Berkeley art collector’s floating museum highlights women artists

It is rare to have a new museum open in our area. Rarer still to have one that is primarily focused on championing the art created by women and under-represented artists alongside international names.

In June, Marta Thoma Hall and David Hall opened the Floating Art Museum on a barge in the tidal canal between Alameda and Oakland. Comparable to a small houseboat, the barge originally served as the couple’s home when they relocated to the Bay Area from Palo Alto. At the time, David Hall, a tech inventor and innovator, was developing boat stabilization technology for his company, Velodyne Marine.

When they moved into a house in the Berkeley Hills, they launched a nonprofit, Hall Art + Technology Foundation (HATF), and transformed the barge into five intimate gallery spaces surrounded by light and water. The museum’s inaugural exhibition, Rising Tides, debuted in June, showcasing works by women and non-white artists who, according to Thoma Hall, have long been at the forefront of social change.

The Rising Tides exhibition is now showing through the end of the year on the Floating Art Museum, 2517 Blanding Ave., Alameda. The museum is open 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays or by appointment. For more information, call (510) 788-1883 or email hallartandtechnologyfoundation@gmail.com

Thoma Hall aims to influence the canon of art history, bringing women and unrepresented artists to the forefront while raising awareness about climate change and environmental issues. 

She believes a small museum is more agile in addressing cultural and social shifts. “We’re nimble. We float on water,” Hall said when I spoke to her for Berkeleyside. She emphasizes that larger institutional museums, due to their heavy investment in blue-chip art, are more entrenched and less flexible. “Our goal is to use the foundation, the collection, and the museum to foster positive cultural change by actively engaging with the community.”

For Thoma Hall, collecting has always been intertwined with her own artistic practice. Drawn to surrealism and feminism, she also repurposed spoons, plastic and glass bottles for her large public artworks like Journey of A Bottle, a giant hanging sculpture commissioned by the Walnut Creek Public Library in which Thoma Hall transformed empty glass bottles into a mesmerizing tidal wave. While the HATF collection adamantly reflects Hall’s own investigations as an artist, it is also a way for her to reach beyond herself and have a conversation with the world. 

Thoma Hall began collecting in the early 1970s while studying fine art at UC Berkeley when the campus was marked by protests against the Vietnam War. The art department, however, was still dominated by faculty that primarily promoted work created by older white male artists. To Hall, this focus felt disconnected from the political turmoil of the era and the realities faced by women and African Americans. 

She had no money, and her first pieces were trades with other artists, including a ceramic cup created by her sister Kim Thoman. “I gave her an etching in return,” Hall said. “But I couldn’t afford to buy a piece of art until the mid-1980s.” 

Hall’s first purchase was a work by Emeryville artist M. Louise Stanley. They’d met when they were both asked to jury an exhibition. With $120.00, Hall bought a hand-tinted etching titled Pygmaliana, which was a retelling of the myth of Ovid from the feminist perspective. In Stanley’s recast version, a female painter is being seduced by a young naked male model. “It was feminist and the funny.” Thoma Hall said. She recently acquired another Stanley work, Melancholia (after Durer), which is in the exhibition. Known for inserting a female avatar of herself into a historical narrative, Stanley’s art satirizes and challenges the Western art canon. “Her irreverence is powerful,” Hall said. 

By the late 1970s, Thoma Hall was exhibiting her own paintings, surrealist images, often self-portraits, that explored personal and political themes. She had a solo show, “Fantasies and Visions,” curated by the Nicaraguan artist and art historian Rolando Castellón at SFMOMA. She would later collect Castellón’s mud, stick and barbed wire pieces, and two are currently on view at the Floating Art Museum. 

In 1994, at an artist’s residency at NorCal Recology, Thoma  Hall scavenged through garbage dumps to create Earth Tear out of rebar and recycled plastic bottles. By the mid-2000s, she’d developed a national reputation as an artist creating large-scale commissioned sculptures (like the one in the Walnut Creek library), incorporating recycled materials and utilizing renewable resources like solar. The leap to her position as president of Velodyne Acoustics, Inc. was both an organic evolution of her interests in design and a huge risk. “I had met my second husband, the inventor David Hall. He was assisting me with my art, and I began working for his audio company. Within months, I had assembled a new marketing department, was helping to make business decisions, and became president of a fast-growing company, Velodyne Acoustics.” 

At Velodyne, Thoma Hall integrated her artistic knowledge into her design decisions. Her team developed headphones with artistic “skins” featuring painted designs by local artists. “David was CEO,” Thoma Hall said. “He had my back. We succeeded together.” In 2019, their German distributor, Audio Reference, acquired Velodyne Acoustics. 

David Hall founded Velodyne in 1983, initially as an audio company specializing in subwoofers and headphones. By 2016, he’d expanded into other cutting-edge fields, including Lidar technology, which uses the speed of light to measure distance — a key innovation for autonomous vehicles. In 2017, Thoma Hall established the World Safety Summit for Autonomous Cars. Around the same time, Hall began working on a real-time feedback system to reduce the rocking motion at sea. After Lindar went public and David sold his shares, the couple moved to Alameda and the Oakland estuary to develop self-stabilizing sea vessels, a magnet-based propulsion system for space exploration, and the Floating Art Museum. 

Thoma Hall attributes their decision to start the foundation to the lessons learned in the tech industry, including the importance of taking risks and experimenting. They converted the barge into a museum, installed additional walls to create more gallery space and turned every nook and cranny into art space, even the bathroom, where Oakland artist Michelle Pred’s Security Storm, an umbrella raining bullets, hangs over the bathtub.

“Marta Thoma Hall is a maverick with a personal vision. She collects artists in our community and through our community,” the San Francisco gallery owner Catharine Clark said when I spoke to her about Thoma Hall. “She’s in the league of someone like Rene de Rosa.” (Rene de Rosa was the legendary philanthropist and vineyardist whose collection of Bay Area Figurative and Contemporary art is housed at his former home in Napa, the di Rosa Foundation). 

“She wants to support artists who have active concerns about the environment. That kind of support is essential for a healthy art ecosystem. By giving artists an institutional setting and sharing her collection with the public, more eyes get to see the work.” 

Indeed, Rising Tides features 51 works by 35 artists, many of them with deep roots in Berkeley and the Bay Area, including Mildred Howard, Dewey Crumpler, Hung Liu, M. Louise Stanley, Archana Horsting, Carol Benioff, Enrique Chagoya, Rolando Castellón, Mondo Jud Hart, Carol Law, Lucy Puls, Maria Porges, Kara Maria, Michelle Pred and Kim Thoman. “We have talent here in the Bay Area that stands shoulder to shoulder with some of the best art in the world,” Hall said. 

Thoma Hall’s vision is coming to fruition. The landscape for women artists and artists of color is already changing. Crumpler is currently exhibiting work that examines issues of globalization and cultural co-modification at the Driskell Center in Maryland. Anglim Tremble Gallery in San Francisco shows a new body in which Howard traces her journey as a young African American girl across the southwest in The Time and Space of Now. 

Thoma Hall believes that the more we see women and people of color in positions of power represented in art — when their work is displayed in museums — the closer we come to being comfortable, willing and open to seeing them in positions of power within our political institutions.