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A Rooftop Garden for SFMOMA
[ A / D / S ]
Thursday, April 03, 2008
– Sunday, October 26, 2008
With construction of the museum’s new 14,400-square-foot rooftop sculpture garden currently under way, this exhibition offers visitors an experiential glimpse of SFMOMA’s expansion. A horizontal projection on the second-floor landing mimics the span of windows that will overlook the completed garden from the fifth-floor galleries, transforming an opaque wall into a virtual portal. The projection, conceived by rooftop garden architect Mark Jensen, paints an atmospheric portrait of the nascent outdoor space, conjuring specific visual elements related to the design as well as abstract suggestions of the changing seasons, weather, and hourly light that will influence the mood in the garden.
press release
246 and Counting: Recent Architecture + Design Acquisitions
[ A / D ]
Thursday, July 10, 2008
– Sunday, January 04, 2009
246 and Counting is an exhibition of architecture and design objects acquired by Henry Urbach, Helen Hilton Raiser Curator of Architecture and Design, during his tenure at SFMOMA, which began in September 2006. The exhibition will showcase more than 246 works, including Eliot Noyes’s model of the Westinghouse pavilion at the 1964 New York World’s Fair; Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa/SANAA’s Tea and Coffee Tower; Jack W. Stauffacher’s graphic portfolio Albert Camus, The Rebel: Twenty-five Typographic Meditations; and Mauro Restiffe’s Empossamento, a photographic series on Brasilia. Conceived as a hybrid of storage and display, the exhibition will be organized by date of accession. 246 and Counting will also illuminate the acquisitions process, revealing how decisions are made about the museum’s collection.
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New Work: Zilvinas Kempinas, Alyson Shotz, Mary Temple
[ I / P ]
Friday, August 01, 2008
– Tuesday, November 04, 2008
This exhibition presents three installations that embody current trends of light-based work in contemporary art. Kempinas, Shotz, and Temple engage the divergent approaches and effects embedded in the longstanding relationship between light and art. All of these artists eschew advancements in light technology, despite such recent innovations as digitization and LEDs. Although their artwork is fully about light, they do not physically include light within the parameters of their work. Each installation is created through a laborious, handmade process, using both traditional and atypical materials. Temple’s site-responsive installation incorporates trompe l’oeil shadows across the wall and floor of the gallery, reminding us of the way mundane encounters with shadows dramatically inform our perception of space. Shotz’s delicate abstract sculptures act as drawings in space and address the furtive, ephemeral nature of light. Kempinas’s installation investigates light’s ability to confound rather than clarify our visual field. The fundamental property of each work is the ultimate reliance on the presence or absence of ambient light in the gallery space. Via three distinct visual interactions with external light sources, these artists explore the transformative properties of light, highlighting its ability to dramatically alter our perception of materials and our sensation of stability, both visual and physical, within a space. Brochure.
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Double Down: Two Visions of Vegas
[ A / D / M ]
Thursday, September 18, 2008
– Sunday, January 04, 2009
Double Down: Two Visions of Vegas presents a complex portrait of America’s most spectacular urban environment—and fastest growing city—through the juxtaposition of two recent films: Olivo Barbieri’s site specific_Las Vegas 05 and Stephen Dean’s No More Bets. Barbieri films Las Vegas from a helicopter, using a tilt-focus lens that renders objects out of scale, transforming the city’s iconic landmarks into toy-like simulacra. Beginning in the desert, emphasizing the city’s isolation as well as its antipathy for empty spaces and blank surfaces; Barbieri’s camera travels along the outskirts of the city before arriving at its pulsating nerve center, the Las Vegas Strip. In No More Bets, Dean homes in on the luminous and colorful signs, screens, and surfaces that make up Las Vegas, abstracting the visual excess and revealing beautiful, unexpected patterns within the city’s semiotic jumble. At one point in Dean’s film, when the screen goes dark, 4,000 watts of red light will flash in the gallery, engulfing the viewer in the Las Vegas environment. The two works will be shown on opposing walls, sequentially.
