The Worth Ryder Art Gallery (WRAG) is an educational art space that has served as a cultural and artistic resource and community center for undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, alumni, and the Bay Area community since 1960, and is a central social and artistic hub of the UC Berkeley Department of Art Practice.
The gallery supports students in exhibiting their artwork in a professional gallery context, serves as an exhibition platform for emerging contemporary artistic strategies, and brings challenging and thought-provoking artwork to the UC Berkeley campus. It is named after painter and founding chair of the department, Worth Ryder. To view the archive of past exhibitions, click here.
VIDRINE is our ancillary space showcasing video, digital art, and installation. It is located around the corner from the Worth Ryder Art Gallery in the lobby of the Anthropology and Art Building.
Current Exhibits:
Bent Pins Have a Place: '27 MFA Exhibition
January 20-February 13, 2026
Opening Reception: Thursday, January 20 - 4:00pm-6:00pm (AAPB 120)
Artist Panel Discussion: Thursday, February 13 - 4:30pm-5:30pm (AAPB 120)
Titled after “Note 51: Beauty is a Method” from Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes, this exhibition is a meditation on grief and loss in response to a world in turmoil; and hope for a future yet to come. One where we change together to create something sustainable, a resurrection of the beauty that remains despite all of this. Christina Sharpe writes “What is beauty made of? Attentiveness whenever possible to a kind of aesthetic that escaped violence whenever possible—even if it is only the perfect arrangement of pins”.
This exhibition features the work of:
- Bhavani Srinivas
- Jaebin Lee
- Lorain Khalil Rihan
- Mark T. Duffy
- Rel Robinson
View the MFA1 Bent Pins Have a Place Digital Catalog
Poster Design: Jaebin Lee
Upcoming Exhibits:
J-Town Express: Craig Nagasawa
February 19-March 20, 2026
Opening Reception: Thursday, February 19 - 4:00pm-7:00pm (AAPB 120)
Panel Discussion: Thursday, March 12 - 5:30pm-6:30pm (AAPB 116)
Craig Nagasawa is a Berkeley-based painter whose work engages Japanese American histories through material processes including nihonga-influenced hand-ground mineral-pigment painting, charcoal drawing, performance video, and animation. His practice explores family histories, cultural rupture, and migration while refusing erasure through humor, visual storytelling, and open-ended creative production.
Presented at UC Berkeley, where Nagasawa taught for three decades, this exhibition features his recent work, the result of a sustained inquiry into materials and identity, while also including earlier hand-ground mineral-pigment paintings that document the development of his technique and thematic concerns. These are presented alongside new, experimental process-based works that center the ways his pigments and media naturally interact on paper.
Brought up in Salt Lake City’s Japantown, where three generations of his family ran Sunrise Fish Market before the neighborhood was demolished and the community scattered in 1968, Nagasawa has long confronted the ongoing legacy of incarceration, dispossession, and oppression faced by his Japanese American community. He is known for his deep engagement with traditional Japanese nihonga painting techniques, gathering raw minerals during excursions in the American West. Grounded in everyday lived experience, his work offers alternatives to dominant narratives of American history, and just as importantly, creates a space where Nagasawa can simply be himself.
This story remains central in Japan Town: Sunrise Fish Market (2022), a large charcoal-on-paper drawing depicting the family business from both the street and interior perspectives, collapsing time and generational stories into a single image. Throughout the broader Japantown series (2020–22), Nagasawa creates delicate works that draw from his early memories. As in earlier paintings, Gojira appears as a stand-in for himself and as a way of confronting racial stereotypes, bringing a sense of play to compositions that also acknowledge more menacing remnants of World War II - the atomic bomb, and the othering of Japanese Americans. This work distills memories of childhood into a composition also filled with joy and humor, depicting the everyday community life that endures alongside histories of erasure.
craignagasawa.com
Internships
The Worth Ryder Art Gallery Internship program is an opportunity for Berkeley students to learn how art exhibitions are put together, to gain experience in the day-to-day functioning of an art gallery from the inside, and to work with professional curators and artists. Applications are due at the beginning of each semester. More information.
Past Exhibitions
As we build our exhibit archive, please visit https://www.instagram.com/worthryder/.
Visit
Regular Hours:
To Be Announced, generally Tues/Thurs 12-6 p.m., Wed 1-6p.m., and Fri 12-5 p.m. during Fall and Spring semesters.
Free and open to the public.
Location:
116 Anthropology & Art Practice Building, First Floor
UC Berkeley Campus
Near the intersection of College Avenue and Bancroft Way
How to get to the Worth Ryder Art Gallery
Gallery Director: Elena Yu (elena_yu@berkeley.edu)