminating a practice where movement becomes sculpture, sculpture becomes community, and art becomes a vehicle for imagining more connected futures. At a moment marked by environmental precarity and social division, Hassinger’s work offers a timely meditation on what it means to care for the world we share.
This exhibition is on view at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in California until 29 November 2026.
