Rhapsody: Works from the Cooper Rosenwasser Collection @ BAMPFA

Rhapsody: Works from the Cooper Rosenwasser Collection presents paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture, and photographs from the collection of Penny Cooper and Rena Rosenwasser, which are part of a generous bequest to the BAMPFA Collection. Cooper, a celebrated criminal defense attorney and advocate for social justice, and Rosenwasser, a poet and cofounder of the Bay Area–based feminist publishing house Kelsey Street Press, have been longtime supporters of BAMPFA and champions of women artists for six decades. Arranged into groupings reflecting themes of abstraction, design, and representations of the body, the exhibition reflects both the dynamism of art making over the last half century and the close personal relationships that the couple has developed with artists, many of whom have exhibited at BAMPFA.

Gathering work made from the 1960s to the present, Rhapsody maps the tremendous contributions of an international and intergenerational group of artists to movements ranging from Minimalism and Conceptualism to cross-disciplinary experimentations. The exhibition also traces the influence of second-wave feminism on artists as they navigated social and political transformation on a global stage. Rhapsody is titled after a major work by Jennifer Bartlett from 1975–76, which spurred Cooper and Rosenwasser’s love of collecting and supporting women artists in the Bay Area and beyond.

The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue featuring an interview with Cooper and Rosenwasser by Margot Norton, Chief Curator, and texts by Tausif Noor, Kiki Smith, and Richard Tuttle.