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Paul Klee's Pedagogical Sketchbook
[ WP ]
Saturday, September 27, 2008
– Sunday, February 22, 2009
While teaching at the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany, in the 1920s, the Swiss-born artist Paul Klee (1879–1940) developed a series of influential lectures outlining his theoretical and artistic investigations. In 1925 his lecture notes were edited and published as a thin, illustrated volume called the Pedagogical Sketchbook. Still in print today, this volume has inspired generations of artists and done much to influence the teaching of art around the world. Including both his early, naturalistic works and his later, more abstract experiments with technique and color, this exhibition showcases the artist’s theories and teachings, revealing the systematic approach underlying the whimsical nature of Klee’s art. The presentation features drawings, prints, and paintings, as well as several building blocks of Klee’s intellectual and artistic development: experiments through which he taught himself, and eventually others, about the formal characteristics and potential symbolism of abstract art.
Brought to Light: Photography and the Invisible, 1840-1900
[ PH ]
Saturday, October 11, 2008
– Sunday, January 04, 2009
This exhibition will explore the use of photography in 19th-century science, considering in particular the representation of phenomena invisible to the naked eye. Over the course of the 19th century, scientists—both amateur and professional—applied the camera to the microscope and telescope, photographing worlds both infinitesimally small and unimaginably large. The exhibition not only will include examples of these groundbreaking scientific experiments, but will investigate some of photography’s pseudoscientific uses, including spirit photography, whose practitioners used the X-ray’s ability to picture invisible objects as a means of lending credence to their own claims of ghosts and other supernatural phenomena. Consisting of approximately 200 vintage photographs, many of which have never before been exhibited in the United States, the exhibition will include works made between 1839 and 1900 by both noted scientists and amateur experimenters. Catalogue.
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Passageworks: Contemporary Art from the Collection
[ I / P / S / WP ]
Saturday, October 25, 2008
– Monday, January 19, 2009
German philosopher and literary critic Walter Benjamin fell in love with the Parisian shopping arcades of the 19th century, calling them “passageworks” for their uncertain status between private and public, interior and exterior, and production and consumption. The exhibition Passageworks is organized around this idea. With contemporary works that evoke a sense of passage or transition, the exhibition considers shifting notions of belonging and mobility, suggesting contemporary experience as fluid and dynamic rather than fixed or stable. Grouped according to themes such as navigation, dislocation, memory, and translation, all the works deal in movement—from past to present, fact to fiction, site to non-site, and back again. Highlights include recently acquired works—some on view for the first time—by Tacita Dean, Luc Tuymans, Pierre Huyghe, Emily Jacir, Julie Mehretu, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Thomas Eggerer.
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The 1000 Journals Project
[ D ]
Saturday, November 01, 2008
– Sunday, April 05, 2009
Launched in 2000, The 1000 Journals Project is an ongoing collaborative and participatory project that attempts to follow a thousand journals on their way around the world. Beginning as blank books and passing from stranger to stranger on park benches, in bus shelters, and in other unexpected places, these journals have traveled to more than 40 countries and all 50 United States, accumulating a rich tapestry of stories, drawings, and personal reflections. This first public showing of The 1000 Journals Project features a selection of journals that have completed their global journey. As an open invitation to participate in this exciting social experiment, visitors will be provided with journals and art supplies. Special screenings of 1000 Journals, a documentary about people whose lives have been touched by the project, accompany the exhibition.
The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now
[ M ]
Saturday, November 08, 2008
– Sunday, February 08, 2009
This exhibition presents an overview of participation-based art since the 1950s, reflecting on how artists create situations in which the public takes a collaborative role in the art-making process. Early conceptual art and historic works by Joseph Beuys, John Cage, Dan Graham, and Hans Haacke, among others, will be contextualized with projects and installations by contemporary artists such as Jochen Gerz, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Lynn Hershman Leeson, and Erwin Wurm. The rise of Web 2.0 platforms such as MySpace and Second Life have prompted SFMOMA to commission several artists to create new installations and online works for the exhibition, many of which consider and engage strategies of participation. The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now will change form and content as more and more visitors—on-site and online—contribute, and in so doing will explore the role of active engagement between artists, the public, and the museum. Catalogue.
