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.
Upcoming Exhibits:
Two Doors
October 22: Two Doors- Reception, 4 - 6 pm, Worth Ryder Art Gallery (AAPB 116)
Exhibition open October 22 through November 7, 2025
Please join us for Two Doors, an exhibition that brings together the work of nine artists emerging from the Advanced Studio & Critique Program. Over the course of two months, these artists have developed bodies of work that grapple not only with personal histories and identities, but also with the conditions that shape how those identities are seen, contested, and affirmed.
Through installation, sculpture, drawing, and mixed media, the artists engage in practices of refusal, remembrance, and repair. Their work moves beyond self-expression, offering instead a mode of critical witnessing; an insistence on visibility that does not flatten but complicates. Themes of healing, resilience, and interconnection recur, are shown as resolutions, and open up further questions.
These are individual explorations that, when brought into proximity, generate a kind of fugitive kinship: a conversation between the intimate and the structural, the body and the state, and the now and the not-yet. Visitors are invited to look, linger, and consider how aesthetic practice becomes a site of both survival and transformation.
Please be sure to join us and the artists for the opening reception Wednesday, October 22, 2025, from 4pm-6pm at the Worth Ryder Art Gallery.
The exhibit features the work of:
Bella Damberger, Fiona Joy McDermott, Grace Meindl, Julie Kaliuga, M Surh, Mychael Imi Kama Loa Vittoria Mann, Nathaly Garcia Perez, Noa Soriano and Nora Rose Slaughter
Exhibition dates: Wed. Oct. 22 - Fri, Nov. 7, 2025.
Opening Reception: Wed. Oct. 22, 2025, 4-6 pm
Between Us: Portraits of Presence
October 22: Between Us: Portraits of Presence- Reception, 4 - 6 pm, Worth Ryder Art Gallery (AAPB 116)
Exhibition open October 22 through November 7, 2025
In Between Us: Portraits of Presence, eighteen students enrolled in Professor Luanne Redeye’s ART 103: Reconsidering the Portrait and Figure are presenting a body of work that pushes beyond likeness to ask urgent questions about representation, identity, and relational seeing. The class approaches portraiture not as a static tradition, but as a living, contested, and deeply personal practice.
The works on view emerge from a process rooted in observation, care, and critical inquiry. Many portraits were developed through sustained conversations with sitters or self-reflection, working from life, memory, and personal relationships. There is an attention here not just to faces and bodies, but to the social and emotional architectures that frame them.
Rather than reinscribe traditional hierarchies of portraiture, Between Us offers a reconsideration of what it means to witness someone, to make them visible, and to hold them in paint. These portraits are less about capturing a fixed identity, and more about mapping presence.
Please join us for the opening reception Wednesday, October 22, 2025, from 4pm-6pm at the Worth Ryder Art Gallery.
Exhibition dates: Wed. Oct. 22 - Fri, Nov. 7, 2025
Opening Reception: Wed. Oct. 22, 2025, 4-6 pm
Internships
The Worth Ryder Art Gallery Internship program is an opportunity to learn how art exhibitions are put together, to gain experience in the day-to-day functioning of an art gallery from the inside, to work with professional curators and artists. 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-Fri 12-5 p.m. Fall and Spring semesters, during exhibition periods, or by appt.
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: Gazelle Samizay