Closing Day! Join us on Saturday, June 20 for one last time to see Barbara Berk perform live!
white-out, 2026
Performance, video projection
Berk has participated widely in group exhibitions nationally and internationally, with work shown at institutions such as the Yale University Art Gallery, the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, and venues in Los Angeles, New York, and Europe. Her practice consistently engages drawing, installation, and performative approaches across a long-standing and active exhibition career.
Throughout Barbara Berk’s practice, she has explored tension, balance, repetition, and the body as both tool and subject. Working across a variety of mediums, drawing has remained her primary point of entry into a methodical and meditative process. Quietly and subtly, her drawings and drawing performances extend from her body, shaped through repetition and restraint. These documented actions become performative, sculptural manifestations that transform simple gestures into meditative encounters with perception and embodied knowledge.
For LAMAG’s performance installation white-out, Berk precariously balances a long wooden stick while attempting to align it precisely with a rod installed on the wall in front of her. The act requires intense focus, physical stillness, and sustained attention, drawing viewers into a shared moment of curiosity and suspense. After some time, the artist releases the stick, which crashes to the floor with a sudden, disruptive bang that startles viewers when they least expect it. The reverberation evokes the subtleties of life’s balancing act and the fragility we live in moment-to-moment.
Barbara Berk holds an MFA from Pratt Institute, an MA from California State University, Fullerton, and additional graduate study at the Istituto Pio XII in Florence, as well as training at institutions including the University of Vienna, the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna, and the Art Institute of Chicago. She received her BA from Clarke College in Iowa, forming a strong interdisciplinary foundation across the U.S. and Europe.
Her career spans a sustained exhibition history beginning in the mid-1980s, with solo exhibitions at venues such as the Riverside Art Museum, the Laguna Beach and Orange County contemporary art spaces, and university galleries across California and the Midwest. She is also known for an extensive performance practice presented at institutions including the Laguna Art Museum, Otis College of Art and Design, and the Irvine Fine Arts Center.
