Generating enthusiasm for an exhibition that recycles a museum's permanent collection is a heavy lift, especially these days when audiences constantly crave the new and different. But BAMPFA's "Way Bay," a rangy, ambitious, historical survey of the Bay Area's legacy of art and cinema, mines the institution's eclectic holdings that include works by Richard Diebenkorn, Joan Brown, Bruce Conner, Chris Johanson, Pirkle Jones and Jay DeFeo, to name just a few, with admirable success and a welcome emphasis on frequently neglected work by women and people of color.
There's a plentitude of interesting things to see, from David Park's 30-foot-long "Berkeley Scroll" (1960), completed the year he died, and "Truth-out.org/Ferguson," Tabitha Soren's wild photo taken of an image on a smudged iPad screen, a nighttime scene washed in a tornado of ocean blue, steam, fury and the flashing lights of protest in Missouri; to "This is what we are for and this is what we'll get," social justice artist Xara Thustra's epic, mixed-media mural referencing the 9/11 attacks with mirror images of the wounded twin towers, crashing airplanes and a pair of horses locked in embrace.
BAMPFA director and chief curator Lawrence Rinder has made astute aesthetic choices on the visual art side, while veteran film curator Kathy Geritz piloted the cinematic contributions. Despite any overt sign of organization or narrative structure, they've managed to pull off a spacious-feeling show that could easily have been a chaotic, overcrowded mishmash. If there's criticism to be leveled, it's at the decision to provide no titles or attribution for works in the galleries. For that and other supplemental information, one must turn to a printed guide and match up the number assigned to each artwork with a corresponding one in the brochure, which can be a time-consuming exercise in frustration. The animating assumption behind this approach is that visitors are more likely to immerse themselves in the art if they aren't distracted by label text, but the wisdom of denying people the immediate gratification of identifying a work of art and who created it is debatable. Instead of reading wall labels, visitors will probably bury their heads in the guide, not to mention it's difficult to follow the yellow brick road laid out by the numbers.
This wouldn't be a comprehensive Bay Area Art exhibition without a strong field of LGBTQ artists, and at least 15 are on hand here. Mike Kuchar, a gay erotica illustrator and filmmaker of the 1965 cult classic "Sins of the Fleshapoids," is represented by "Faery Tale" (1980), a ribald pen-and-ink drawing done in an exaggerated R. Crumb comic book-style. It depicts an overly muscular gay-biker couple, one in a wolf mask, the other in a Viking helmet, taking a breather underneath a tree. Stemming from obscure origins, Nayland Blake's cabinet collage "Untitled (Miracled Birds)" (1989), with gilt-framed, questionable homilies such as "Somehow Damned" and bird feathers attached to the back, was inspired by the paranoiac delusions of a late-19th-century German jurist. Erica Deeman moves in close enough to "Marvin" to transmit the spirit of a bearish, bare-chested, intensely soulful African American man, whom she photographed against a tan background approximating her skin tone for Brown, her 2015 portrait series, while Jerome Caja, the audacious late painter and drag queen, is captured in a short, jet-black wig, heavy mascara and scarlet, off-the-shoulder dress, looking like one fierce signora in photographer Catherine Opie's charged 1993 portrait. In "Study for Queer Mysteries" (1992), David Cannon Dashiell reimagines the Dionysiac frieze at the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii, replacing the Classical characters with Edwardian fops and futuristic women. The two panels of drawings exploring queer sexuality, envisioned for a room-sized installation, are displayed so high on the wall it's difficult to discern what the participants are up to. Channeling the ghost of John Cage's burnt offerings, the edges of the paper are singed, remnants of a fire that engulfed Dashiell's apartment. He died of complications from HIV a year after finishing the work.
An array of frolickers get it on in "The Bed," poet-filmmaker James Broughton's very 1968-free-love lark. In this bit of surreal sexual wish-fulfillment, a bed magically arrives in the middle of a meadow on Mt. Tam, where Imogen Cunningham, members of Anna Halprin's dance troupe, and a bikini-clad, bushy-tailed woman chasing a nattily-attired fellow in a white suit get the party started.
In a brilliant stroke aimed at those resistant to the charms of local avant-garde, experimental and artist-crafted cinema, digitized copies of selected films, projected on hanging screens and monitors, mingle in the garden of fine art. A high point of the show is the singular work of Sara Kathryn Arledge, whose hand-painted glass slides, made between 1947-50, are delicate, vibrantly colored and just plain beautiful. Arledge carved stage gels into shapes reminiscent of Matisse cut-outs, baked them in an oven, then applied them to scientific slides, scratching and manipulating the layers with toothpicks and sharpies. When illuminated, the painted transparencies sparkle, shimmer and glow like stained glass. "A Trip Down Market Street," a silent short by the Miles Brothers (Earle, Herbie, Harry and Joe), filmed with a camera strapped to the front of a cable car, documents a ride down the bustling thoroughfare shortly before the 1906 earthquake changed the face of the city. Then there's "Tribune-American Dream Picture" (1924), a genuine oddity that came out of a contest where readers submitted a dream hoping their scenario would be turned into a film. The winner was about a family who goes to San Francisco only to discover their baby has disappeared. Never fear: the baby, apprehended by an attentive policeman, is found driving a car and given a speeding ticket; now that's hard justice.
This is the first installment of a two-part exhibition. Part 1 closes June 3; Part 2, with some overlapping content, runs June 13-Sept. 2. bampfa.org .