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Martin Puryear
[ S ]
Saturday, November 08, 2008
– Sunday, January 25, 2009
Following the development of Martin Puryear’s career over the last 30 years, this retrospective will feature approximately 45 sculptures by the acclaimed American artist. Departing from the impersonal machine aesthetic of Minimalism, Puryear’s work combines Modernist abstraction with traditional craft and woodworking techniques, resulting in shapes and textures informed by nature and ordinary objects. Using materials such as tar, wood, stone, and wire, he creates deceptively quiet meditations on issues of identity and history, encompassing wide-reaching cultural and intellectual experiences and drawing on a huge and varied reserve of images, ideas and information. His sources are as various as the range of interpretations his sculptures invite: “I think there are a number of levels at which my work can be dealt with and appreciated,” Puryear has explained. “It gives me pleasure to feel there’s a level that doesn’t require knowledge of, or immersion in, the aesthetic of a given time or place.” Catalogue.
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New Work: Mai-Thu Perret
[ I / S / WP ]
Friday, November 21, 2008
– Sunday, March 01, 2009
(dates tentative)
For nearly eight years, Geneva-based artist Mai-Thu Perret has been writing The Crystal Frontier, a fictional account of an imaginary feminist commune founded as an attempt to escape from capitalism. Perret studied English literature at Cambridge University. She uses an ongoing, nonlinear narrative consisting of diary entries, essays, poems, and musicals “authored” by the pioneers of the utopian community as a springboard for her related objects. Perret’s new installation, created for SFMOMA, comprises sculpture, neon light, texts, and wallpaper. Like all her work, it draws from diverse sources, such as Russian avant-garde stage design, French illustration, Busby Berkeley musicals, early-20th-century mysticism, the Bauhaus, and various other modern art movements. In its contemporary reframing of feminist and socialist issues associated with the 1960s and 1970s, Perret’s work explores how broader collective possibilities can still suggest social change without a heavy-handed sense of nostalgia. Brochure.
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The Face of Our Time
[ PH ]
Saturday, January 31, 2009
– Sunday, April 26, 2009
(dates tentative)
This exhibition presents works by Yto Barrada, Judith Joy Ross, Leo Rubinfien, and Guy Tillim, four photographers who share a common interest in documenting the changing face of the world in which we live. Working in the tradition of street photography, Rubinfien photographs people in cities that have experienced terrorist attacks—such as Cairo, Madrid, and Jakarta. Ross explores a more local manifestation of international conflict, documenting the participation of rural Pennsylvania residents in demonstrations against the Iraq war. Across the ocean, Barrada captures the rapidly changing coastline of postcolonial Morocco, where tourism and consumerism are rapidly transforming the land. Barrada’s pictures record the destruction of beaches, historic buildings, and forests by the developers of sprawling resorts, documenting the impact of these changes on coastal communities Tillim’s work likewise focuses on scenes of political and social turmoil of his home country, South Africa.
Patterns of Speculation: J. MAYER H.
[ A / D ]
Friday, February 06, 2009
– Sunday, June 14, 2009
(dates tentative)
Patterns of Speculation: J MAYER H. joins two modes of exhibiting architecture in a gallery—installation and documentation—to present a unique, hybrid environment. The first solo museum exhibition to focus on this internationally recognized, Berlin-based studio, Patterns of Speculation offers a kind of dreamscape: a chamber of hypnotic imagery in which sound and light are set within a three-dimensional matrix of constructed and graphic elements. Data protection patterns serve as the source material for the installation. These patterns—which are used to conceal information, similar to the lining on the inside of bank envelopes—are translated into different scales and media, from the freestanding modules to frameworks for projected imagery and sound, as well as models for the designs of the depicted buildings. Long a subject of fascination and object of research for J. MAYER H., the patterns are presented here as the precondition or pretext for the studio’s architecture, a code that lies at the core of its design language.
