Line: Selections from the BMoA Permanent Collection

As the shortest distance between two points, the line is a device that denotes chronological progression and leaves behind evidence of its trajectory. As a mode of confirming its existence as a single point in time, mankind’s earliest forms of expression involved simplistic renditions of its own physique and the life around it. These primitive expressions offer traces of a past that would cease to exist otherwise, becoming a single point in a historical network of visual stimuli that serves to represent the self in the real world.  

LINE chronicles an array of interpretations of the line from California artists throughout the course of over 50 years. These pieces from our permanent collection use line not simply as a realistic depiction of life, but to highlight and obscure the relationship between expected portrayals in movement, perspective, and repetition.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.