Berkeley perk: Borrow some Chagall for your cube, living room

Monotonous cubicle got you down? Feel like your apartment or dorm room could use a little extra spark? Turns out that staff, faculty and students can borrow artworks from UC Berkeley’s Graphic Arts Loan Collection, a collection of framed, original lithographs, etchings and woodblock prints by major artists like Chagall, Manet and Kandinsky.

Members of the UC Berkeley community can check out two prints an academic year, and hang them on their wall through the end of spring semester. The library’s 60-year-old program is currently one of only 10 university art-lending programs in the country and the only one run through a library, rather than an art museum.

The art should make for brighter conference rooms and, maybe, foster a creative spark. (Interested in borrowing a work? Learn more about the GALC.)

“It’s a matter of pure enjoyment, but also, living with art gives people a sensitivity, absolutely, and more feeling, more understanding,” Peter Selz, founding director of the Berkeley Art Museum, said in a recent interview about the lending program. “Living with art gets you beyond everyday activity into a deeper world.”

More from the University Library: Art for the Asking, Library exhibit honors 60 years of sharing art