Sensate: Works from the Architecture + Design Collection
[ A / D ]
Friday, February 06, 2009
– Sunday, June 14, 2009
Sensate explores the complex relationship between design and the human body. The exhibition features a selection of around 20 works, including Alex Schweder’s A Sac of Rooms: All Day Long (2008), Aziz + Cucher’s Plasmorphica #1 (1997), Greg Lynn’s Embryologic House (1998), and John Dickinson’s Bone Game Table (1977). Designers usually work in human scale and privilege user experience when creating their designs. The works presented in this exhibition, however, shift the balance of the typical relationship between user and object. By calling forth bodily characteristics, the works evoke strong visceral or perceptual sensations that are not usually associated with functional objects. Rather than being designed to serve a body, these objects were made to resemble, mimic or react to corporeal experience. The exhibition features works in a variety of media, including furniture, architectural models and drawings, design objects, and an inflatable sculpture.
2008 SECA Art Award: Tauba Auerbach, Desirée Holman, Jordan Kantor, Trevor Paglen
[ P / S ]
Thursday, February 12, 2009
– Sunday, May 10, 2009
Administered by SFMOMA’s Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art, the biennial SECA Art Award honors local artists of exceptional promise whose work has not yet achieved substantial recognition. Winners receive a modest cash prize and are honored by inclusion in an exhibition at SFMOMA (organized by assistant curators Apsara DiQuinzio and Alison Gass) and an accompanying catalogue. This year more than 200 artists working in a broad range of media were nominated by a diverse group of Bay Area arts professionals, including museum and alternative-space curators, art school instructors, gallery owners, critics, SECA members, and former recipients of the SECA Art Award. This year’s exhibition features works by winning artists Tauba Auerbach, Desirée Holman, Jordan Kantor, and Trevor Paglen. Catalogue.
William Kentridge: Five Themes
[ S / V / WP ]
Saturday, March 14, 2009
– Sunday, May 31, 2009
Co-organized by SFMOMA and the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Florida, this major traveling survey of recent work by the renowned South African artist William Kentridge spans the 1980s to the present, with particular emphasis on projects completed since 2000, many of which have never before been exhibited in the United States. The presentation features nearly 100 works in a variety of media—including drawings, prints, animations, theatrical designs, books, and sculptures—and is structured around five primary themes that have engaged Kentridge over the course of his influential career, following along as his subject matter has departed from a specifically South African context to explore more universal stories. While famous for addressing apartheid in his native country, the artist has in recent years dramatically expanded both the scale of his projects and their thematic concerns, turning toward new material such as his studio practice, colonialism in Namibia and Ethiopia, and, most recently, post-revolutionary Russian history. Other highlights include new drawings and a film installation inspired by his staging of The Nose, Dmitri Shostakovich’s opera based on the short story by Nikolai Gogol, which will premiere at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, in spring 2010. Organized by Mark Rosenthal, William Kentridge: Five Themes debuts at SFMOMA and will be overseen in San Francisco by Rudolf Frieling, SFMOMA curator of media arts. A national tour will include stops in major American cities through 2010. Catalogue.
New Work: : Ranjani Shettar (working title)
[ I / S ]
Saturday, March 21, 2009
– Tuesday, July 07, 2009
(dates Tentative)
Part of SFMOMA’s ongoing New Work series devoted to emerging contemporary artists, this presentation showcases the work of Ranjani Shettar, an installation artist based in Bangalore, India, who is on the cusp of major international recognition. Working with simple materials such as beeswax and string, the artist creates architecturally complex installations that give the appearance of levity yet reveal exquisite attention to detail. Viewed over time from various angles and in changing light conditions, the forms of these weblike structures appear to evolve. Challenging the typical physicality of sculpture, Shettar’s installations introduce a new landscape of spatial experience. By exploring the physical conditions that typically determine a work of art, such as gravity, mass, light effects, and physical structure, the artist eschews the limitations imposed by naturalistic representation and conventional narrative subjects. SFMOMA is proud to be the first West Coast venue for the site-specific installation featured in this exhibition. Brochure.
Looking In: Robert Frank’s “The Americans”
[ PH ]
Saturday, May 16, 2009
– Sunday, August 23, 2009
Robert Frank’s The Americans (first published in France in 1958 and in the United States in 1959) is widely celebrated as the most important photography book to appear since World War II. Featuring 83 photographs made largely in 1955 and 1956 while Frank traveled the United States, the project looked beneath the surface of American life to reveal a profound sense of alienation, angst, and loneliness. Frank’s prescient photographs redefined the icons of America, demonstrating that cars, jukeboxes, gas stations, diners, and even the road itself were telling symbols of contemporary life. Frank’s style—distinguished by seemingly loose, casual compositions, often with rough, blurred, out-of-focus foregrounds and tilted horizons—was just as controversial and influential as his subject matter. The exhibition celebrates the 50th anniversary of the publication by presenting all 83 photographs in the order established by the book, accompanied by a detailed examination of the project, its relationship to Frank’s earlier work, and its impact on his later art.
