©QIU ZHIJIE/COURTESY THE ARTIST
As part of a major redesign courtesy of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, in Berkeley, California, will also unveil a 60-by-25-foot project space devoted to murals called Art Wall, the museum announced today. Slated to open in January, the Art Wall be visible both inside and outside the museum. Art Wall commissions will be switched out biannually.
The first artist commissioned to do a mural for the Art Wall is Qiu Zhijie. Coinciding with “Architecture of Life,” the inaugural show at BAMPFA’s new building, the Chinese artist’s mural will be about a literati garden. As with his work currently on view at the Venice Biennale group show “All the World’s Futures,” Qiu will focus on the way that history repeats itself. Qiu’s mural, his first major project in America since a 2009 show at New York’s Chambers Fine Art, will be on view until the summer.
“We are thrilled to inaugurate the Art Wall program with Qiu Zhijie’s project,” Lawrence Rinder, the BAMPFA’s director, said. “Not only does it resonate with contemporary themes of relevance to our campus and community, but it also echoes many dimensions of our opening exhibition, Architecture of Life, which explores architecture as a metaphor with which to illuminate diverse aspects of life experience.”