on view

pulleY

A collaborative exhibition with NIAD Art Center

Curated by christopher robin duncan

september 20 - november 16, 2025

EXHIBITING ARTISTS:

Arstanda Billy White, Deatra Colbert, Felicia Griffin, Karen May, Mat Van Dongen, Mireya Betances, Peter Harris, Richard Naranjo, Shantae Robinson, Shawn Sanders, Sylvia Fragoso, and Christopher Robin Duncan

The Berkeley Art Center presents, PULLEY, a radical experiment and mutual exchange between NIAD artists and Christopher Robin Duncan. The show’s punchy title refers both to the physical mechanism that allowed for these works to be created during a workshop Duncan held at NIAD in 2023, and to the greater concept of a pulley system: a collection of wheels and ropes that operate in concert to lift an object. NIAD, an acronym that stands for Nurturing Independence Through Artistic Development, likewise functions as a sort of pulley system offering the support and scaffolding for intellectually and developmentally disabled artists to explore, experiment, and elevate their creative practices within a collective and collaborative environment. In this show, the artists prioritize the magic alchemy of working in tandem with one another, with light, and with space.

upcoming

Obstructed view of the house through the trees with the road visible on the left side in the foreground. Or Black Point Reinterpretive Site.

an installation by Torreya Cummings & Sarah Lowe

curated by Elena Gross

December 13, 2025 - March 29, 2026

 Obstructed view of the house through the trees with the road visible on the left side in the foreground. Or Black Point Reinterpretive Site is an immersive, site-responsive installation and replica of a 19th-century Victorian “period room,” constructed by multidisciplinary artists Torreya Cummings and Sarah Lowe. Period rooms function as domestic interior spaces to present a wealthy family’s opulent, and often exotic, treasures. At Berkeley Art Center, Cummings & Lowe have fashioned theatrical backdrops, handcrafted facsimiles, props, furniture, and created a stage to play out the political dramas of natural history, colonialism, and mechanical interventions into the Northern California landscape from the time of Western expansion to the present day. These fabricated scenes challenge and question how art and artifice, photography and commercialism, have functioned as tools of both history-making and historical erasure. Black Point Reinterpretive Site explores the changes in landscape, in natural species evolution (or extinction), and in the proliferation of industry and development of the Bay Area as a wink to the near-distant past and as a potential warning sign for the future. The massive installation spans the entire gallery and includes sculpture, photography, textiles, soundscapes, and a live fountain, with the heightened artificiality of a theater stage that destabilizes the presumed authority of the museum by being honestly false. Cummings & Lowe invite us into this figurative hall of mirrors to better understand where we stand today and how quickly the tides can turn for all of us.