OPENING RECEPTION

The Berkeley Art Center presents [Obstructed view of the house through the trees with the road visible on the left side in the foreground.] or black point reinterpretive site is an immersive, site-responsive installation by Torreya Cummings and Sarah Lowe, curated by Elena Gross.

[Obstructed view of the house through the trees with the road visible on the left side in the foreground.] or black point reinterpretive site is an immersive, site-responsive installation and replica of a 19th-century Victorian “period room,” constructed by multidisciplinary artists Torreya Cummings and Sarah Lowe. Period rooms function as domestic interior spaces to present a wealthy family’s opulent, and often exotic, treasures. At Berkeley Art Center, Cummings & Lowe have fashioned theatrical backdrops, handcrafted facsimiles, props, furniture, and created a stage to play out the political dramas of natural history, colonialism, and mechanical interventions into the Northern California landscape from the time of Western expansion to the present day. These fabricated scenes challenge and question how art and artifice, photography and commercialism, have functioned as tools of both history-making and historical erasure. black point reinterpretive Site explores the changes in landscape, in natural species evolution (or extinction), and in the proliferation of industry and development of the Bay Area as a wink to the near-distant past and as a potential warning sign for the future. The massive installation spans the entire gallery and includes sculpture, photography, textiles, soundscapes, and a live fountain, with the heightened artificiality of a theater stage that destabilizes the presumed authority of the museum by being honestly false. Cummings & Lowe invite us into this figurative hall of mirrors to better understand where we stand today and how quickly the tides can turn for all of us. 

RELATED PROGRAMS

• Saturday, December 13, 2025, 3 - 5 pm: Opening Reception
• Saturday, January 24, 2026: Panel discusion: How this place is made: Geology, Decisions, Photography, and the Oyster (details coming soon).
• Sunday, March 8, 2026: Walking tour: An outdoor excursion to explore an East Bay Site that connects the gallery back to the natural landscape(details coming soon).

ABOUT THE ARTISTS 

Torreya Cummings is a project-based visual artist working with histories, futures, and sites, particularly around unlearning dominant narratives of the American West. To these ends, Cummings uses drag aesthetics, substitutions, hardware store materials, landscape, research, ambivalence, bad illusions, props, sets, dioramas, and the language of museums and interpretive sites. Their work includes photography, sculpture, installation, performance, and video. They were a Bay Area Fellow at the Headlands Center for the Arts, and have exhibited solo projects at institutions including Recology SF, Oakland Museum of California, Aggregate Space Gallery, and Interface Gallery, and group shows at The Contemporary Jewish Museum, Root Division, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. They have presented performances with Machine Project, Southern Exposure, Small Press Traffic, and the McEvoy Foundation for the Arts. Cummings received an MFA in sculpture from California College of the Arts and lives and works in Emeryville, CA.

Sarah Lowe’s practice engages indiscriminately with art, design, craft, spectacle, scholarship, and play. They make spaces and objects that provoke a prismatic understanding: shifty, gorgeous, and unsettling. Sarah holds a BFA in Art from Carnegie Mellon and an MFA in Digital Media from San José State University; their art-making strategies are deeply informed by years of work in theater production. They have shown work at 01SJ Biennial, the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, the Legion of Honor, and the National Bottle Museum.

ABOUT THE CURATOR

Elena Gross (she/they) is an independent writer and curator living in Oakland, CA. She specializes in representations of identity in fine art, photography, and popular media. Her research has been centered on conceptual and material abstractions of the body in the work of Black modern and contemporary artists, and most recently in queer artistic and literary histories of the late 20th century.

ABOUT BERKELEY ART CENTER

Berkeley Art Center (BAC) is a hub for artistic exploration and community building that champions work by Bay Area artists and curators. Located in Live Oak Park in North Berkeley, we make contemporary art approachable at an intimate scale while serving diverse communities through exhibitions and artist-conceived events, workshops, and programs. Since its founding in 1967, BAC has exhibited work by important local figures such as Enrique Chagoya, Mildred Howard, Hung Liu, Jim Melchert, Taraneh Hemami, Lava Thomas, and David Huffman and Carrie Mae Weems, among others.

Berkeley Art Center contact: Marthe Benoit, Gallery Manager, info@berkeleyartcenter.org, office: (510) 644-6893