Georgia O’Keeffe and Ansel Adams: Natural Affinities
[ P / PH ]
Saturday, May 30, 2009
– Monday, September 07, 2009
This exhibition brings together for the first time over one hundred photographs and paintings by two of America’s best-known artists: Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986) and Ansel Adams (1902–1984). O’Keeffe and Adams met in 1929 when both were in Taos, New Mexico, and began a lifelong friendship based on a profound shared appreciation for the natural world. Georgia O’Keeffe and Ansel Adams: Natural Affinities establishes the artists’ skill at capturing the essence of the world around them and reveals numerous parallels between their distinctive visions of nature. Catalogue.
Richard Avedon: Photographs 1946–2004
[ PH ]
Saturday, October 03, 2009
– Sunday, December 20, 2009
(dates tentative)
Widely considered one of the greatest American photographers, Richard Avedon was among the first to challenge the conventional boundaries between studio photography and reportage. This exhibition presents more than 200 of his photographs, ranging from street scenes taken after World War II and images of the glamorous fashion world of 1950s Paris to a selection of his more recent and best-known works: portraits of artists, heads of state, and celebrities. Avedon revolutionized celebrity portraiture by casting aside the stiffness and conventional poses typical of formal portraits in order to represent his often famous subjects as people with distinctive personalities. This presentation, the first major retrospective since Avedon’s death in 2004, celebrates his unique vision and integral place in the history of photography. Catalogue.
Yves Klein
[ P / S ]
Saturday, October 17, 2009
– Sunday, January 10, 2010
(dates tentative)
The first American retrospective of Klein’s work in nearly 30 years, this exhibition examines the artist’s life and career from the mid-1950s to his untimely death in 1962. A highly influential French conceptual artist, Klein was also a composer, a judo master, and a student of Rosicrucian mysticism. Above all, he was a multifaceted individual who believed in the transformative power of art. In his series works, including the Monochromes, Anthropometries, Cosmogonies, Air Architecture, Fire Paintings, Sponge Reliefs and Actions, Klein sought to explore immateriality by experimenting with color, texture, and combinations of organic and inorganic forms. The exhibition is co-organized by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
ONGOING EXHIBITIONS
Picturing Modernity: The Photography Collection
[ PH ]
Among the first museums in the Untied States to recognize photography as a legitimate art form, SFMOMA possesses one of the oldest and most distinguished photography collections in the world. The more than 12,000 images in the Museum’s collection date from the advent of photography in the 1830s to the present day. Highlights include photographs by Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Alfred Stieglitz. SFMOMA is also known for its rich holdings of photographs by European avant-garde artists of the 1920s and 1930s, with an emphasis on Constructivism and Surrealism, as well as a growing selection of “vernacular photography”—anonymous snapshots, documentary evidence, and other photographic images never intended to be viewed as art.
Matisse and Beyond: The Painting and Sculpture Collection
[ P / S / WP ]
Representing movements ranging from Fauvism and Cubism to Pop art and Minimalism, SFMOMA's modern and contemporary art holdings include paintings, sculptures, and works on paper by some of the 20th and 21st centuries' most celebrated artists. The selection currently on view features works by Vija Celmins, Marcel Duchamp, Philip Guston, Eva Hesse, Frida Kahlo, René Magritte, Joan Mitchell, Georgia O'Keeffe, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, Diego Rivera, Mark Rothko, Kiki Smith, and Sam Taylor-Wood. Through September 10 the presentation includes a performancce installation by Ann Hamilton, titled indigo blue, which encompasses 18,000 pieces of used, blue work clothes and a live "attendant," who erases printed text from a book. The attendant represents the countless anonymous laborers who have served as the engine of U.S. industry through the years; their contributions are humanized through a physical activity that obliterates mechanically produced text.
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