BAMPFA Resilient in Face of Trump Budget Cuts
By Larissa Archer
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive is unsurprisingly amongst the arts institutions struck by Trump’s crude funding cuts, having lost $260,000 of promised grants, one which was supposed to cover an upcoming exhibit of African American quiltwork in California and another separate grant to be spent over the next several years, all vanished in the president’s zeal to make America ever dumber, whiter, and lower-brow.
It speaks to BAMPFA’s sturdy convictions that, while other institutions are obediently firing staff, canceling exhibits, withholding diplomas, etc in genuflection to Trump’s demands, the Berkeley museum held strong on its pre-election decision to honor two artists at its annual gala who stand in direct ideological defiance of this administration (and even some previous administrations). One is Trevor Paglen, a conceptual artist and pioneer of “experimental geography” who started examining mass surveillance and data collection long before the rest of us noticed that Facebook could basically read our minds and then show us an ad based on what it found there.
He’s used lenses made for astronomy research to photograph remote government “black sites” and explored the ethics of drone warfare over a decade before its practice was being livestreamed to our phones 24/7. The other is Cheryl Dunye, the first black lesbian to ever direct a feature film, 1996’s The Watermelon Woman, and who for nearly 35 years has been exploring themes of race, gender, and sexuality, focusing on the experience of being a black lesbian, including the deliberate erasure of black women and lesbians in the history of filmmaking.
The attendees bid valiantly in the auction, resulting in a net of about $600,000 for the museum, which sounds great but does not fully heal the wound of the slashed funds. It brings up a troubling concept which predates the current term and its violent anti-cultural tantrums. Conservatives want us to think that it’s not only fine but proper for funding for the arts to come entirely from the affluent so the government can spend our precious collective tax dollars on more appropriate things like bombs, fighter jets, and facial recognition tech.
While one can be relieved and grateful that people with money are able and willing to pony up in the interest of advancing culture, the practice leaves the very culture it props up, well, not very securely propped up. Even the wealthy don’t always have as much money as is needed to maintain the institutions and the artists in major cosmopolitan American cities to a standard that is normal for even a more modest town in a socialist country in Europe –the appreciation and hope for the beloved Berkeley institution was palpable in the room that night, but everyone’s also fretting about tariffs and inflation. And the wealthy are also….people. They are subject to whims and personal tragedies, and any number of distractions that can pull them away from their philanthropy.
Prestige photography site Pier 24 closed earlier this year, the founder Andrew Pilara apparently having decided to turn his focus away from collecting photography as breezily as he had initially decided to take it up. McEvoy Foundation also closed a couple of years ago, a family decision. Art philanthropy is noble, and badly needed, but when what comprises our artistic life and legacy as a society is entrusted to the hands of a few people for its survival, that survival is only as certain as those few people’s interest and ability holds up–without collective support, there is no safety net.
Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California, opens at BAMPFA June 8.
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