Julie Rodrigues Widholm Appointed New Director of BAMPFA

The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) announced on Thursday the appointment of a new director: Julie Rodrigues Widholm, the current director and chief curator of the DePaul Art Museum (DPAM) in Chicago.

Widholm comes into Berkeley with high marks. During her five years at DPAM, the museum experienced a 40% increase in attendance and a tripling of its annual budget. She also oversaw the addition of 500 artworks to the museum’s collection “with a particular emphasis on work by underrecognized artists from marginalized groups,” according to BAMPFA’s press release.

Widholm succeeds BAMPFA’s exiting director Lawrence Rinder, whose history with the museum stretches back to the 1980s and whose role as director began in 2008.

Rinder was widely acknowledged to have left the museum in good standing, after overseeing a major move from the institution’s former home—a 101,000-square-foot brutalist concrete shell on Bancroft Way—to a new building on Center Street. Rinder, whose acquisition program added over 6,000 works to the museum’s collection, also reportedly secured a “significant gift from an anonymous donor” before his departure.

The museum, currently closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, cites Widholm’s “emphasis on diversity and inclusion” as a contributing factor in her hiring, pointing to DPAM’s curatorial program and its emphasis on work by artists of color, women and LGBTQ artists.

“I am incredibly honored to join BAMPFA at this critical juncture to work collaboratively with staff, colleagues, faculty, students, and other stakeholders in the community to think deeply about what it means to be an inclusive academic art museum in the 21st century,” Widholm said in a statement. “I have long admired BAMPFA’s program, including the MATRIX program’s longstanding role in bringing emerging and underrecognized contemporary artists to the fore.”

Windholm will start at BAMPFA on Aug. 1.