The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive recently announced that it will receive a bequest of artworks from Berkeley-based collectors Penny Cooper and Rena Rosenwasser.
The gift, which comes just in time to celebrate women’s history month, consists of over 150 pieces of modern and contemporary art, all by women artists. Cooper is a criminal defense attorney, and Rosenwasser is a poet and the cofounder of Kelsey Street Press, a publishing house in the Bay Area.
Supporting Women in the Arts
The two have long been collecting art by women as a means of supporting women in the arts. They began their work in 1977, when they purchased a textile piece by Lenore Tawney.
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Many of their pieces were collected early in the careers of prominent artists. The bequest to BAMPFA comprises works in all media by pioneering figures such as Lynda Benglis, Louise Bourgeois, Mona Hatoum, Agnes Martin, Julie Mehretu, Catherine Opie, Doris Salcedo, Kara Walker, and Carrie Mae Weems.
“Museums have a responsibility to reflect the full breadth of human creativity, and for too long our collections—like those of institutions across the field—have fallen far short of that promise,” said BAMPFA executive director Julie Rodrigues Widholm. “The Cooper Rosenwasser Collection bequest gives us the rare opportunity to meaningfully right-size the representation of women artists in our holdings, and to do so with works of extraordinary depth and range.”
BAMPFA is celebrating the gift with an exhibition titled “Rhapsody: Works from the Cooper Rosenwasser Collection,” which includes a selection of 65 paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures, and photographs from the bequest. The show is arranged into sections reflecting themes such as design, abstraction, and representations of the body. It also touches on the close, personal relationships that Cooper and Rosenwasser have developed with some of the artists over the course of their work as collectors.
The exhibition runs from March 4 through June 26, 2026, tracing the influence of women artists over the past 60 years.
