Upstairs in Haviland Hall, on the third floor and in “the exact center of the structure,” as the Daily Cal described it, was the jewel in the building’s crown: Room 301. This was the exhibition room, a large octagonal chamber with an expansive skylight and “lighted by 60, 150-watt lights hung so as to give perfect diffusion” (Daily Californian, Oct. 6, 1922, p. 7).
The exhibition room was intended to display traveling art exhibits and American and international educational work. Its walls were covered with burlap-faced cork to permit statistical charts, posters, and other displays to be hung with tacks. It came into high demand and quickly developed a waiting list. In March 1924, only two months after the building opened, Room 301 was already hosting an exhibit of the work of the Berkeley schools to demonstrate how the city’s school system was “meeting the objectives of modern education” through “the five phases of social efficiency: physical, vocational, avocational, civic, and moral.”
Throughout the 1920s, Room 301 displayed exhibits featuring Oakland, Fresno, Pasadena, and Los Angeles schools. In June 1925, an exhibit on the San Francisco public school system featured children’s drawings and a twelve-foot poster by second-graders titled “In Mother Goose Land.” It also showcased wood work and metal work by intermediate and high school students, and photographs and charts demonstrating character training and citizenship, toy making and rug weaving.
Room 301 became a campus destination for artists, including prominent painters like Maynard Dixon and Hans Hofmann. Sometimes the exhibits didn’t always go to plan, as evidenced by one frustrated student’s complaint:
Why in the name of the seven muses and humanity, should the campus public in general, and the art students in particular, be attacked by the Daily Californian itself, as well as a certain professor in [the] art department . . . for showing, as they claim, an utter lack of appreciation of the wonderful art exhibit on display in Haviland Hall? They say so few have gone to see it! I’m not a practicing artist but this morning I met a poor art student wandering around Haviland’s halls in a vain attempt to find a sign, or a person, that would tell her where the art exhibit was—and she left after spending all her spare time, without finding it. What a wonderful system! Not even a single notice posted anywhere in the building regarding it. Also in a professor’s office with “Information” printed on one of the doors no one there knew anything about it. Yet the poor students show a lack of interest! Ultimately I found out my mere chance that this precious exhibit was on the third floor. What angels ascend such heights in blind faith? (Daily Californian, Feb. 10, 1925, p. 4)
In addition to frequent educational and artistic exhibitions, the university hosted an exhibit on radiation, organized in conjunction with the Atomic Energy Commission, in 1948. The exhibit displayed a scale model of the university’s famous cyclotron and explanations of the theory of nuclear energy and included displays and demonstrations of different phases of atomic research on the campus.
After the School of Education relocated to Tolman Hall in 1962, the exhibition room was partitioned up to the skylight. Not until 2021 was that barrier removed and the room returned to its previous grandeur.
Written by Craig Alderson
Exhibit
- February 1925: Landscapes by William Ritschel, California artist
- April 1925: Landscape and figure drawings by university professors
- October 1927: Wood engravings by Henry Wolf, the “most prominent American exponent of wood engravings.” With sixty pieces, the exhibit was the largest showing of Wolf’s work on the Pacific Coast since 1915
- October 1927: Lace collection of Phoebe Hearst
- November 1927: Work of Northern California landscape designers, “the first independent exhibit of landscape designing ever held in California,” with over half the material by university graduates
- February 1928: Chinese paintings, including paintings by masters of Sung and Ming dynasties, from the Kiang family collection. Includes address by collector
- March 1928: Works by Sergey Schebakoff, Russian painter
- March 1929: Paintings by Maynard Dixon
- April 1931: Paintings by Edward Bruce
- August 1931: Paintings by Hans Hofmann, abstract expressionist
- February 1932: Paintings of Death Valley by Helen K. Forbes
- August 1932: Exhibition of book jackets loaned by Lloyd LaPage Rollins
- October 1933: Watercolors of wild flowers by Ethel Wickes
- October 1940: Photographs by Cedric Wright
- March 1962: Paintings by Victor Mark Schick