Free First Thursdays at Berkeley Art Museum | East Bay

The UC Berkeley Art Museum is the visual arts center of the University of California, Berkeley. Through art and film programs, collections, and research resources, the University aspires to be locally connected and globally relevant, engaging audiences from the campus, community, and beyond.

Normally $18, the museum offers free admission to the art galleries and public programs on the first Thursday of every month (PFA Theater programs excluded).

Berkeley Art Museum Gallery Admission

Gallery admission includes access to scheduled tours, lectures, readings, and other programs unless otherwise noted in program description.

$18 General admission

$12 Discounted admission

• Senior citizens (65+)
• Visitors with disabilities*
• College students (non-UC Berkeley)
• Active military and veterans
• UC Berkeley alumni and retirees
• All UC faculty and staff (UC Berkeley faculty and staff are always free!)

$9 Discounted admission

• Adult groups (Advance reservations required. See Group Visits and Tours)

$5 Discounted admission

• Youth ages 14-18

Free admission

• BAMPFA Members
• UC Berkeley students, faculty, and staff
• Children ages 0–13**
• SNAP participants via Museums for All
• Reciprocal programs participants***
• Hofmann Circle, Leadership Board, Director’s Cabinet, and Curator’s Circle members
• MATRIX artists and BAMPFA Collection artists
• Galleries are free for all on the first Thursday of each month

About BAMPFA

One of the nation’s leading university museums, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) is a forum for cultural experiences that transform individuals and advance the local, national, and global discourse on art and film. As the premier visual arts venue at the top U.S. public research university, BAMPFA is uniquely dedicated to art and film in equal measure. Its annual program encompasses exhibitions, screenings, and public programs that connect visitors from campus, across the Bay Area, and beyond with the leading artists and filmmakers of our time.

BAMPFA takes a contemporary and critical perspective on its wide-ranging collections. The museum’s holdings of more than 25,000 works of art include particular strengths in 20th- and 21st-century work, including Abstract Expressionist painting, contemporary photography, conceptual art, and African American quilts, along with focused historical collections of 19th-century American folk art and early American painting, Italian Baroque painting, Old Master works on paper, and East Asian paintings. BAMPFA’s collection also includes more than 18,000 films and videos, representing the largest collection of Japanese cinema outside of Japan and impressive holdings of Soviet cinema, West Coast avant-garde film, and seminal video art, as well as hundreds of thousands of articles, reviews, posters, and other ephemera related to the history of film.

Founded as the University Art Museum in 1970 and initially housed in a Brutalist structure designed by Mario Ciampi, BAMPFA relocated in 2016 to a new facility designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro in the heart of downtown Berkeley, where it has become an anchor for the city’s flourishing arts district. The museum’s curatorial strategies reflect the rich diversity of the UC Berkeley campus and the greater Bay Area through programming that is interdisciplinary, intergenerational, and international in scope. A locally connected, globally relevant institution, BAMPFA is deeply dedicated to its role as an educational space for UC Berkeley scholars and the general public. It fulfills this mission with three distinguished study centers—the James Cahill Asian Art Study Center, the Film Library and Study Center, and the Florence Helzel Works on Paper Study Center—as well as a range of collaborations with the university’s academic departments and student organizations.

2025 Exhibitions

Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection

October 27, 2024–April 20, 2025

Making Their Mark brings together more than seventy artworks by women artists from the Shah Garg Collection, illuminating transgenerational affinities, influences, and methodologies among pathbreaking artists from the postwar era to the present.

To Exalt the Ephemeral: The (Im)permanent Collection

August 14, 2024–July 6, 2025

To Exalt the Ephemeral: The (Im)permanent Collection draws from BAMPFA’s art and film collections to explore how museums collect, care for, and amplify the work of artists who celebrate ideas of impermanence and cycles of decay and regeneration.

Abounaddara: The Ruins We Carry

Campus Collaborations

October 9, 2024–February 23, 2025

Part of BAMPFA’s Campus Collaborations series, Abounaddara: The Ruins We Carry is the collective’s first solo US museum exhibition. Known for its intimate portrayals of Syrian life amid upheaval, Abounaddara debuts a new three-channel film installation, The Imagemaker, exploring the world-making powers of one of the last craftsmen of stamped cloth in Damascus.

Art Wall / Tanya Aguiñiga: Border Fall Height

January 18–July 13, 2025

Tanya Aguiñiga creates sculptures and installations using natural materials and objects gathered from her environment. Her Art Wall installation at BAMPFA is her first solo presentation in the Bay Area. Aguiñiga presents a series of rust prints depicting a thirty-foot ladder made using an actual object that she found near the US–Mexico border.

MATRIX 286 / Amol K Patil: A Forest of Remembrance

January 18–April 20, 2025

Amol K Patil works across painting, sculpture, performance, and video and excavates the lived experiences of Mumbai’s working class. For his first solo exhibition in the United States, the artist presents a newly commissioned body of work that reconfigures the architecture of the city’s chawls into a space of collective memory and dynamic protest.

Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California

June 7, 2025—November 30, 2025

Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California traces the flow and flourishing of quilts in the context of the Second Great Migration. These quilts explore the medium’s unique capacity for connecting kin across time and space, holding memory and ancestral knowledge, and opening up space for beauty and ingenuity.

– Updated 12/31/24